Pitri

the last paragraph makes incredibly hard to take it seriously, tbh.

no need to feel like an impostor. you could be homoromantic asexual. or if you're also on the aro spectrum, oriented aroace (where tertiary attractions are relevant enough to be considered part of their orientation) could apply.

even if you're not on the end of the ace spectrum, like gray or demisexual, you still belong in this community. and if you ever turn out to be not aspec anymore in the future, i'm sure you'd still be welcome here.

you are what you are, and that's valid. you don't need to prove your place here.

and feeling lonely/sad because you don't have anyone is no reason to be excluded, either. some aces (and aros) have no problem being alone. some crave a relationship of some kind. some are actively avoiding it, because "ew, relationships".

the ace spectrum is just as diverse as humanity itself, we just have the little difference of not (or conditionally, or rarely) experiencing sexual attraction. that says NOTHING about our opinions or how we interface with the (lack of) feelings

Important note: everyone's ADHD is individual, my struggles are not necessarily going to be your struggles, keep that in mind.

I had my first real job experience starting last October (it was a full-time internship for university, which was supposed to be 95 full-time work days within 6 months). The conditions were ideal: friendly and respectful coworkers, a beautiful, park-like property with a pond and walkways, I could come in whenever I liked, as long as I wouldn't miss a meeting (which didn't happen before 9:00), decent pay for an internship. And to top it all off, the company worked with my favorite programming language.

Despite all that, I noticed how this full-time job slowly ate me up. I noticed how, from day to day, my mental battery drained progressively further. It got more and more clear to me that there was no way for me to work and have enough free time and sleep in 24 hours. I came home, mentally exhausted, and often couldn't do much more than just sit down and watch some videos until bedtime. My personal projects and interests had to be completely stopped in their tracks. Going to bed on time left me incredibly unsatisfied (which, over weeks, became misery), but if I tried to give my mind enough time to be satisfied, I sacrificed important sleep hours. Either my mind was deteriorating, or my body.

In hindsight, my 2-week covid quarantine in November was an important break for my mind, despite how horrible being sick was. I also almost reached a breaking point before Christmas, where I used 6 tactically chosen holiday days to bring it up to another 2 weeks. I felt better afterwards, but not recovered.

Ultimately, I lasted 4 1/2 months, until I crashed down with a horrible burnout in February. 18 days short of what I needed for the internship. I sincerely hoped I could power through the rest to be done with it. I really tried. But at that time, my mental resources were dried up, completely. I didn't function at all, anymore. I became an empty husk of myself.

Luckily, with some explanation and a doctoral certificate, I got the university's green light to pick it up at a later time and just work the 18 days, instead of having to redo the whole internship. If that would have been denied, I would have probably quit university then and there. Because having to go through that again, would have been unthinkable for me.

The most important thing this internship taught me was not related to the work itself, nor its industry branch, it was the realization that I'm incompatible with full-time work. That's why I recently struck a deal with the company, I'm going to work the last 18 days, but only 3 days per week, instead of 5. I hope 2 extra free days per week will be enough for me to remain stable.

You might get used to your job in a few weeks. Or you might feel like I did. The only person who will know the best, is you. If you are like me, just be sure to pull the emergency break before you crash down like I did.

Imagine the shock some people are going to have once they realize they played chess on the wrong board all these years

It works quite well so far. :D

And even though the graph is an interconnected mess, the clusters are still mostly distinguishable from each other. funnily enough, the video game articles blow their space out of proportion because of all the attachments. some of my video game articles tend to be asset or screenshot-heavy.

^ my vault after 10 months

In my case, it's a mixture of life wiki, personal project wiki, videogame wiki, and journal (not daily, but more for a few significant days).

Like, there's this cluster with all the people that I know, pointing to their respective communities, and who participated in which annual social gathering (which have their own articles with pictures and videos). With one (usually rather empty) article per person, I can just link to them from other relevant places.

Then there are all my (software) projects and generally intellectually interesting stuff I thought about, which I wrote down over the years (which took me a few weeks to digitalize/find/sort once I got my hands on obsidian).

In terms of video games, it's either the knowledge/realizations I made or rough copies from some online wiki articles. Considering my internet provider is horrible and unreliable, having an offline source can be really nice sometimes.

In general, it's really useful to support my shitty memory. Having detailed descriptions of what I've made or what happened just makes it easier to re-experience certain moments.

I tried to do my part and heavily restricted my visits to the site. I checked the state of my feed and user profiles a select few times but always left almost immediately.

I even redirected my reddit browser bookmark to a local website which acted as a warning wall, just to stop me from my subconsciously opening and browsing the site.