Madison @[email protected]

I’m looking into clinical psyc PhD programs (I could technically apply the end of this year 😳) and I’m finding out they’re more competitive (in regards to percentage admitted versus applied) than both law school and med school and I’m just over here feeling INCREDIBLY unqualified and like the possibility of ever being admitted is getting smaller and smaller. Most programs admit 4-10 students a year. This is so incredibly daunting!

(Those are happy tears by the way) 💛

Had to share 💛

I emailed my favorite prof about being on his research team and he emailed back with an emphatic YES which was amazing enough BUT THEN:

I met with the other research assistants and him, and and he explained that he doesn’t recruit, but waits for students to come to him. With that, he said that every quarter he has a student or two that he hopes so strongly will ask him. Then he said I was that student 😭

Being so warmly regarded and seen as valuable is so powerful. Wow wow wow.

Safety is a mostly foreign concept to me, but the way he modeled safeness and steadiness as a human really and truly impacted me big time.

I was simply a human deserving of care and patience, not pathology or otherwise.

He continues to be an incredible human to be taught by (I’m lucky enough to have two classes taught by him rn).

Also yes, I sent him a big email thank you.

I have NEVER had anyone in a space like that alongside me. He went from not knowing me, to knowing something incredibly vulnerable about me in a moment, and just entered into it without being fazed.

To say it was healing would be putting it lightly. Within a few days I got back on track and have been doing much better.

I share this because y’all: there is hope. There are some people who truly come along side us when we’re drowning.

2 weeks ago, when discussing something with a professor it slipped that I hadn’t eaten that day. He inquired as to why, and I couldn’t lie, so I told him I had lapsed into restrictive eating patterns.

He offered to buy me lunch, and walked me to the student union, where he stayed while I proceeded to freak tf out about the idea of food. I was making actual non-word grunting noises and he was just unfazed by it and affirmed my progress and courage

My full self was my full self at therapy today, meaning we brought autism into the space and explored what it meant to me.

It was the most liberating hour of my life. I was stimming the entire time, hardly made eye contact, laughed so much, talked SO much (😂), and felt so allowed to be myself and to start to see that as good and not only to see me as “passing” as good.

It was as if she (the therapist) said, “hey I see this too (“this” being how autism impacts my entire life), and it’s okay.”

Hi all! I enjoy a great deal doing hand lettering in my “down time” but have found myself quickly running out of quotes/poems/words/etc.

SO: send me your quotes/poems/words you enjoy if you’d like, I might just make something out of them you can use for a phone background or just to gaze upon 😂💛

I’m claiming it. I am courageously giving myself permission on at least one platform to be my whole self:

I’m autistic.

I was informally diagnosed by a therapist last year who saw me on and off for 7 years and had a v good idea of who I am/how I navigate the world.

I have felt it innapropiate to claim it without formal diagnosis, even while I understand the barriers to such diagnosis and fully accept other’s self, informal, or otherwise diagnoses.

So, here I am.
Thank you for having me.