The failure of our culture to find a way to integrate people with schizophrenia into itself is a failure of imagination. We similarly fail to try to fit many other people into our idea of civilization and do so at our peril.
As many of you know, Albert Einstein was working as a clerk at a patent office when he came up with his theory of relativity. Why a clerk at a patent office and not, say, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University? Because Einstein didn’t so well in high school and, in all likelihood, would today be diagnosed with a learning disability, (and again, his talents might be wasted.)
Maybe someone with schizophrenia would have trouble sitting in a cubicle for 40-50 hours per week. Is doing so the apex of being a productive and useful being? Was anything of consequence accomplished by human beings prior to the advent of the cubicle?
How severely do your judge yourself in terms of how cubicle-ready you are? What could you accomplish if you measured success by other metrics?