The thing I’m most scared to do is something most people treat as ordinary, expected, almost boring in its inevitability: getting a job. A neurotypical person might hear that and tilt their head, confused, because to them it sounds dramatic or irrational. Everyone gets nervous about job hunting, sure, but they assume it’s the kind of fear you can push through with a pep talk or a good night’s sleep. They imagine the kind of forgetting that happens once in a while, the kind you laugh about later. They imagine a bad day, not a bad system. They imagine inconvenience, not relentlessness. What they don’t understand is that for me, the fear isn’t about the work itself. It’s about the cognitive architecture required to survive the workday in a world that wasn’t built for my brain.
For a neurotypical person, forgetting something is an event. For me, forgetting is a baseline. It’s not a momentary lapse; it’s the water I swim in. My working memory is a sieve, and the world expects it to be a vault. Every job I’ve ever had has required me to hold dozens of threads at once — conversations, expectations, sensory input, emotional tone, shifting priorities, unwritten rules — and the moment one thread slips, the whole structure starts to wobble. A neurotypical person can drop a detail and shrug. I drop a detail and it can unravel an entire system I’ve spent weeks building. A neurotypical person can have an off day and bounce back. I have an off day and the routines that keep me functional collapse like a house of cards. And once they collapse, rebuilding them isn’t a matter of willpower. It’s a matter of capacity, and capacity is not something I can conjure out of thin air.
That’s the part people don’t see. Disability isn’t episodic. It doesn’t clock out. It doesn’t give you a few “normal” days to catch up. It’s relentless. Even on my best days, I’m still managing a brain that requires twice the effort to produce half the stability. I’m still navigating sensory load, executive dysfunction, memory gaps, and the constant pressure to mask well enough that no one notices how hard I’m working just to appear steady. Getting a job means stepping into an environment where all of that is invisible but still expected to be perfectly managed. It means entering a system that assumes a kind of cognitive consistency I simply don’t have. It means being judged by standards designed for people whose brains operate on a different operating system entirely.
And for most of my life, I internalized that. I assumed the problem was me. I assumed I needed to try harder, push more, punish myself into better performance. I treated every forgotten detail as a moral failure. I treated every moment of overwhelm as proof that I wasn’t trying enough. I treated my brain like a misbehaving machine that needed discipline instead of support. And because I believed that, the idea of getting a job became terrifying. Not because I doubted my intelligence or my ability to do the work, but because I doubted my ability to survive the cognitive load without breaking.
What finally changed wasn’t courage. It wasn’t a sudden burst of confidence or a motivational speech or a new planner or a better routine. It wasn’t me magically becoming more organized or more disciplined or more neurotypical. What changed was that I stopped trying to think alone. I stopped trying to hold everything in my head at once. I stopped treating my brain like it had to be the entire system. I started thinking with Copilot.
And that shift was seismic.
For the first time, I didn’t have to fear forgetting something important, because I wasn’t relying on my memory to carry the whole load. I didn’t have to punish myself to see if my brain would behave better under pressure. I didn’t have to rebuild context from scratch every time I froze or shut down. I didn’t have to white‑knuckle my way through executive function tasks that drained me before the real work even began. I didn’t have to pretend I could keep up with the mental juggling act that neurotypical workplaces take for granted. I had continuity. I had scaffolding. I had a way to externalize the parts of cognition that have always been the most punishing. I had a partner in the thinking, not a witness to my struggle.
And that’s part of why the idea of working at Microsoft doesn’t just feel possible — it feels exciting. Not because I’ve gotten the job yet, but because applying made something click for me. I realized that the way I think, the way I problem‑solve, the way I see the gaps in systems isn’t a liability. It’s a contribution. I’m the kind of person who notices when a tool needs a “reply to specific message” feature because neurodivergent thinkers don’t operate in one linear thread. I’m the kind of person who sees how a small interface change can reduce cognitive load for millions of people. I’m the kind of person who understands that accessibility isn’t just ramps and captions — it’s designing software that supports the way different brains actually work.
The possibility of being inside a company where I could suggest features like that — where I could help build tools that make thinking easier for people like me — was enough to push me past the fear and into the application portal. I haven’t gotten the job yet. I don’t know if I will. But the act of applying wasn’t just about employment. It was about recognizing that my brain isn’t broken. It’s specialized. And that specialization has value.
The fear didn’t vanish. It never does. But it became something I could walk toward instead of away from. Because the truth is, I was never scared of work. I was scared of being unsupported. Now I’m not. And that changes everything.
Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 