#And one for future me who's being deprived medication by national shortages and has to go back to crawling

[ockhamasylum]

As someone raised male but with that same internal ADHD, this absolutely fucked me up too. Because I wasn't externally hyper, because my dopamine-starved brain could stay glued to books for hours, because I wasn't causing a ruckus, I limped well into adulthood until officially getting a diagnosis/treatment late last year.

The worst part is that I apparently built really good systems for compensate for my ADHD. I know how to set up my schedule, make lists, arrange my belongings, use coffee, etc. I know my brain; I'm good at accommodating my needs.

And almost none of the systems work without medication. It's like building a car but not having gas. I'm left pushing an absolute brick of a brain. And until I recognized it as ADHD and was able to get a diagnosis, I never had the chance to be medicated.

With meds, everything works well enough I could cry. There's absolutely another post to make about how Adderall gives me the tools I need and makes everything snap into place, but the point is: I had no way of getting the help I needed until I was diagnosed. And thanks to the way ADHD's hyperactivity takes center stage in the conversation, no one recognized why I was struggling. I didn't even know myself until Tumblr folks voiced their experiences with internal ADHD.

...ngl, the fact that ADD and ADHD got condensed into ADHD when the hyperactivity specifically is part of the reason so many girls were simply not diagnosed drives me up the wall.

It's not that the whole name isn't bullshit, because it is. It describes the way people outside of our experience perceive us, as opposed to the difficulties that are part of our lived experience. Even from an outside standpoint, it's recognizable that "deficit" is not always the issue with our attention... but that's beside the point.

When psychiatrists noticed that ADD and ADHD were basically the same thing... they chose to favor the typical male presentation in the literal naming of the condition, and in doing so condemned a generation of girls (and other afab people) to suffer through being told they're so smart, they just don't apply themselves enough, that it's a personal failing they can't regularly turn in homework, that they're lazy for waiting until the last minute to work on an assignment... because those girls weren't hyperactive. Those girls just kind of drifted off and daydreamed in classes. Those girls doodled or wrote stories all through their school years, and functioned measurably worse when a teacher noticed they were doing that and tried to stop them. Those girls are now so many of my adult friends who are now being diagnosed with ADHD as adults, because the hyperactive part of the diagnosis almost solely applies to children (CHILDREN, when, I might note, this is a lifelong condition) who are socialized male.

We need a whole other name for the condition, because attention deficit is not our problem at all. But my god, the hyperactivity part actually ruined my life for so many years, because I had no way to explain to my dad why it physically hurt me to be bored, why I had to read or write or doodle in class in order to keep my focus, why I excelled in tests but failed at homework so my grades sucked because of that. No one even considered I might have ADHD, all through my childhood, but earlier this year I had the opportunity to go through all my grade school reports, and they could not be MORE CLEARLY talking about a child with ADHD. "Pleasure to have in class", "assignments not complete", "does not pay attention in class", "Birdie is a highly intelligent child with specific and unique needs" (I would LOVE more follow-up on that one, from third grade, do not have it). But I was a quiet and reserved child, so obviously I couldn't have ADHD.

I'm legitimately angry about it in retrospect. I went off my Adderall for a couple months recently, as an adult who only started taking Adderall as an adult, and it completely fucked up my ability to function. For years I was just out there as a teenager struggling through high school and college entirely unmedicated because as a child I was too withdrawn to be diagnosed. Fucking wild and also infuriating.