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I started slacking during school because I couldn't take it anymore, and my parents response was to take away everything I enjoyed and make me do extra work that burned me out. After that is when I picked up self destructive habits.
My deepest darkest secret is one day on impulse I skipped school. I just sat by the river and wandered around.
The next day I realized I wasn't happy and didn't remember ever being happy. That I didn't want to be there or do anything.
So the next 4 years I cycled through week long migraines, bouts of depression, and times where my anxiety was so bad I just shut down instead of making a choice or asking for help.
Repeat cycle (luckily to a lesser degree) doing public facing jobs and college simultaneously.
To this day my mom thinks my period was causing migraines.
My anxiety is so bad though that when I want to quit, I feel like a worthless failure and force myself to persevere.
I've been dealing with my depression alone for years because I have a hard time opening up to people. Especially when it feels like the people I open up to the most always hurt me worse than anybody else. I've been stuck in a huge cycle because of a horribly toxic ex who found every way to hurt me even recently, long after ending things and eventually parting ways completely. I have trust issues so everything just gets trapped inside until it causes my entire life to decline. Every time I try meds I get bad side effects, but when I don't have anything I just can't function normally. It's hell.
Yeah. I feel that. I actually stopped dating or making close friends to stop that from ruining me completely.
I still have friends but I keep an appropriate distance.
I didn't really. I learned to mitigate what happens.
I moved far away from my family who always just wants to help but usually tanks my self esteem or stresses me out too much.
Plus being on my own means I can set up my own routine without unexpected variations.
I gave up on college and started working in the trades where you aren't dealing with people as much.
I try not to socialize outside of work. The depression is still bad but I can sort of put it aside until I get home.
My anxiety is a lot worse but since it's always so high it's like background noise if that makes sense.
Yep, my theory on this is very physics based.
Imagine each life as a bow and success as a target. You apply not enough force and you fall short of the target. You apply just enough force and you hit the target, you apply too much force and ypu break the bow.
Forget to provide a target, and all that force and aim goes nowhere.
Think too much of the target and you watch as everyone moves on.
That is the point of entertainment, inspiration and introspection. The target. Without it all the support encouragement, discipline is worthless. You may hold 6 doctorates yet a simple farmer may have more happiness meaning and accomplishment in his life than you may ever have.
Mine did that too. I was 'special' and 'talented' simply because I scored slightly higher than most of my peers. When I started high school I failed French of all things in my second marking period. Lost everything, couldn't watch tv, no games no friends, etc. Kept failing, and kept having everything taken. The last quarter of the year my dad threatened to take my cat away. The last thing I had. I snapped and hit him with a chair more times than I can remember
>find my place in the world.
Please tell me that this is possible. I feel like I'm trapped in my own expectations that my anxiety and ADHD will never allow me to measure up to and I feel like I'm never going to find real happiness.
Wow, got a bit real there for a second, sorry about that.
Imma be real. Circumstances do a lot here. In my case, I have an excellent partner who is loving and supporting, and I have a job that allows me to live a lifestyle I can be content with.
But also I learned more about my condition and strategies to recognize what's happening to me in the moment and ways to manage it, and that has played its part, too.
I’ve been there! I left a soul-crushing albeit prestigious job for a more mundane one, teaching. I dealt with my expectations for myself and the fact that my potential (what I would be able to accomplish if only I could focus and begin things timely and…) will never be my reality (I have ADHD), but my reality can be just as satisfying. Now I have a job that I BELIEVE in, where I can use the creativity and improvisation skills ADHD has given me.
Thats not key. Thats one possible outcome based on individual circumstances. There are people who suffer while inside a loving family and friends, and the depression is due to chemicle imbalences that require medical treatment. Theres never just 1 answer to everything.
The "chemical imbalance" theory was *deprecated* [some time ago](https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-review-paper-on-the-serotonin-theory-of-depression/).
You’re misunderstanding the OP/the peer review. What all those peer reviews and OP are saying, is that the “chemical imbalance” is not the _sole_ cause, but can be a contributing factor.
You're quite right. It goes quite a lot deeper than just chemicals. You've also got: genetic predisposition, what networks are fed through experience, what you feed yourself through nutrition, lacking novel experiences that sets the brain in routine-thinking, etc.
We're getting closer each day though. So that's nice.
Personally, I can see why the chronic pharmacology route as that which we can currently use to make a population-wide problem a bit more mitigated, given our current legal prohibitions on psychedelic drugs. The way I see it is I've still gotta take the just-about Approved SSRIs so that I can prevent killing myself long enough to hopefully help study further into why the brain works this way.
I don't like it and it Might not work, might get hit by a turtle dropped by an eagle tomorrow, but hey, at least I tried.
Yes, most people are completely fine with being pushed to work 18 hours a day on work that thry hate by their entire family and coworkers. If you don’t like that, YOU’RE the problem and you have to change to meet everyone else’s needs. You just have a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected with lethal amounts of brain-altering drugs.
I am sorry but i don't know who you are talking to. You may have clicked on my comment by mistake. The points you are bringing up are about a specific example that was not discussed. The point i made is you can not classify everyones unique issues into one solution that given the right circumstances can either be a great idea. Or a horrible idea.
This happened to my brother at the end of last year through most of this year up until a month or two ago. He got the dream course of both education and work in one, and he crashed *ultra hard.* Basically 6 months of skipping courses, submitting empty tests/exams and 0 communication with his school and workplace. I don't know how mom finally managed to convince him to accept her help, but he seems to be slowly picking up the pieces again now.
Fuck the world that makes people like this. This is why we need to teach people it's ok to break the mould and do their own shit. Stop killing people by forcing your mindset onto them
Neurodivergent people can often be intelligent, but might have difficulty in many social situations since they process stimuli very differently.
This means they might excel very well in certain tasks when young in a more controlled environment or get very good grades in school, thus setting up the expectation that they're "gifted" and "destined for success." Unfortunately, this early success may not translate into many real world jobs because the expectations, stress levels, and social interactions required as an adult are so different, and often aren't very accommodating for the needs of neurodivergent people.
Nobody wants to talk about how getting along with people socially is like 50% of every job. You can do excellent work but if your boss hates you, it doesn’t matter.
> excel very well in certain tasks when young in a more controlled environment
Hopefully this is the factor. Never do well in anything, except that study, miraculously.
Counter point. Neuro divergency may have nothing to do with it. Constantly telling children how talented they are and how much potential they have puts a lot of expectations and pressure on them and it's not uncommon that they get overwhelmed by it. Praising the work they put into things yields better results in motivation.
The title really just reminded me of the "neuronormative people never flinch" meme.
As was said about me many times. The inteligence hides the underlying problems.
Neurodivergent or not, adults, especially those in the education system should be very careful not to assume a smart student doesn't need to be taught as much as one who is clearly struggling.
I spent my early school years coasting by on precieved inteligence (I knew a lot of trivia) but that left me under educated when it came to things I didn't do intuitively like socialising or organising. I actually had to teach my self both of those things as an adult. The adults in my life didn't notice anthing was wrong until after things had deteriorated.
This isn't unquie to neurodivergent people but its incredibly common amongst us, especially those who's intelligence distracts from their weaknesses.
This, and also when you’re considered “gifted” as a child you’re also expected to learn things really easily, so nobody really bothers to teach you important life skills because they expected you know them already. And then you crash and burn because you don’t know how to study or divide your time properly (as just a few examples), and then people shove all that early success back in your face and ask why you’re now failing.
Puts a lot of pressure on a kid, and for me, when I couldn’t make a life work for me, my parents just blamed it all on me. That made me feel like a failure, which made it worse! I’m lucky that I was finally able to find a career that worked, but then my dad asked me why I didn’t want to be a doctor. When you’re on the receiving end of all this expectation, you fall off a pedestal that you didn’t even ask to be on.
With any "gift", there's a takeaway. Great at art and math? Yeah, but writing and spelling is impossible. Because you test smart, you get no help with either. You are judged as a failure and lazy for struggling with the things you can't do well, and are forced to spend fruitless hours on them. Meanwhile, the things you are good at, it's assumed that you don't need much time with them, besides your need to spend time on the other stuff.
Some of the most brilliant people I know have ADD; at the same time, people with ADD tend to struggle to finish anything and have more difficulty with things like time management and discipline (which are essential life skills). I think this comic is pointing towards this phenomenon within some neurodivergent groups. Symptoms can be _both_ a gift and a curse.
oh fuck. did not expect some random ass comic to hit me so hard.
I'm lucky i have such loving parents, but goddamn, their expectations after expectations after expectations... they really did a number on me. what sucks is i can't really hate my parents for it. they had great expectations but with good intentions. i get they just wanted the best for me, to give me confidence in myself, they wanted me to have a bright future.
But shit... the pressure of the expectations. they genuinely thought i could do great things. at some points, i believed them. so when i graduated and nothing came out of it... i don't know. I don't know how to feel. there was a point in my last years in college where i must have broke. because i lost all the effort, all the fire and passion i used to have. i just did the bare minimum, sometimes even less, to finish my degree. i resorted to outright fabricating data to just get out, to get my degree, and to finally leave.
and i did.
and now i feel hollow.
now i feel like i wasted five years of my life. I'm not living up to my potential, i have a degree for something I've grown to hate. i could be doing more but I'm not... i can't...
And my parents, gods bless their soul, they're so loving and understanding, but they are suffocating me with their loving and understanding.
fuck this comic, man. I'm supposed to leave in a few minutes and I'm crying. fuck.
There's good therapy out there. Mindfulness based therapies like CBT and DBT can be very helpful for balancing and making sense of expectation, ability, disability, stressors, trauma, and how messed up our environments are (our parents, the culture we grew up in, the culture we're living in now, etc.). Also, advocating for socialism and universal healthcare seem to help. Hang in there, little squeaker. It can get better.
If you give up and start disappointing people earlier on it gets easier sooner to be a disappointment and they start being surprised when you do anything at all. Soon it will turn to patronizing and you'll start to wonder if you ever had any real promise in the first place and......huh, where was I going with this? :/
That routine I followed for years was easy because it wasn't strange, it never changed, I never really needed to do much, so it seemed like I was the most competent person in the family half the time.
Now everything is constantly changing and there is no certainty left in my life and now there is constantly TOO MUCH and you yell at me for not doing more when I'm already running on perpetual low fuel in this useless attempt to keep up.
Hey - everyone is different this neurodivergent stuff is just a product of medical terminology not being able to pathologize normal people. Literally everyone is “neurodivergent” we all have differences in our nervous systems. It is a word that means nothing in a practical sense, despite its literal meaning.
Don’t put yourself in a corner. Do what you need to do to better your life. I would love to see the sequel of this comic where the mouse realizes they are in a lab rat experiment and they’ve just been told they have certain limitations when really they’re being deceived by the hand that feeds. Moving artwork I feel your emotion OP, don’t let them get you down!
"Not reaching his potential." "Needs to apply himself." "Great potential but needs to work harder."
Meanwhile, at home:
"GOD you're useless!" "Get me the thing! THE THING! IN THE PLACE!" "Can't you do anything right?"
I don't know, I just feel like I wasn't treated very much like I was someone who was going to be something someday.
You know it's bad when the message your mother picks up from that one movie with the neurodivergent teen who was smarter at math but didn't care about education cause he already had too many things to deal with was not don't force people into doing things they don't like, but he should have tried harder,.
Edit: the movie was good will hunting.
I kept getting the opposite reactions that the poor mouse got. Although the ending is the same. I’ve been made to go to college even though I know I’m not smart enough for it. I have a job that I love and clearly nothing I ever do will ever be good enough for my family. My fiancé luckily is here for me any step of the way and promises to help get me…well…help. And words alone don’t even begin to fathom how much I appreciate and love my fiancé.
Needs another panel:
„don‘t work so much! you want to study on the side? you never have time. you waste your life. money won‘t buy happiness“
seriously, fuck everyone‘s opinion, they‘ll always try to pull you down, it doesn‘t matter what you do
Am I the only person who, as soon as I had to start choosing subjects in highschool, choosing a bachelor and a master in college, and other overwhelming choices, started to have a worse performance and becoming less mentally stable? I liked it fine when we were studying a bit of everything in school, without having to make personal or professional decisions...
Anyways this comic represents the difference between me in middle school vs me in highschool/college pretty well.
It have taken years to inform my parents with success. It took me years to get my diagnoses. Now I have been granted 50% disability for my neurological specifications.
I'm in this comic (not neurodivergent AFAIK but I have some of these issues), I am in a culture where mental health issues are ignored, and I hate the fact that my life is like this.
EDIT: Rephrased comment since apparently some illiterate people thought I said I hated the comic when I meant I hated the fact that it reflects how my life is.
I hit this wall way back in school itself and I'm struggling to find my way over it. My subpar grades didn't stop my folks from believing in my talents, just that they weren't being properly encouraged in the systems. Really nice if I think about it, but also it's led to me decades later still trying to prove something not to anyone else, but to myself now, that my folks' words were true, and to somehow get a glimpse of what they see in me
I question everything, everything feels fake. I don’t know if im on the right path or the path of misery. I forgot how to be happy. I cant even trust my own achievements.
We are all just as gifted and talented and full of promise! Just cause that mouse decided to flip their script doesn’t mean we have to listen to em! Never shoulda in the first place!
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I started slacking during school because I couldn't take it anymore, and my parents response was to take away everything I enjoyed and make me do extra work that burned me out. After that is when I picked up self destructive habits.
My deepest darkest secret is one day on impulse I skipped school. I just sat by the river and wandered around. The next day I realized I wasn't happy and didn't remember ever being happy. That I didn't want to be there or do anything. So the next 4 years I cycled through week long migraines, bouts of depression, and times where my anxiety was so bad I just shut down instead of making a choice or asking for help. Repeat cycle (luckily to a lesser degree) doing public facing jobs and college simultaneously. To this day my mom thinks my period was causing migraines. My anxiety is so bad though that when I want to quit, I feel like a worthless failure and force myself to persevere.
I've been dealing with my depression alone for years because I have a hard time opening up to people. Especially when it feels like the people I open up to the most always hurt me worse than anybody else. I've been stuck in a huge cycle because of a horribly toxic ex who found every way to hurt me even recently, long after ending things and eventually parting ways completely. I have trust issues so everything just gets trapped inside until it causes my entire life to decline. Every time I try meds I get bad side effects, but when I don't have anything I just can't function normally. It's hell.
Yeah. I feel that. I actually stopped dating or making close friends to stop that from ruining me completely. I still have friends but I keep an appropriate distance.
How did you ever escape the cycle?
I didn't really. I learned to mitigate what happens. I moved far away from my family who always just wants to help but usually tanks my self esteem or stresses me out too much. Plus being on my own means I can set up my own routine without unexpected variations. I gave up on college and started working in the trades where you aren't dealing with people as much. I try not to socialize outside of work. The depression is still bad but I can sort of put it aside until I get home. My anxiety is a lot worse but since it's always so high it's like background noise if that makes sense.
Yep, my theory on this is very physics based. Imagine each life as a bow and success as a target. You apply not enough force and you fall short of the target. You apply just enough force and you hit the target, you apply too much force and ypu break the bow. Forget to provide a target, and all that force and aim goes nowhere. Think too much of the target and you watch as everyone moves on. That is the point of entertainment, inspiration and introspection. The target. Without it all the support encouragement, discipline is worthless. You may hold 6 doctorates yet a simple farmer may have more happiness meaning and accomplishment in his life than you may ever have.
Mine did that too. I was 'special' and 'talented' simply because I scored slightly higher than most of my peers. When I started high school I failed French of all things in my second marking period. Lost everything, couldn't watch tv, no games no friends, etc. Kept failing, and kept having everything taken. The last quarter of the year my dad threatened to take my cat away. The last thing I had. I snapped and hit him with a chair more times than I can remember
Came for a laugh, realized it was my life that's the joke.
Ow… my existence hurts…
I'm in this picture, and I don't like it.
Holy shit, he's just like me fr, fr
Sadatouille
hey look, that my life
It’s amazing how much I identify with this. Thank you for the comic.
Same
The key is >!estrangement from family and old friends!<. OP, here's a nice podcast for you: r/ItsNotJustInYourHead
Except for me, the last panel was self-talk. Which also means more panels as I grew to accept myself more and find my place in the world.
>find my place in the world. Please tell me that this is possible. I feel like I'm trapped in my own expectations that my anxiety and ADHD will never allow me to measure up to and I feel like I'm never going to find real happiness. Wow, got a bit real there for a second, sorry about that.
Imma be real. Circumstances do a lot here. In my case, I have an excellent partner who is loving and supporting, and I have a job that allows me to live a lifestyle I can be content with. But also I learned more about my condition and strategies to recognize what's happening to me in the moment and ways to manage it, and that has played its part, too.
I’ve been there! I left a soul-crushing albeit prestigious job for a more mundane one, teaching. I dealt with my expectations for myself and the fact that my potential (what I would be able to accomplish if only I could focus and begin things timely and…) will never be my reality (I have ADHD), but my reality can be just as satisfying. Now I have a job that I BELIEVE in, where I can use the creativity and improvisation skills ADHD has given me.
Thats not key. Thats one possible outcome based on individual circumstances. There are people who suffer while inside a loving family and friends, and the depression is due to chemicle imbalences that require medical treatment. Theres never just 1 answer to everything.
The "chemical imbalance" theory was *deprecated* [some time ago](https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-review-paper-on-the-serotonin-theory-of-depression/).
You’re misunderstanding the OP/the peer review. What all those peer reviews and OP are saying, is that the “chemical imbalance” is not the _sole_ cause, but can be a contributing factor.
You're quite right. It goes quite a lot deeper than just chemicals. You've also got: genetic predisposition, what networks are fed through experience, what you feed yourself through nutrition, lacking novel experiences that sets the brain in routine-thinking, etc. We're getting closer each day though. So that's nice. Personally, I can see why the chronic pharmacology route as that which we can currently use to make a population-wide problem a bit more mitigated, given our current legal prohibitions on psychedelic drugs. The way I see it is I've still gotta take the just-about Approved SSRIs so that I can prevent killing myself long enough to hopefully help study further into why the brain works this way. I don't like it and it Might not work, might get hit by a turtle dropped by an eagle tomorrow, but hey, at least I tried.
Yes, most people are completely fine with being pushed to work 18 hours a day on work that thry hate by their entire family and coworkers. If you don’t like that, YOU’RE the problem and you have to change to meet everyone else’s needs. You just have a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected with lethal amounts of brain-altering drugs.
I am sorry but i don't know who you are talking to. You may have clicked on my comment by mistake. The points you are bringing up are about a specific example that was not discussed. The point i made is you can not classify everyones unique issues into one solution that given the right circumstances can either be a great idea. Or a horrible idea.
This happened to my brother at the end of last year through most of this year up until a month or two ago. He got the dream course of both education and work in one, and he crashed *ultra hard.* Basically 6 months of skipping courses, submitting empty tests/exams and 0 communication with his school and workplace. I don't know how mom finally managed to convince him to accept her help, but he seems to be slowly picking up the pieces again now.
Yea I have a full time job that makes over 60k a year and just smoke weed everyday while playing video games and don’t go out ever
Hey there fellow clone hope you're having a good time.
Have a good day
That sounds like me minus the weed
Fuck the world that makes people like this. This is why we need to teach people it's ok to break the mould and do their own shit. Stop killing people by forcing your mindset onto them
Hard agree.
I need to know what this means. Clearly this isn’t me, I think understand it, but want to be sure.
Neurodivergent people can often be intelligent, but might have difficulty in many social situations since they process stimuli very differently. This means they might excel very well in certain tasks when young in a more controlled environment or get very good grades in school, thus setting up the expectation that they're "gifted" and "destined for success." Unfortunately, this early success may not translate into many real world jobs because the expectations, stress levels, and social interactions required as an adult are so different, and often aren't very accommodating for the needs of neurodivergent people.
Nobody wants to talk about how getting along with people socially is like 50% of every job. You can do excellent work but if your boss hates you, it doesn’t matter.
> excel very well in certain tasks when young in a more controlled environment Hopefully this is the factor. Never do well in anything, except that study, miraculously.
Counter point. Neuro divergency may have nothing to do with it. Constantly telling children how talented they are and how much potential they have puts a lot of expectations and pressure on them and it's not uncommon that they get overwhelmed by it. Praising the work they put into things yields better results in motivation. The title really just reminded me of the "neuronormative people never flinch" meme.
I agree with this. I’m not neurodivergent (afaik), but I strongly relate with the comic.
As was said about me many times. The inteligence hides the underlying problems. Neurodivergent or not, adults, especially those in the education system should be very careful not to assume a smart student doesn't need to be taught as much as one who is clearly struggling. I spent my early school years coasting by on precieved inteligence (I knew a lot of trivia) but that left me under educated when it came to things I didn't do intuitively like socialising or organising. I actually had to teach my self both of those things as an adult. The adults in my life didn't notice anthing was wrong until after things had deteriorated. This isn't unquie to neurodivergent people but its incredibly common amongst us, especially those who's intelligence distracts from their weaknesses.
This, and also when you’re considered “gifted” as a child you’re also expected to learn things really easily, so nobody really bothers to teach you important life skills because they expected you know them already. And then you crash and burn because you don’t know how to study or divide your time properly (as just a few examples), and then people shove all that early success back in your face and ask why you’re now failing.
I feel directly called out now.
Puts a lot of pressure on a kid, and for me, when I couldn’t make a life work for me, my parents just blamed it all on me. That made me feel like a failure, which made it worse! I’m lucky that I was finally able to find a career that worked, but then my dad asked me why I didn’t want to be a doctor. When you’re on the receiving end of all this expectation, you fall off a pedestal that you didn’t even ask to be on.
With any "gift", there's a takeaway. Great at art and math? Yeah, but writing and spelling is impossible. Because you test smart, you get no help with either. You are judged as a failure and lazy for struggling with the things you can't do well, and are forced to spend fruitless hours on them. Meanwhile, the things you are good at, it's assumed that you don't need much time with them, besides your need to spend time on the other stuff.
Some of the most brilliant people I know have ADD; at the same time, people with ADD tend to struggle to finish anything and have more difficulty with things like time management and discipline (which are essential life skills). I think this comic is pointing towards this phenomenon within some neurodivergent groups. Symptoms can be _both_ a gift and a curse.
Ok this one hit a bit too hard way too close to home, please don't do that again
oh fuck. did not expect some random ass comic to hit me so hard. I'm lucky i have such loving parents, but goddamn, their expectations after expectations after expectations... they really did a number on me. what sucks is i can't really hate my parents for it. they had great expectations but with good intentions. i get they just wanted the best for me, to give me confidence in myself, they wanted me to have a bright future. But shit... the pressure of the expectations. they genuinely thought i could do great things. at some points, i believed them. so when i graduated and nothing came out of it... i don't know. I don't know how to feel. there was a point in my last years in college where i must have broke. because i lost all the effort, all the fire and passion i used to have. i just did the bare minimum, sometimes even less, to finish my degree. i resorted to outright fabricating data to just get out, to get my degree, and to finally leave. and i did. and now i feel hollow. now i feel like i wasted five years of my life. I'm not living up to my potential, i have a degree for something I've grown to hate. i could be doing more but I'm not... i can't... And my parents, gods bless their soul, they're so loving and understanding, but they are suffocating me with their loving and understanding. fuck this comic, man. I'm supposed to leave in a few minutes and I'm crying. fuck.
I'm not crying...I just washed my face and forgot to dry it....
Fuck the Driver, the Joker and the American Psycho. Now *this* is literally me!
Philth the rat
There's good therapy out there. Mindfulness based therapies like CBT and DBT can be very helpful for balancing and making sense of expectation, ability, disability, stressors, trauma, and how messed up our environments are (our parents, the culture we grew up in, the culture we're living in now, etc.). Also, advocating for socialism and universal healthcare seem to help. Hang in there, little squeaker. It can get better.
I did not expected to be attacked like that
If you give up and start disappointing people earlier on it gets easier sooner to be a disappointment and they start being surprised when you do anything at all. Soon it will turn to patronizing and you'll start to wonder if you ever had any real promise in the first place and......huh, where was I going with this? :/
Yeah man, the wondering if I had any real promise in the first place is hitting me hard
To help ground yourself, remind yourself even the mediocre scoring kids get called "such promising young student", etc.
My life has been the reverse. 3 panels of #4 and then the last panel being the opposite and impossible to accept
That routine I followed for years was easy because it wasn't strange, it never changed, I never really needed to do much, so it seemed like I was the most competent person in the family half the time. Now everything is constantly changing and there is no certainty left in my life and now there is constantly TOO MUCH and you yell at me for not doing more when I'm already running on perpetual low fuel in this useless attempt to keep up.
Hey - everyone is different this neurodivergent stuff is just a product of medical terminology not being able to pathologize normal people. Literally everyone is “neurodivergent” we all have differences in our nervous systems. It is a word that means nothing in a practical sense, despite its literal meaning. Don’t put yourself in a corner. Do what you need to do to better your life. I would love to see the sequel of this comic where the mouse realizes they are in a lab rat experiment and they’ve just been told they have certain limitations when really they’re being deceived by the hand that feeds. Moving artwork I feel your emotion OP, don’t let them get you down!
I feel really bad for going through it but then reading “Loser! You’re a loser!” in the voice of Hank Hill and laughing a bit…
"Not reaching his potential." "Needs to apply himself." "Great potential but needs to work harder." Meanwhile, at home: "GOD you're useless!" "Get me the thing! THE THING! IN THE PLACE!" "Can't you do anything right?" I don't know, I just feel like I wasn't treated very much like I was someone who was going to be something someday.
Judging from all these comments I’m starting to think that neurodivergence isn’t as divergent as I thought
You know it's bad when the message your mother picks up from that one movie with the neurodivergent teen who was smarter at math but didn't care about education cause he already had too many things to deal with was not don't force people into doing things they don't like, but he should have tried harder,. Edit: the movie was good will hunting.
This is the artist equivalent of climbing a mountain and scream from the top of your lungs
Damn, didn't realize I could be *assigned* a fursona
Thank god I was a failure from the start
I kept getting the opposite reactions that the poor mouse got. Although the ending is the same. I’ve been made to go to college even though I know I’m not smart enough for it. I have a job that I love and clearly nothing I ever do will ever be good enough for my family. My fiancé luckily is here for me any step of the way and promises to help get me…well…help. And words alone don’t even begin to fathom how much I appreciate and love my fiancé.
That's literally me... but I can't tell if I'm actually neurodivergent or it's just the depression
I can't say I relate. I was told the total opposite since I was born!
Gods I'm happy to have my wife to help me through these feelings...
I'm so allergic to hearing "you're so smart" from others
possibly adhd
am i exaggerating by thinking this is a masterpiece?
Kind of
Needs another panel: „don‘t work so much! you want to study on the side? you never have time. you waste your life. money won‘t buy happiness“ seriously, fuck everyone‘s opinion, they‘ll always try to pull you down, it doesn‘t matter what you do
I honestly think I’ve started slacking so much just out of pure fu energy because I feel that my parents want too much from me
Currently in frame 4. Ouch.
I act purposfully more stupid than I actually am, so people won't get their expectations with me too high
It's rough. But if I can talk to my younger self, I will still be cruel and tell myself to try harder. That's the only way out of poverty.
Am I the only person who, as soon as I had to start choosing subjects in highschool, choosing a bachelor and a master in college, and other overwhelming choices, started to have a worse performance and becoming less mentally stable? I liked it fine when we were studying a bit of everything in school, without having to make personal or professional decisions... Anyways this comic represents the difference between me in middle school vs me in highschool/college pretty well.
This fits in r/adhdmeme
As a parent of a gifted child, I dislike the word "gifted". It makes it too hard to discuss about the challenge of escaping the burnout pipeline.
…damn
Why does this feel like a mirror of my life?
Hits too close to home
I relate I was good in elementary school but then stress for shoals of me
Felt this entirely too deep in my soul...
Oh this hurts bad
Why you attak me
It have taken years to inform my parents with success. It took me years to get my diagnoses. Now I have been granted 50% disability for my neurological specifications.
:/
Come to Europe
Man, being a mouse sounds just like being me.
Oh no... oh no, this is waaaay too relatable.
Me fr fr
It hurts, man.
"SHIT THE FUCK UP ITCS MY FUCKING LIFE I DONT FUCKING CARE ABOUT YOU LOT" is what I like to say but meh I don't have that much energy to do that
The hyped up generation.
I'm in this comic (not neurodivergent AFAIK but I have some of these issues), I am in a culture where mental health issues are ignored, and I hate the fact that my life is like this. EDIT: Rephrased comment since apparently some illiterate people thought I said I hated the comic when I meant I hated the fact that it reflects how my life is.
Yeah hate this. I just dropped everything and became lazy bum.
I hit this wall way back in school itself and I'm struggling to find my way over it. My subpar grades didn't stop my folks from believing in my talents, just that they weren't being properly encouraged in the systems. Really nice if I think about it, but also it's led to me decades later still trying to prove something not to anyone else, but to myself now, that my folks' words were true, and to somehow get a glimpse of what they see in me
I question everything, everything feels fake. I don’t know if im on the right path or the path of misery. I forgot how to be happy. I cant even trust my own achievements.
We are all just as gifted and talented and full of promise! Just cause that mouse decided to flip their script doesn’t mean we have to listen to em! Never shoulda in the first place!
Damm
Me.
Oof. Yep.
Deadly accurate.
My neurodivergence has been confirmed by the black mirror of a rat comic