Insert horrified looks when I tell me friends some "funny stories" from my childhood. :D
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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"Pug, you're an incredibly smart kid, but you're lazy."
Me, unable to remember homework, but acing every test and going above-and-beyond on any project with freeform requirements, leading to solid Bs and Cs despite half my assignments being a flat 0 for not being turned in: "Yeah."
... kind of wish someone looked a little deeper into the issue at the time.
Growing up neurodivergent in the 80s and not being disruptive enough to demand said deeper look may lead to:
Who are you and how did you read my diary?
.... uncle jerry?
Same. There's more of us?
I only have about half of those, so...yay?
Ha. Rookie! /j
Help lol
It ain't much but it's honest work.
Oh hey thanks! I was looking for that!
Uhhhh oh boy heh...
My mom used to talk in code a lot for no fucking reason. She’d throw out the weirdest segues and irrelevant stories. When I (barely) graduated from a gifted kids high school, she jumped from telling me she was proud of me, to telling me that when my sister was little, all her teachers told her that she should be “tested” - heavily implying it was for learning disabilities - and added that “none of [her] babies are retarded.”
2 things - that sister had dyscalculia and never got beyond an associates degree because she kept failing math. And it took until my mom died to figure out she was also talking about me - and every one of my siblings.
When going through my mom’s things, I found out that she ignored the advice of several teachers and school counselors to get me tested for ADHD. Because she didn’t want a ‘damaged’ kid.
Now that’s a tough pill to swallow. How’d you cope with that?
It prompted me to begin the process of being evaluated.
Insofar as the emotional aspects?
I had made a choice not to speak with her many years before. She was a badly broken person who refused to change in any way. Her response to having her failings pointed out was defensiveness and accusations against the accuser.
Sometimes you doubt yourself when it comes to cutting off a parent. Was it really that bad? Were they really that harmful?
I don’t think it’s fair to say I ever hated her. I went from mad to sad for her, to just disappointed.
Learning these things about her was more or less met with a bitter chuckle. Rueful, I suppose. It was further validation that she put her ego over my well-being. But I can’t change what is. I can’t undo a life of forgetting, of failing at things because despite accidentally deploying almost every ADHD coping mechanism, I still needed additional help.
I do regret that I didn’t know I had ADHD much earlier in life. It would have made so many things easier. I’m probably delayed about 10-15 years professionally because of struggles in school, as well as poor social skills (which are better in recent years, mind you). My most noticeable symptom is that I have object permanence issues - awareness of ADHD probably would have prevented me from developing some negative self assumptions*, and perhaps empowered me to not harm, or at least mitigate some of that harm for people who just ceased to exist for me when life was tumultuous and my working memory was too small to encompass them.
*And the assumptions are, if not valid, then reasonable to understand - when I am not interacting with someone, they just crystallize in my head into the person they last were. I have crushes on people I haven’t seen in years because they haven’t changed in my head. Conversely, I have a friendship with another object permanence person that is fantastic. We see each other once or twice a year and it’s like we never stopped talking. But for most people I atrophy and attenuate. I fade. People forget me. They get upset because I don’t reach out. I don’t remember they exist. And so when I see someone I haven’t seen in years and I remember them and want to give them a big hug and treat them like they are exactly as close as we were the last time we saw each other, they (rightfully) treat me like a stranger, and it hurts in a way that I … am going to talk to my therapist about, because I’m off the rails. But I feel that I don’t have a social home, because there’s no place my social self lives. I am a ghost.
That’s why I picked this username, actually. Because it means I’m still here.
That is a beautiful but tragic story. I’m in a similar situation, ADHD/autism - got diagnosed way too late literally after high school and after trying desperately to begin college and struggling ridiculously hard. I am basically 30 now I struggle with the same things you mentioned. “People permanence” is a problem for me too. I struggle with socializing and relationships too in so many ways I can’t possibly keep up. I often feel very lonely no matter who is there talking with me.
I want to give you a virtual hug as I could had written the exact same things for me. I struggle with the same stuff and now being close to my 40s it is exhausting. I got diagnosed with ADHD before almost 5 years but as I look deeper into I tend to believe it must be more like a childhood trauma result than just genetics. Lookup C-PTSD and the overlapping symptoms are way too much for this would be just a coincidence. But every step towards a better situation is a good step.
Fuck, man, the stigmatization of neurodivergence has done so much damage to so many people :(
It really, really has.
Can't have ADHD if you don't get tested! Fucking brilliant.
Same here. I didn't get diagnosed until a couple of years ago but the signs were always there...
Now I'm just biding my time until my youngest two get the diagnosis (my husband and I both are ADHD, and our other kids have already been diagnosed).
High potential + severe adhd => ticking bomb
You got the “good” (/s) adhd. There’s the other adhd where you suck at tests because you can’t pay attention and you don’t do the homework or projects either.
Well, I definitely didn't pay attention in class. I slept through a number of my classes on the regular. But I was a little bookworm desperately short of books, so I gleefully and willingly poured over the textbooks in my free time. Or in math class, which bored me to tears and I was never any good at.
We have starkly different opinions about our textbooks. I found mine achingly uninteresting. Regular fiction/fantasy/sci-fi books? I could devour a novel in a day. “Sailed the ocean blue in 1492”? Couldn’t be bothered.
Our literature textbooks had Asimov and Twain, while history has always been an obsession of mine. Science was good too, until it got into chemistry, at which point it veered too much into math for me to care.
Sounds more interesting than ours, which had snippets of made-up quotes or stories to demonstrate proper form when writing. History is awesome in my current opinion, it’s fascinating. In school it was nothing more than being forced to memorize names, dates, and places. I’ll diverge from your opinion on math here, I hated it in regular school, but I really enjoyed college maths like physics because it had application and real-world results. Not just pointlessly solving versions of a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
Different strokes…
I kinda wonder how the fuck I wasn't diagnosed as a kid but my siblings were. I remember going to a therapist as a kid and yet nothing was said or done about any problems I had.
I got this but my parents did know I had ADHD. My mom didn't want to put me on mods though, so I mostly just got weird stuff done to manage it. Like making me sit in the bathroom with no distractions, not allowed to leave until homework was done, among other things.
ADHD still affects me in the workplace, but I'm fortunately in a position where it's not too detrimental and my bosses both like me and understand my challenges.
How'd that turn out? How'd college and/or employment go?
Poorly, on both. I took longer than normal to complete my degree's credits, and spiraling depression and anxiety closed off most of the 'usual' avenues of employment. I eventually managed to scrape out a living in a field which didn't require my degree. C'est la vie.
I feel like that's a common outcome, unfortunately.
Damn. We are so similar. At 50 and having my kids diagnosed I am finally realizing why.
I feel this comment.
One problem I had though was that some of my teachers were like, "I think he should be tested for ADHD and/or autism," and my parents going on a tirade about it not being real or some shit.
Of course I only found that out after I got diagnosed with ADHD (still haven't got the courage to ask my doc about autism though) and told my parents therefore triggering they're tirade aimed at me where they mentioned my teachers talking about it pretty consistently in school.
Would have loved getting that diagnosis when I was younger than 29.
My mother was actually very open about mental illness, took it very seriously. I was diagnosed bipolar from a young age because she was looking out for me.
Unfortunately, the idea of 'ADHD' in the minds of non-specialist observers was tied in with the idea of hyperactivity at the time, and I was anything but a hyperactive kid.
I'm inattentive type ADHD so maybe that was a contributing factor to why my parents felt they way they did about it
They generally take mental health seriously but for somethings they're pretty damn backwards on
Same for me, but they hadn't identified ADHD yet
I did all my homework in the next claas, so at the end of the day I had one thing left, which I'd do in the first class the next morning. Didn't carry books home.