#but sure. “look squirrel!” amiright? thats so quirky and silly

[smol-feralgremlin]

But at the same time, I felt uneasy at being thrust into an online community which I’d long considered kind of annoying: What’s really striking is the extent to which a disorder associated with garrulousness and substance abuse has been captured so utterly by nerds. To what neurodivergent urges would I now be subjected? Would I be tempted to start drawing pastel-colored webcomics about buying too many notebooks or set up a TikTok account with my boyfriend in which he is assigned the role of baffled but tolerant neurotypical and I am essentially a child? Would I start claiming that innocuous behaviors like “Googling stuff,” “using emojis,” “being able to concentrate sometimes but not always,” and “watching cartoons” arise directly from my newly confirmed condition? Would I begin to construct elaborate metaphors along the lines of “ADHD is basically like having a poltergeist that follows you around and moves your stuff” or “ADHD is having a werewolf that lives inside your brain: the secret is not trying to control the werewolf, but fully embracing that you are this creature”? I didn’t want to do any of those things, but I did start to consider what we are telling ourselves — and one another — about ADHD.