College is a completely different setup than the job market. I'm slow at things. Really, really slow. I process information really slowly and have to take my time when I write things because I have difficulty remembering words. Like, I'll have to sit there staring at the page for a few moments until I remember the word I was trying to find, or I can sometimes pull up thesaurus.com and try to find the word if I can think of one that is similar to what I am looking for. As you can imagine, this is a very time-consuming process. The thing is, in college, it was fine if I was slow. I could read book chapters, write essays, study for exams, etc. on my own time. I might have made a 98 on a 5-page paper, but it took me 2 weeks to write it, whereas one of my classmates could have written theirs 2 hours before the class began.

That's the difference between school and the "real world." Employers won't let me take as long as I need to finish things. They want someone who can work as fast as possible, and why would they hire me when they can hire someone who can do the same job just as well in like 1/100th of the time?

This is the thing. I'm not smart at all, but when I am allowed the time to do so, I am willing to put in exponentially more work to achieve the same result that someone smarter achieved in a fraction of the time. When I am not allowed to pace myself, I screw everything up because my brain just doesn't process information very fast. No employers will let me take my time, so I make errors or just don't finish my work. I'm tired of being rushed, and I'm also tired of people using my school grades to invalidate my concerns. Yes, I did well at school because people let me take my time in school. I can't succeed anywhere else because speed is the name of the game elsewhere.

I went to a neuropsychologist once to have testing done to see if I have cognitive problems. He asked me what my GPA was in school, and as soon as I told him, he said, "Then you don't have any cognitive limitations." Nevermind the fact that I am literally failing at every other aspect of life and can't hold a job...the fact that I can memorize facts and spit them out on a test is supposed to prove I don't have a problem.