Tips from a Neurodiverse Third Year Student

I was going to write a review this week, but decided that I’d rather start making some blogposts tailored at students just finishing A-Levels and GCSE based on my own experiences around University. I don’t doubt once I graduate I’ll probably come back to these posts with a more informed piece regarding the entire experience and whether University is ‘worth it’. Also, the art is by me. I couldn’t find the images I took from Hillwalking so I just decided to illustrate some bits.

A lot of the material I found was heavily tailored towards STEM related subjects and the economic ‘grindset’ side of University, ie. ‘It isn’t worth it to rake up £9000+ in debt for a degree where you read Shakespeare’. My perspective is from a humanities student that had a non-linear experience with University due to mental health.

Some background: I’m a third year English Literature student at a Russell Group University, who’s started this blog to kickstart myself into a career in writing. I have been working on short stories and a novel outside of the blog. I am autistic, and vocal about it since it has informed my entire life experience.

I hope this post is enlightening to anyone about to go into or considering going to University that may have struggled with mental health, are neurodiverse, or just need the extra tips.

Moving Out isn’t for Everybody

My Uni experience started off terribly.

I went to a University an hour away from home in order to study History. I enjoyed it at school, found the Open Day persuasive and because I had negative experiences within my local area, I hoped that I too could experience the ‘blossom’ that happened with moving away.

Turns out, moving out of home as a neurodivergent individual still grappling with mental health was a terrible move for me.

It started with Fresher’s. I was dressed and ready to enjoy the parties but realised I couldn’t stand a rave, then realised every fresher’s event was a rave. I didn’t mind the idea of drinking but did drinking have to necessitate a dance party with blaring loud music?

Then it was the housing. I chose one of the more expensive catered options so that my parents wouldn’t worry about me skipping meals. Even so, once my mental health declined I even skipped those provided meals.

The problem with my housing was that I was on the first floor, and I had to go down the stairs to the ground floor for the toilets and the showers. These were communal, and unfortunately there’s a major difference between communal in the sense of home and the sense of people you barely know. There were times I would go to the toilet at 11pm and freeze up because someone was in the stall next to me. With neurodivergence too, there’s already extra steps (spoons) that are needed when it comes to self-care, and I found the steps to navigate downstairs to shower and dress to come back up the stairs very stressful the more my mental health declined.

Big tip on moving out: Even if you feel you might not need accommodations, you probably might. Take advantage of student loans.

You want and need to support yourself. Make use of every service available to you, whether that’s libraries for free course books, helplines and mental health services, DSA, and tutors.

‘Useless’ Degrees and You Can’t Study Everything

Then it was the subject itself. I enjoyed History at school as previously mentioned particularly when it came to History from the 1800’s up. However, the majority of the curriculum focused on History around the 16-1700’s and certain modules I chose I found to be far from what I expected.

I admit: I felt pressure when choosing my subject because I wanted a shot at post-uni employability, and was partially swayed by my parents in making that decision. Even if English was and has always been my passion, it didn’t feel useful as a degree choice through the many videos telling me that I would be unemployable and effectively wasting my money.

As my grades began to slip and I struggled to keep up with the density of the coursework, I started to get more anxious about going into class. I didn’t make a lot of friends either, so I dreaded any seminar that involved talking to the person next to you, and I would ruminate on the smallest hints that justified in my mind that people hated me.

There was a big case of imposter syndrome. I was good at History at school, but here I saw people that seemed to know so much more than I did. Particularly in a class focused on Tudor history, I saw people that seemed to know everything when the entire extent of my knowledge came from Horrible Histories.

Something important I learnt through my grades turning abysmal was as follows:

• You can’t read everything.
• You can’t be perfect.

I struggled deeply with perfectionism as a side effect of bullying, effectively needing to prove myself as capable and hating myself when I couldn’t achieve that. These days, I’m alright with just getting a solid 2:1 grade, because it can be very hard to get 1sts and I’m happy just passing and doing well. And while I’d love to read absolutely everything, sometimes you just don’t have time to read that one Austen book at the end of term or that one 50 page theoretical essay. It’s about crunching down, finding what you enjoy the most that you can work with on coursework and tailoring the degree towards the eventual marking.

What I’ve come to learn is there’s no useless degree. Any degree has its uses, but it all depends on you. I’ll come back to that point a little later, but especially when you don’t have an exact career in mind, it’s important to choose something you love rather than something you hate.

I definitely still worry about my post-uni prospects, even though now I have a little more guidance in what I want to be doing (which is writing). I, and possibly you the reader, are part of a generation screwed over by big corporations and governments where home-ownership feels like a dream and the job market is stacked against everyone. It’s pretty daunting, and it’s scary sometimes to think the next few decades of my life will be paying back debt because I didn’t really know anything better because I was institutionalised to stay in education.

And that’s why I focus inward. I love to read and write, and I spend my time doing just that because that’s my passion and what I’d like to make into my career. It’s been a long time coming in forming this view on what I want to do with my life, but I’m happy to have some direction. Use University, or even an Internship, to turn inward and figure out your path, and use the tools at said place to advance. What gives you purpose or meaning, then how can you live with and off purpose and meaning?

Societies aren’t too bad

Now, this is an example of taking advice and not following it myself here. Through the pandemic, I’ve been terrible when it comes to joining societies and I hope to remedy that going into my final year. I have a few Uni friends who have also echoed this sentiment.

When I was at this previous Uni, the highlight of the experience included the Hillwalking Society. I eventually struggled with going on walks as my mental health dipped, and struggled more than I expected when it came to scaling Tors in Dartmoor (and eating unsafe foods with sensory sensitivity). But the Saturday walks that I did attend were some of the most unforgettable things I did, and I don’t regret them in the slightest. They were arduous, sure, but it gave me some acquaintances during my semester, and gave me a love for walking.

Especially for Neurodiverse students: Join a society about an interest, whether new or not. Yes, give that Anime and Manga Soc a chance. ND people primarily form connection through shared interest, and at Uni it can be very hard to meet people without these societies, especially in a heavily self-study focused degree. Plus, getting involved is a great way to build your employability.

When it came to making friends at my current Uni, I sort of happened upon a very nice group of people just by joining group chats. Sometimes you don’t even need to put too much thought into it. Personally, I found honesty has really helped me when it’s come to friendships or passing acquaintances. It helps me to be upfront about who I am and what my deal is because otherwise I doubt myself when I’m stuck in my head.

Take advantage of everything you can get (And Deferral is an option)

Around mid-way through Semester 1 at this previous uni, I effectively became a shut-in. I only ventured out of my dorm if I absolutely had to, and avoided people seeing me at any cost. I became deeply ashamed of myself, and wallowed in self-loathing. I was Gregor Samson. I drew the curtains, and hid away.

I needed to use various tools and services in order to help me. I used the dorm’s phone-in service which was helpful for check-ins during particularly bad days of breakdowns, and the counselling service. The counsellor was nice, but it definitely helped me see the difference between talking services and CBT, the latter of which helped me on the road to recovery and healing.

The other thing I was very lucky to have was DSA. In particular, DSA offered me a mentor that would check up on me regularly and advocated for me as an autistic individual. I still work with this mentor, who’s incredibly wonderful. They helped me a lot when it came to deciding to defer my studies.

Now, when I was looking at information, a lot of it never pointed me towards deferring. I thought it was 3 years straight, or drop-out. Deferring is the case of postponing studies temporarily, rather than dropping out where you simply leave. We worked with the staff and tutors to explain my situation and helped to get me deferred at the start of January.

Which perfectly lined up with the entire country shutting down due to COVID. I was lucky my Dad could pick me up and take me back just in time, because I don’t know how well I would have been had I been forced to isolate. Deferring during the pandemic gave me time to get in contact with CBT services, return to my immediate support circle, and give me direction on changing universities to commute in and study English.

Even now, I utilise anything I can that helps me with my work. My current Uni added something for DSA students which is an extra coversheet, signalling to markers about how to mark my work in a way that is productive for ND people.

To Conclude

I don’t know if I could effectively answer if my current degree is ‘worth it’. Especially after the worst of the COVID pandemic, I don’t know what the state of English as a degree subject is (with governments wanting to defund the arts, teaching as a less lucrative/more demanding field and controversies around ‘liberal’ education). But going through the negative experience and studying something I love has given me time and direction that I sorely needed. In the last three years, I decided on writing as my ultimate passion, and this English degree has helped me to expand my literary horizons and focus my potential as a writer.

My partner just recently graduated too from a more streamlined, industry-focused degree. He put it into perspective that University is a way to build yourself towards your career goals rather than as a space of dedicated study. Even if you go into academia, what people don’t stress enough is you need to build the links and skills necessary to build your future. Make that LinkedIN page, attend talks, go to societies, go to careers services. Uni gives you three years of a space to help you enter the working world.

That’s why I’ve started this blog. Partially to get all of the special-interest info dumping into a digestible form, and partly to show that I can and want to write. And this coming year, I hope to network and talk to different people about ways of breaking into the writing industry. University gave me a space to study something I love deeply, but it’s also given me what I sorely needed: time to figure out how I define my life. When I finished sixth form, I had no clue who I wanted E.S.Wills to be. Now, even if I can’t say for certain what exact job I want to supplement my writing career, I at least have more direction.

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Convenience Store Woman, Rain Man, and Autistic Joy: A Review

Terms Used: Neurodiversity (ND) and Neurotypical (NT). Konbini- Convenience Store. Incel- Involuntary Celibate. Hikkikomori- Japanese term, induviduals withdrawn from society. I use Queer in the reclaimed sense.

Spoilers for Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

A feeling that’s perhaps unmatched is seeing yourself in media. There are countless videos and stories online of the life-changing impact of seeing your physicality or internality represented in books and films. Take, for example, the story of Kenzo Brooks, who saw himself reflected in the Encanto character Antonio, and the beam on his face as he sees himself on screen. There’s a power in media in its ability to show the different varieties of life, which in turn gives visibility to those varied lived experiences. It’s a feeling that’s hard to compare. The delight and joy when you see yourself in another character. The moment you read or watch something and feel that growing warmth in your chest because you feel seen. The happiness that comes from ‘Hey! I know what that’s like! I do that too!’

I’m a staunch believer that representation is not a bad thing. Far from it, in fact, representation offers benefits to both creatives and audiences alike. But this comes with a clear and important caveat that representation must not be done poorly.

I’d say there’s two types of representation: Normalised and Enlightening

Normalised is the visual representation of peoples previously unrepresented in media, in order to make future representations just as normal as other characters. Whether it’s a disabled, non-white, LGBTQ+ or neurodivergent character, this sort of representation doesn’t need to be brought up. It’s allowed to exist without being explicitly stated because the represented aspect is merely a part of their character. Take, for example, the prevalence and normalisation of physical disability in Fullmetal Alchemist. There’s a great video by Oakwyrm that goes in depth into this particular subject that I’d highly recommend.

Enlightening is where the experiences of the represented aspect play a role in the narrative. An example of this is Todd Chavez in Bojack Horseman. Todd comes out as asexual in Season 3, and his arc takes a trajectory of self-discovery on what asexuality means to him. He still gets up to his whacky shenanigans, but he goes about this with this newfound discovery of a term that fits his lived experience.

These two mentioned have types that are done with varying levels of success. And thus, there are means of doing these poorly. Failed attempts at representation might be seen in the rise of a sort of ‘strong women’ media, where physically strong action women need to outwardly state their ‘being a women’ in ways that feel unnatural and downright insulting at worst.

I introduce Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman in this framing because it is an example of representation done well on a subject that has been poorly represented historically: that of neurodivergence.

Convenience Store Woman, or Konbini Ningen, tells the story of Keiko Furukura. She is a 36-year-old woman who has been working at a Konbini for 18 years. While Keiko is undoubtedly neurodivergent, the translated version I read by Ginny Tapley Takemori does not include an outwardly named diagnosis. Similarly, when it comes to her sexuality, or lack thereof, Murata writes:

‘I’d never experienced sex, and I’d never even had any particular awareness of my own sexuality. I was indifferent to the whole thing and had never really given it any thought. And here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t.’

Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman (p.37)

It’s the sort of writing where it doesn’t need to be explicitly stated for it to effectively be true. In that regard, Keiko is a neurodivergent, aro/ace woman who is satisfied with her life ‘reborn’ as a convenience store woman. This rebirth is heavily framed through the various tools she learns to navigate and assimilate into the role, such as Keiko’s necessity for routine and parroting behaviours. Murata writes:

‘My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.’

Murata, Convenience Store Woman (p.25)

Keiko finds a groove in which she is able to replicate and perform a role that gives her a semblance of a neurotypical existence.

‘That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.’

Murata, Convenience Store Woman (p.20)

The story breaks down as Keiko, fully immersed in this life, faces scrutiny from family and associates. The mask of the convenience store woman becomes abnormal again. To alleviate these concerns from co-workers, her sister and the incel hikkikomori Shiraha, she attempts to create the mould of a married woman to protect the life she feels comfortable in.

There’s a discomfort for some readers if this is read as an endorsement of capitalism. It’s odd to read this story of someone that’s happy and willing to work in a capitalist industry as something like a ‘corporate slave’. But this angle isn’t necessarily true to Keiko’s perception of the world. To be ‘a normal cog in society’ is Keiko signalling a deep social struggle to conform to this sort of capitalist society, full of strange rules and logics. She finally finds a role that makes sense to her, and she embraces it tightly. The setting didn’t necessarily have to be a Konbini, as the narrative could still work in any sort of labour field either deemed strange or mundane for someone to work full time for life in. Supermarkets and Convenience Stores are not places where one expects to work for the entirety of their lives, but are places of passing through. Even Keiko notes this, through the coming and goings of staff and managers during her tenure.

Now, I read this book in one sitting, back to front, from the hours of 8am to around 11:30 am. It’s a quick read, aided by its short length of 163 pages and its larger typeface. This book made me so unimaginably happy, that it’s hard to describe in words. It very quickly became one of my all-time favourite reads.

I’m a big believer in how media impacts us based on our own personal circumstances. We can find the right media at the right time, the wrong media at the wrong time, so on and so forth. In how the impact of shows like Evangelion or Bojack Horseman can be incredibly important for those going through depression, but could become incredibly hard to handle coming out of depression, for example. Convenience Store Woman to me was the right media at the right time, reflecting an experience of neurodivergence that I understood deeply.

I cannot comment on its depiction of aromanticism and asexuality, being that I identify as neither, though I have heard of neurodivergent experiences that definitely align with the representation in this book. In returning to my previous exploration of modes of representation, I’d argue that Konbini Ningen works towards both the enlightening and normalising of representation and posits a positive representation of a neurodivergent experience. It’s ‘weird’ in ways because it goes against convention, but that weirdness can be and is fairly typical of a ND life.

I come to this work as an openly diagnosed with ASD, and I definitely see traits of Keiko’s condition that aligns or is similar to my own experiences. Keiko loves routine, gets overstimulated, parrots people, needs to learn appropriate verbal responses, doesn’t understand other people’s logic: things that are common in autistic people. Now, Keiko could easily be ADHD or any other sort of neurodiverse, but I’ll frame my discussion around the idea that Keiko is autistic specifically. There is room for other readings of her, which is a given.

The reason I highlight Keiko’s neurodivergent coding is that the novel lends its focus to Keiko’s autistic joy. There are a few moments towards the centre of the novel where Keiko does struggle, but it ultimately ends with Keiko assured of her life’s path and who she wants to be and identifies as. Messages like these for autistic people and people that don’t identify as neurotypical are incredibly important, especially being in the wake of poor representations of neurodivergence in media.

Most notably, I highlight Sia’s Music and the 1988 film Rain Man. While Sia’s debut film was both critically panned by reviews and audiences alike, Sia herself dubbed this film as a ‘love letter’ to Rain Man, and thus I’ll frame my criticisms towards the legacy of Rain Man rather than Sia’s film, which has already been talked about extensively by people such as Jessie Gender.

Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson, stars Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. Now notably, Dustin Hoffman is not autistic nor has publicly claimed he is as such. Similarly, its representation of autism is that of the autistic savant, with Raymond Babbitt having impeccable mathematic skills. While autistic savants do exist, these people are statistically rare. Similarly, the man Raymond Babbitt is based off of never had ASD and instead had a lack of connection between his two brain hemispheres, causing his math abilities. These are not the only issue with Rain Man, as it’s narrative revolves around the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt being in the film to serve the character development of the non-autistic character of Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt. It’s a story where a neurodivergent character is side-lined for the narrative progression of someone else. They lose their agency, and exist for the betterment of a neurotypical character that effectively has to ‘deal’ with the neurodiverse character until they do something useful. Raymond is a pain in Charlie’s side until his special ability proves his worth.

What does this narrative have to say about neurodiverse and disabled people overall? That we’re a burden unless there’s something we’re good at? That we exist to serve the emotional arcs of our carers and families? It’s inspirational porn at its finest, at the expense of our lived experience.

I’m very harsh on Rain Man because I find its legacy tied into my own struggles accepting my autism diagnosis. Of course, the film alone is not singlehandedly responsible for a negative, singular portrayal of autism, nor is it the sole reason for my own issues. In short, Rain Man was an incredibly uncomfortable watch for me, a young woman still figuring out what my neurodivergence meant.

Rain Man stands as part of a complicated history of autism being largely diagnosed in boys. Effectively, the period I grew up in was a period where the resources around autism were heavily young boy centred. I couldn’t relate to the depictions of autism I saw (such as the autism in rain man and autistic coded characters like Sheldon Cooper) because I couldn’t see myself in them. Because of the wealth of information that depicted young boys with very particular traits of autism that were not my own, I went through an incredibly damaging period of denying my diagnosis. How could I be autistic when I wasn’t having the public meltdowns I saw on the websites? How could I be autistic when they said I liked math and was unemotional when I definitely felt emotions and hated maths? The reason I feel so strongly about Rain Man is because it’s part of a legacy that has caused a lot of harm to autistic people like myself, and I’m sure not the only one. Sure, it educated people about the condition, but in a way that was tailored to neurotypical people and focused on a particular rare type of autism. It’s impact lead to portrayals of autism as a particular set of traits, and not as the spectrum condition it truly is.

However, I can also recognise that the period I grew up in was not the period the film came out in. Autism is now better known, both today and when I was growing up, but it still suffered from diagnostic biases and perpetuated stereotypes of autism being a certain way among certain people. The autism in the film does exist, but it’s far from the exclusive experience of every autistic person in the world, and therein lies the danger of representation that falls into stereotypes. The history of autistic representation has been complex, not helped by the stereotyping of the condition through media. If Rain Man was simply one sort of portrayal, then perhaps I would feel less strongly. But it set a standard for how people still view autism today.

Herein lies the other complexity of representation. It’s well and good creating media that appeals to the audiences it represents, but under capitalism, work must come with pay. Representative media thus competes with the capitalist urgency of profit, and thus has to strike the balance between catering for mass audiences and represented audiences. Oftentimes, this has meant that media tailors its narratives towards the mainstream and larger audiences, and representation has faced the backlash that comes with defying the status quo. One may turn to the fierce censorship of elements such as queer or POC characters in films for traditionalist-governed countries in order to turn profits, which effectively undermines the importance of representation if it’s confined to an easily cut sentences and scenes (such as the cutting of Dumbeldore’s romance in Fantastic Beasts for Chinese cinemas). Profit is king. And thus, works not only battle censorship and scrutiny, but may represent and/or simplify narratives and characters into forms that are easily digestible to mainstream audiences at the expense of representative realism. Raymond Babbitt, therefore, became a stereotype for all autism.

Sia’s Music could have been good. It could have been a heartfelt depiction of a young non-verbal autistic girl in an overstimulating world, finding what brings her joy. But it followed along that complicated history and in fact became far more insulting than the source material it claimed as a love letter, further aggravated by Sia’s own insensitivity to the autistic community’s criticism.

In that history of complicated media representation, diagnostic biases, and unhelpful material for the newly diagnosed, sits Konbini Ningen. It’s not true to the whole experience of autism, as it is a spectrum condition, but it presents a form of autism that isn’t the same as other depictions, even just in the fact that Keiko is a woman. And it’s not about an autistic girl that serves the betterment of a NT protagonist. It’s about her, and what she likes and what drives her. The story is about her. I’m sure one could rewrite the story to make it another Rain Man by making Shiraha the main character, wouldn’t that be something! But this isn’t anyone else’s story. It’s Keiko’s, and in the end she’s happy, even if that happiness is at the expense of others that strive to impose their values of happiness onto her. Autistic media is full of overstimulated characters melting down and struggling. Here, the struggle is worth it in the end. Keiko ends up self-assured and happy in spite of the roadblocks in the way that I don’t doubt many other autistic, ND and queer people have experienced. This isn’t the happiness of someone else, but entirely her own.

‘For the first time, I could think of the me in the window as a being with meaning.’

Murata, Convenience Store Woman (p.163)