Need to vent: difficulties in graduate school

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I got into a taught postgraduate programme two years ago and I thought it was so awesome. Because wow, I failed terribly in high school, now I can get into graduate school. And after years of refusing to get a diagnosis despite constant nagging by my psychologist who suspected I had ADHD, I went to a psychiatrist and got a diagnosis of ADHD along with other fun stuff like dysgraphia, anxiety, insomnia, sensory processing problems. She also suspected I have Asperger syndrome but after a discussion with disability support at my school, my school was willing to tailor a learning support plan according to a suspected diagnosis and my psychiatrist and I both felt that a diagnosis would cause additional discrimination instead of helping me at this point of my life.

So, great, I received learning support sessions, I receive a learning plan with flexible deadlines, extra time in exams and counselling. Unfortunately, I requested for titles of texts used to be given to me earlier so that I have extra time to read, that never happened and no one knew what the status of that was.

And then nightmare. I just cannot read or process fast enough to catch up with coursework. It was the same nightmare as high school algebra. My dissertation is a systematic review but I couldn't figure out boolean search phrases until 6 months before the deadline no matter how many times I read it or watched the lecture. I couldn't understand a damn thing about how to write the darn review until very recently. It's like my brain cannot understand anything until a switch flicks off, then I get it and I am brilliant at it but until then, absolutely not happening. It's driving me mad and I feel so useless and stupid. I have a degree in English, surely, writing a systematic review cannot be this impossible. Surely, reading a book on how to write a systematic review shouldn't take this long to understand. It doesn't help that I am very bad at comprehension and that information can be entirely skipped over or 'lost' while I read (I can't say how many times I've booked tickets or a hotel room for the wrong day or place because of this). So I have to read texts about four or five times to make sure I don't miss out anything. That's fine, but it is NOT FINE when I have 50,000 search results for sift through to find titles with the keywords I have, 50,000 titles are no joke to sift through once, much less another few more times.

At this point, every time my supervisor asks how things are going, I just say 'fine' or 'not too good'. She probably thinks I'm really lazy or something, but I'm kind of used to teachers calling me that throughout grade school and high school. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to describe the kind of difficulties I am facing in a way which will help anyone help me. My learning support sessions were all finished up last year so I'm no longer in contact with them. I've just asked for an extension and it's making me feel terrible, stupid and useless. People keep telling me that sure it cannot be that bad since I got a place in the programme in the first place but part of me keeps thinking what if they made a mistake.

I don't like learning by reading a lot, so I use some ways of learning that are not primarily from reading. There is still a little reading involved.

For each topic, I build it up by reading a few short things like lecture notes or online powerpoints, then I build up the topic on my own by making my own powerpoint. I try to put the big picture of the topic and the little details in my powerpoint. Later, when I need to review this info for test or research, I can look at my powerpoint, and I remember and understand all the things really well, because I built it up myself.

Another suggestion I have for communicating with your advisor. To most advisors, it is ok for students to say something about some difficulty or obstacle they have in research. You can say that it is taking you a long time to go through so many search results, but you are working on it, and you can also ask for any advice about how to speed things up or understand better. Advisors have worked with many students and have been through the same as students are going through, so they may be able to offer advice that you or other students don't naturally think of.

Hang in there. You will do just fine.

Thanks btbnnyr, for all the suggestions. I'm feeling a bit more demoralized. I just got feedback on my work again (2 months to deadline!!) and I've done a significant chunk wrong. Again. I realize I don't understand anything about it, to be honest. I've reviewed taught material over and over again. I've read and googled, but somehow I am STILL getting it wrong every time I get feedback on my work. Something or other is done wrong. And I get so anxious when I talk to my supervisor that I can't remember much of what she says. I'm considering just letting them flunk me for my dissertation and graduating with a diploma instead because it's 2 months to deadline and I am still nowhere closer to getting work done correctly. I'm going to have a word with disability support and try to come up with a battle plan.

Could you get an extension from deadline with help from disability support?

Does the feedback say that you didn't understand some ideas correctly, or that you didn't included certain information needed, or something else?

Perhaps it is not as bad as it seems at first, maybe if you figure out the chunk with the problems, you can finish this thing in time or with extension.

It is the norm to get a lot of negative feedback in grad school in many areas, I think, as people will criticize the iffy or incomplete or unclear parts, so you can improve them. Positives are usually just passing comment or two that you did something correctly or well.

I've had one extension already when I took some time off school because I couldn't cope without access to medication or care. I still don't have access but I've got to graduate some how. Disability support is offering me a session with a counsellor where I asked to talk about discussing how long I should get the next extension for, along with study skills and help with planning and organizing my work.

I was told that I had gone into doing my research the wrong way and I am not putting in enough effort to get things done before. In the last year, I've scrapped the entire thing and redone it three times. Not to mention stupidly doing 100+ variations of the same searches because my brain didn't seem to grasp the concept of boolean search terms. So now I'm like 6 months behind schedule and I think I need to scrap and redo AGAIN. I honestly don't feel like saying anything else at this point and just letting my advisor think that I don't understand because I couldn't be bothered to try understanding. It is demoralizing.