Order and Disorder

Her recent transformation had equipped her with what she believed to be enhanced academic capabilities. This time, she would follow a perfectly normal student path: attending every lecture like a dedicated scholar, studying steadily with the discipline of someone who had finally discovered proper learning techniques.

Best of all, she now had sufficient savings to pursue education without employment. Her life had clearly been arranged to support this magnificent educational journey. But first, she needed official documentation of her exceptional neurological status.

She marched into her general practitioner's office with the confidence of someone about to receive professional validation of her unique cognitive architecture.

"Hi!" she announced brightly. "I just had a mental breakdown!"

The doctor blinked with the expression of someone who had expected to discuss seasonal allergies. "I see. Has this never happened before?"

"Oh no, never! But I think I'm autistic," she declared with the enthusiasm of someone announcing they'd discovered they were secretly royalty.

He studied her carefully applied makeup, her coordinated pastel outfit, her complete transformation from the woman who had walked into a police station weeks earlier speaking in fragments and certainties.

"You don't really look autistic though," he said carefully.

The narrator pauses here: she had been a structural biologist who could theorize the thermodynamics of learning, who could hold six-dimensional protein folding problems in her mind simultaneously. Now she was giggling in a doctor's office after her digestive system made an emphatic sound. The framework that explained this was pharmaceutical intervention. The reality was more complicated. The gap between the two was where all the grief lived.

"Oh, well," she explained helpfully, "I did some screening tests online from private laboratories. And I scored quite high on all of them. Same range, consistently."

"Yes," he said slowly, "maybe you are autistic."

"Why did you change your mind?" she asked, dissolving into childlike laughter.

He had no answer for this.

The referral machinery ground into motion with the precision of bureaucratic systems everywhere. She scheduled appointments, navigated phone calls, mastered the particular language required to request specific medical procedures at specific times, a skill that should have been obvious to someone of her previous caliber but now felt like learning a foreign dialect. no, Me managed to be a clandestine in her own country, that's why she is testing for autism….

At the neurologist's office, practically vibrating with excitement about receiving official confirmation of her exceptional neurological status, she encountered her first real obstacle.

"We can't do those kinds of diagnoses here," the neurologist explained with professional bewilderment. "You should see a neuropsychiatrist."

Of course. Obviously, her condition required the most specialized expert available. This was clearly more sophisticated than she had initially realized.

She found a neuropsychiatrist in private practice and began her consultation with dramatic flair, recounting the saga of recent months like someone narrating her own mythology.

"You have been drugged!" the doctor exclaimed, displaying recognition.

"Yes, indeed! That's exactly what I suspected," she agreed triumphantly. "But the hospital doctors insisted this was impossible."

She elaborated on her history: the challenging work environment, the complex family dynamics, including that memorable incident when her mother had attempted to eliminate her "during what could generously be called a momentary lapse of maternal judgment," her previous psychiatric evaluation that had failed to detect any disorders.

"Let's start with some assessments," the neuropsychiatrist said, handing her a questionnaire.

She approached it with analytical precision, treating each question as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of identity and social expectation. Then she encountered one question that stopped her:

Do you think you are part of a bigger community that supports you and makes you feel less lonely?

This was asking about The Whole. But was she supposed to discuss cosmic connections in a clinical setting?

"Oh my," she said. "This question... this was the entire theme of my epic leak adventure! What should I answer?"

"Do you still feel like that?" the doctor asked with professional interest.

"Mmm, no," she admitted sadly. "But I definitely miss it."

"Then the answer is no," the neuropsychiatrist concluded with clinical efficiency.

The narrator notes something that deserves precision: she had just answered that she no longer felt supported by a cosmic network. But what she had actually revealed was that the medication had successfully severed her connection to the only interpretive framework that had allowed her to survive. She was mourning The Whole. She was mourning the coherence that had kept her alive.

And she was doing it in a questionnaire designed to determine whether she met diagnostic criteria for autism. no, for personality and mood disorder

She shared further insights: "Of course I don't believe my mother loves me. She literally tried to kill me in a rage-induced episode. I would have to be genuinely insane to interpret attempted infanticide as maternal affection!"

"You are definitely a person of exceptional caliber," the neuropsychiatrist said, clearly impressed by her analytical capabilities. "Let's properly assess your intellectual capacity."

She was scheduled with the psychology colleague for comprehensive testing.

Here the narrative must pause for a moment of bitter comedy.

She had requested autism testing, a straightforward assessment of her exceptional neurological architecture. However, through a delightful series of miscommunications involving medical abbreviations, referral forms, and her own charming assumption that all psychological testing was essentially equivalent, she had somehow enrolled herself in a comprehensive learning disabilities evaluation.

Instead of receiving confirmation of her autism-related superpowers, she was about to undergo extensive testing to determine whether she was intellectually impaired.

After all, what could possibly go wrong when someone convinced of her own genius accidentally enrolls in an assessment designed to identify cognitive limitations?