I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2020

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  • I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

    I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

    I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.





  • I always found it overwhelming to get started on big messes, so cleaning everything up immediately would get around my executive dysfunction. When I got in a relationship with someone whose approach was to be a human hurricane and then deep clean every once in a while it was a culture shock and it took years of me being a bad partner to become more responsible. I didn’t really understand the executive dysfunction so I self-loathed over it.