torpak

I'm German myself but since I am a programmer I like the US-Keyboard more than the German one. The easy fix for me was using US-intl-nodeadkeys so I can use the right alt key to type those stupid German umlauts. This should work at least for most (Western-)European languages.

This is definitely true for me. That's one of the reasons I love anime and manga because in most of those the innermost thoughts of the characters are shown to the audience.

The best solution to this problem is not to buy one in the first place.

It's not really a single tool but using Arch Linux helps me greatly since it gives me full control over my computing environment and it's look and feel.

Oh no, you fell into your own trap!

Nope, the burden of evidence is on the one claiming something contradicting current scientific understanding.

In this post I have been using that term “non-speaking episodes” because it factually describes what is happening. Some people suggest “autistic shutdown” which is common in the community.

I am not arguing we should use non verbal but autistic shutdown is way to general because for me being (temporarily) unable to speak is only one of the first syptoms. It feels like a litteral "loss of words" since in those situations I'm unable to translate my thoughts into words.

Don't worry, I'm sure you won't have to translate any overly long sentences in the first semester.

Funny how culture shapes perception. As a German that sentence didn't even strike me as overly long.

When I have a mild headache, usually from a stiff neck, it impacts me like any other mild pain. It is just a source of stress, like children screaming near by or a Light flickering. It lowers my concentration and my mental capacity but unless there are other factors I can still somewhat function at least for a time.

Migraine is something different all together for me typically it starts with flickering in the center of my vision. Usually I recognize it because it gets hard to read text. The flickering then spreads out and slowly moves to my peripheral vision over about 10 to 30 minutes. When it moves out of my field of vision it takes another 10 to 30 minutes until my brain feels like a bucket of snails. I can't concentrate even on interesting things and even simple thoughts take effort. About a third of the time a really bad headache starts at the same time. The headache usually lasts about 1 to 3 hours but feels like 10. The sluggishness and fuzziness of my brain will slowly fade over the next one to three days.

This seems to be called migraine with aura. Luckily it hits me only about 3-5 times a year.

I did the switch twenty years ago, starting with dual-boot and Wine. Nowadays dual-boot is gone and I never use Wine outside of gaming.

I don't consider ADHD a superpower and I struggle with executive dysfunction every single day. I would love to be able to understand other people and their non verbal or indirect communication better. On the other hand I love the fact that my personal combination of disabilities has allowed me to learn to extremely quickly research enough of any given topic to have relevant discussions with experts. My widespread intereste allowed me to learn a huge variety of facts most of which are useless most of the time but many of which were surprisingly useful at least one time in my life. My bad working memory forced me to learn to use general principles to get useful results based on very little information and to quickly distill the most relevant information out of heaps of text. Nearly every single strenght I have is literally the flip-side of one of my weaknesses. On the whole I would say that while my ADHD and ASD have clearly made my life more challenging on the whole those challenges helped me become the person I am. I recognize that not everyone is as lucky as I am in that regard but i"m quite sure there are others who are even more lucky than me many of which won't even suspect they are neurodivergent, just as I didn't a few years ago. So I think your perception of the "objective" ammount of neurodivergent suffering may be squewed because only people who suffer at least a bit have reason to get a diagnosis.