By H.L. LaMere
When I attended freshman orientation in the summer before my first year of college, the bulk of the presentations and workshops were titled something like “Navigating College Successfully.” Now, more than four years later, I am forced to ask myself if “navigating college successfully” is an accurate description of what I did.
The perfectionist part of me — the autistic part of my brain consumed by black-or-white, all-or-nothing thinking — says no, no I did not. The struggles of being autistic made my college experience miserable at times to the point of being unable to get out of bed for weeks on end. I may have graduated, but it took me 5 years of study and 2 months in the psych ward to do it and I did it with a less-than-competitive GPA and fewer extracurriculars than is necessary to land a job in the competitive job market.
However, I have been trying not to listen to the perfectionist part of me. Here is a better outlook:
I graduated with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. I did this as one of 10 women in my graduating class of 75. I did this in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I did this while navigating the emotional horrors of being a 20-something. Most importantly, I did this while mentally ill and disabled — two identity categories that teamed up like toxic lovers to keep me afraid to get out of bed, barely able to feed or bathe myself some days, and often without the executive functioning levels to complete the most basic of my homework assignments. When I am at my lowest points with my sense of self worth, it helps to remind myself that I managed to acquire a rocket science degree despite being so handicapped that I estimate I was only able to actually put in about half of the time into my studies that my peers could. If I achieved the same results with half the effort, that must mean I’m pretty smart, right?
Right?
Before college, I used to base most of my self worth around being “pretty smart,” particularly in middle and high school when I couldn’t base it on my non-existent social skills or my acne ridden appearance. I think a lot of high-masking autistic children base their sense of self worth on intellectual benchmarks.: a high GPA, an unnecessarily high number of AP classes, and constant praise from teachers and peers all serve to replace the hole inside that often comes with being autistic — a lingering feeling of being fundamentally wrong somehow that sits in the base of my chest. I was only successful at using textbooks to fill the void in me during childhood because childhood is easier than what comes after. In childhood, you need only plan as far ahead as tomorrow. However, when you go to college and first begin to play at being an adult you are suddenly required to plan for the future. In order to do that, you must evaluate whether the habits and philosophies that govern your lifestyle are sustainable in the long term. As it would turn out, my childhood habits of basing my lifestyle solely around academics was not.
To explain why, I’ll need to introduce a couple neurodivergence-related vocabulary words. The first is executive function: one’s ability to do things, whether those things be making plans, solving problems, doing homework, brushing your teeth, driving to work, feeding yourself, doing chores, or taking a walk. People with autism, like myself, tend to struggle with executive functioning. Something as simple as sending a text message might take so much executive function for us that it completely depletes us of the ability to do anything else for several hours. The second vocab word is autistic burnout: a period of intense fatigue and decreased executive functioning caused by the exhaustion of living as an autistic person in a world not designed for autistic people. Autistic burnout looks different for everyone, but for me it resulted in me frequently being unable to do anything but stay in bed for days on end.
The reason my lifestyle in high school (doing 4+ hours of homework a night in addition to extracurriculars and working a part time job) was unsustainable and could not continue with me into college is because it required me to always act as if I was not autistic, both by masking my autistic traits and operating with higher executive functioning levels than I actually had. Doing this for four years in high school meant that I was building up a backlog of unacknowledged exhaustion — a backlog that would result in a period of severe autistic burnout almost as soon as I entered college. It’s like paying for things with a credit card: not only does it just push the debt to the future, but it also charges interest. This debt was the baseline of my autistic college experience (I do not know what it is like to go through college as an autistic person who isn’t in a state of burnout, but from the experiences of my autistic peers I would guess that all autistics go through a period of burnout at some point in college anyways, so even if I hadn’t exhausted my energy reserves by pushing myself so hard academically in high school, I probably would have ended up in burnout anyways just from the high level of executive function required to complete a degree).
This burnout is not easily helped in the college environment. Often, it feels like college is intentionally designed to make autistic burnout worse. In my sophomore year, a peer once asked our professor why it felt like the scheduling of time-intensive projects and exams in different classes always overlapped, often forcing students to completely neglect one assignment and take the resulting grade drop in the hopes of having enough time to earn a passing grade on another project. Our professor admitted that this was on purpose: the college frequently cultivated levels of stress not for the purpose of preparing us for our careers (as these were levels that would seldom even be approached in our post-college careers) but rather to test our resolve and force those of us who didn’t “want it” enough to leave the program. Our freshman and sophomore year classes were arranged such that the only way to pass was to operate at 110% percent at every moment. This is not an effective method to use on autistic students. Wanting something more than anything else in the world and being willing to work for it isn’t enough to overcome the neurological blocks in our brains in the same way that no amount of wanting something would be enough to make a colorblind person able to sort crayons by hue. Even if an autistic person is capable of operating at 110% percent for a period of time, it always catches up to them in the form of burnout.
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There are more anecdotes I could cite to show how college is designed against the autistic brain (see also: when a professor refused to comply with my mandated-by-law disability accommodations plan while implying that I was too stupid for his class, when that my disability accommodations were but a fraction of what I needed in the first place, or when a teammate left me a poor graded review because I “spoke awkwardly). The laundry list could go on and on. Instead, I’ll give what advice I can for fellow autistic people in college:
(1.) Whatever your expectations for yourself in college are, reduce them by about half.
Do you plan on double majoring, graduating summa cum laude, completing a research project with a professor, all while running an on-campus club, working an internship each summer, and graduating early? You will only do half of those things by the time you graduate. If you attempt to push yourself towards doing all of those things, then you will burn yourself out and will end up doing none of those things. Here’s what we struggle to accept as autistics with all-or-nothing perfectionism ironed into our brains: half is great. Half is exceptional. With the list of accomplishments I gave above, even one-quarter would be exceptional. I am not suggesting that you set your goals low or never push yourself towards anything. I am simply saying that autistic people tend to set unrealistic goals due to our perfectionism and need for structure, goals that are made even more unrealistic by the fact that we are disabled and therefore we have different limits than others (on that note, I’d also recommend growing comfortable with the “disabled” label. It’s not a curse or slur, nor is it embarrassing or destined to turn you into a pariah. It is just a word — the word that most efficiently communicates that your brain works differently than is average and therefore you will need to treat your brain differently). Don’t set yourself up to accomplish nothing by trying to accomplish everything.
(2.) Pick a major as close to your special interest as possible.
The autistic brain is not as good as neurotypical brains at making itself do boring things. While you’ll struggle with your academic workload regardless of major, you’ll struggle less if your brain enters a several-hour hyperfixation period on your schoolwork a couple times a week (as my brain often does with my special interests).
However, I recognize that the freedom to pick any major is one that is not often afforded to many who come from an economically disadvantaged background. Since college is a large financial investment, those of us financing our degrees with student loans must make financial considerations when choosing our majors, not just considerations of passion. Therefore, if your special interest is in a field of study that isn’t financially realistic for your situation, I recommend you dissect your special interest for its organs and find a major in a higher paying field that incorporates as many of those organs as possible. Figure out which specific aspects you like about your special interest and what skills make you good at it, and find something that incorporates those. Someone with an special interest in art may be a good UX designer. Someone with an interest in action video games may have the reflexes to be an air traffic controller or ER nurse. Someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of a niche science fiction series might be a good archivist.
(3.) Utilize your school’s disability services.
I cannot stress how important this is. I did not have academic accommodations for the first years of college and my performance suffered. Even if you don’t think you’ll use any accommodations, get them anyways. If your mental health or ability level drops unexpectedly in the middle of the academic year and you find yourself wishing you’d gotten the accommodations offered earlier, the waiting period for disability services can be months. Plus, just being registered with the disability office gives you a starting point to make arrangements with professors should something unexpected affect your academic performance.
(4.) Keep yourself balanced. Autistic people are susceptible to extreme butterfly affects. Our minds and bodies do not exist as two separate beings. Mental health affects physical health and physical health affects mental health.
While I disagree with the notion that simply eating nutritiously and exercising can cure mental ailments, it’s important to remember that autistic people are more sensitive to the chemistry of our bodies, similar to the sensory issues that we face. While a drop in blood sugar from eating lunch late may make a non-autistic person a bit cranky, that same drop can be enough to make an autistic person experience a full-on autistic meltdown (which can be enough to throw off an entire day or week through the triggering of other emotional symptoms). For most of us struggling with executive functioning issues, going to the gym or on a run five days a week and cooking nutritional meals three times a day is not going to be feasible. That’s fine — you can take baby steps. Add unflavored protein powder to whatever you can — soups, drinks, bowls of cereal.. Keep a stock of your safe foods on hand so that you don’t skip meals due to the unpleasantness of eating. If a full workout is too much, find exercises that can be done seated or lying down. Since a person can only handle so many distressing stimuli at once, minimizing the discomforts caused by hunger, fatigue, and malnutrition gives you more bandwidth to do other things that take a toll.
Another thing to keep balanced are your energy levels. Everyone has a limit of what they can handle each day. For autistic people, this is often lower than non-autistic people. Find out what your limit is on an average day. Maybe you can handle leaving the house once and doing three tasks before you burn out. In that case, try to schedule your days such that each day equals about that much effort. This is going to require sacrifice sometimes: maybe you have to skip an outing with friends because you already left the house once for class that day, or maybe you’ll have to push off a fun task until tomorrow because you already used all of your energy doing more pressing tasks. It’s frustrating to have to sacrifice things you want to do on certain days, but I promise you it will suck a lot more if you push yourself too hard several days in a row and end up burnt out and barely able to function for a week. You’re sacrificing one day of what you want to do to save a whole week of what you want to do.
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I’m not an expert on autism. I only was diagnosed a couple years ago, so all of my guidance is coming from a place in between personal struggle and success and not from a medical degree or therapy license. Therefore, take them with a grain of salt.
I didn’t adapt to my autism well when I was in college and I paid the price of my mental health because of it. Now that I’m out of college and in an adult life consisting of employment, bills, and errands, I’m trying to utilize my own advice more. However, no amount of advice is going to change the fact countless parts of my autism will always be a struggle.
I harbor a lot of anger at this, but I don’t think anger always has to be a bad thing. We’re allowed to be angry that many aspects of the world are set up for autistic people to fail. If no one ever got angry about anything, society would never improve for the better. So, I’ve had to make a truce with my anger to keep it from making me give up completely. The truce is this: I will allow the anger to continue because I can use it as a battery. I can use it to push me into doing the things that help me mitigate the most difficult struggles of my autism. By mitigating these struggles as much as I can, I will slowly start to improve my quality of life. An improved quality of life will make it easier for my autistic brain to put effort into things: things that will loop back around again and improve my quality of life further, or even things like making the world an easier place for autistic people to survive in so that the next generation of us won’t have to be fueled by anger at all.
