T.W.: conditioning, over-medication, general assholery.
I could write a multi-page essay about this shit, and probably will eventually, butnone of us have time for that now. So, I'll give you the condensed version of this rant.
Living in the U.S. as a neurodivergent who's just joining the workforce is hell. From a young age, you're taught that unless you can be productive in this very specific way you aren't good for anything, so you dedicate your entire childhood to changing yourself in every way possible to fit that model. If you have ADHD like I do, you're put on medication that literally changes your brain to the point that you are no longer the person you were before. On top of that, in red states, when the medication stops working, they don't look for alternate ways to help, they just up the dosage. And then, when you hit the workforce you discover that all that energy that got sapped out of you, that rarely rears its head because executive dysfunction has taken over your life thanks to the pressure to conform and be normal, is what managers want from you.
Then there's the ways that managers are assholes to you, unintentionally or otherwise. I recently found out that I have autism as well as ADHD, and I have made neither a secret at work. I have explained to the managers, the team leads, the people that run the damn store how that affects my brain, over and over, and the things I need to be productive. (I'm nineteen and I've only been working a job that wasn't opened by family friends for less than six months. I was naive when I started and I'm still getting over conditioning that I need to be a good, productive worker to deserve what should be a basic right.) Every time the response seems to get more and more insensitive. At first it was just “show some more hustle and we'll try to help you out.” The most recent, when I explained that because of the way my brain works, I am either a perfectionist or do a sloppy job, the reply I got was, “You're young, you've got a long road ahead of you. You need to figure out how to deal with that.”
If you're neurodivergent, and it isn't a debilitating divergence such as severe Downs syndrome, autism, etc., you're viewed as a lazy normal person. You could do your best and fall behind neurotypical people, but because you aren't visibly disabled, who gives a shit, right? You're supposed to be a perfect robot that provides as much profit as possible anyways, so why not act like your problems aren't relevant whatsoever.