That telling my adviser what I did all summer went fine. He's happy. He wants me to fix my slides so that they are easier to understand, because communication. But that's really it. (Yes, communicating on topics I only semi-understand is difficult. I don't think that's even an autism thing. I think it's just that it's hard to throw together a presentation on a summers worth of only partially-understood research in a coherent fashion in three hours, even when those three hours are during a time of full energy and not executive function failure.)
But he gave some concrete details on how to fix it, and what further data I should try to get, and we're meeting again on Monday. I've got the weekend to get the data and to fix my presentation. The lab building is locked on the weekend, but the grad students have keys (I'm supposed to ask for one on Monday) and one of them lives close enough to campus that he said I can give him a call and he will let me in tomorrow. Another says she's planning to come in Sunday, and she can call be when she arrives so she can let me in. YAY ways around locked doors. (I did tell them I'm autistic, but I think that they don't believe me/it didn't sink in. I have no idea why. Except I do. I know exactly why it's hard for people to believe. It's because I am too successful to be autistic. There isn't actually such a thing, but people think there is. And I wrote about that, but I've got stuff queued out for about a week right now and you won't see it for a while.)
But he gave some concrete details on how to fix it, and what further data I should try to get, and we're meeting again on Monday. I've got the weekend to get the data and to fix my presentation. The lab building is locked on the weekend, but the grad students have keys (I'm supposed to ask for one on Monday) and one of them lives close enough to campus that he said I can give him a call and he will let me in tomorrow. Another says she's planning to come in Sunday, and she can call be when she arrives so she can let me in. YAY ways around locked doors. (I did tell them I'm autistic, but I think that they don't believe me/it didn't sink in. I have no idea why. Except I do. I know exactly why it's hard for people to believe. It's because I am too successful to be autistic. There isn't actually such a thing, but people think there is. And I wrote about that, but I've got stuff queued out for about a week right now and you won't see it for a while.)
So glad it went fine! I think the reason they "don't believe you're autistic" is because to the uninitiated, we don't match the word. (and let's face it, unless you're a parent of an autistic child, or autistic yourself, or study autism, you're not going to have any idea of what autism looks like besides "rainman".) - When people first suggested I was autistic, I completely balked at it too... then I actually started reading and learning what Autism *really* was, and everything made sense. But 4 years ago, I wouldn't have believed it either.
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