#adhd is a rock but it's also a sheild it turns out

[lastoneout]

As much as my ADHD has made my life absolute hell at times and I truly wish I had been diagnosed sooner...as I unpack my past in therapy I've realized my undiagnosed ADHD actually did do me one HUGE favor.

Bcs without getting too into it my response to the specific way I was raised and the trauma that came with it was to make myself smaller. A lot of kids in my situation would have just lashed out, but I just started cutting bigger and bigger bits of myself off because I thought if I wanted attention or affection then I needed to be perfect and normal and not even the smallest burden or inconvenience to the people around me, and I fell so hard into that mentality that part of healing has legit been trying to like get back in contact with who I was before all that made me into someone I wasn't.

Which is hard, but not impossible, because during all that trauma no matter how hard I tried to shove everything "ugly" and "imperfect" about myself into a tiny little box where no one would ever see it until I was the perfect daughter, I couldn't quite manage to get all of me in there, because my ADHD wouldn't let me.

And as I was growing up I saw this as a bad thing, obviously. Like I didn't know it was ADHD at the time ofc but I knew that my impulsiveness and loud ass laugh and distractability and habit of talking too much to fast and struggle to shut the fuck up about whatever weird thing I was into were parts of me I could never seem to fully change. No matter how hard I tried to be quiet and have normal interests and stop doing impulsive shit like talking really loud or going off about an interest I know no one around me shared, I couldn't actually do it.

So now, looking back with a healthier frame of mind, with a fiancé who became interested in me bcs we shared one of my "weird" interests, who smiles and laughs and tells me he loves me when I get loud and passionate about things I care about, who loves my loud ass laugh so much that once after I was sick and didn't laugh for like a week the first time I did went "oh good, I missed that sound", I can see at least a bit of good in the ways my ADHD stopped me from being able to destroy myself completely for the sake of others.

More often than not my ADHD was a huge rock tying me down, but it turns out deep inside that rock was a geode protecting the things about myself that I used to hate but now love more than anything, and now that the rock is smaller and easier to carry I can be thankful for that.