#i have adhd so i wrote a giant post that i couldn't read if it showed up on my dash because i have adhd and it's too long

[witch-king-of-angstmar]

It's such a ridiculous notion that if we don't fit society's expectations, then people think we must be bad or wrong, and never that maybe these expectations are flawed. I wasn't diagnosed until I was in my 30s, so pretty much up until then I beat myself up believing I mean lazy and useless.

IDK I just don't get it. It makes me so angry. NTs are allowed to just exist. Why can't we? Why do people see someone struggling and their first response is to blame and shame them? Since when has that ever worked? It's not that they're trying harder or that they're better or worse, it's that the world is structured to work for them so they can meet the bare minimum with comparatively less effort. So why are ND people held to this ridiculous standard where we have to be freaking geniuses in order to be considered worthy of help?

I'm saying this as someone who was a gifted kid when I was young but who crashed and burned and now struggles to read and can't hold down a job. The very symptoms of ND struggle, like being forgetful or needing to stim when overwhelmed, are the very things people use at work or school to paint us as broken and therefore less than. This is bullshit. Like yes, the experience of a gifted kid struggling invisibly and someone struggling visibly will necessarily be different, but the kid who gets straight A's and gets a bullshit gold star for reading quietly is not somehow more worthy than the kid who shakes their legs and gets a bullshit demerit and bullshit public shaming because they can't finish the bullshit worksheet. They shouldn't be pitted against each other as The Right Way To Be ND/The Wrong Way To Be ND! One's struggles go undetected because they push through. One gets penalized and is never given the chances that others get. The system failed them both in differently horrible ways. But both are valid! Both are deserving of help! As NDs, we aren't a monolith, and we can't always understand directly what each other's experiences are when we don't have their limitations, but it's not a competition. We can hold space for us all to exist. And also like. What if we had accommodations to everyone, NT or ND, without people needing to run the gauntlet of Proving You're Suffering Enough But Not So Much That People Don't Believe You, so those who need them can use them, and those who don't don't, and everyone can just exist without the shame?

Getting treated with basic human dignity and getting support to survive in life should never be conditional on high performance or proving you're a "good person" to authority figures. You shouldn't have to burn yourself to permanent damage in exchange for not being trampled on. You are not a bad person because everyone who was supposed to help you failed you instead. Getting help from your family and community before a situation becomes dire is a reasonable expectation, not a luxury!

And if the people who failed to help us are bothered by these concepts, then it was never about helping us in the first place.

making a separate post but like. i don’t think some of y’all understand how genuinely traumatizing it is to have undiagnosed (or even diagnosed) adhd and go through school as the lazy stupid kid. i’ll tell you a little bit about what school looked like for me.

when i was in second grade, my teacher used to drag my desk up to the front of the class in the middle of lessons if i tapped my pencil or bounced my knee. she wouldn’t let me talk to any of my friends, and wouldn’t let me read my books when i was done with my assignments and was waiting for everyone else to finish. she would berate me in front of the whole class until i cried. her treatment of me got so bad my parents had to pull me out of school.

when i was in fifth grade, my teacher gave out “assignment alerts”, bright orange pieces of paper that indicated you’d forgotten to turn in an assignment. i was given dozens of these papers, and they started to build up, so it was harder to hide them. she would give these out in front of everyone in the middle of class, and she always made sure that when it came to me everyone knew i had the most. she would mock me in front of my classmates for my inability to keep up with homework and said that because my test scores were good it was because i was just lazy and didn’t care.

when i was in seventh grade, my teachers made me come up to the front of the class at the beginning and end of the period so they could inspect my assignment book and sign it, in view of the rest of my classmates, and announce whether or not i’d done my homework. when i inevitably forgot about assignments, they would berate me in front of the class.

when i was in high school, i wasn’t allowed to try to test into higher level classes because my teachers had decided that even though i did well on tests and papers, i wasn’t intelligent enough to take them because i couldn’t keep track of my assignments and deadlines. I was told over and over again that i was just lazy, and anytime i tried to explain what i later learned were symptoms of adhd i was berated and told i was making excuses.

when i was in college, i failed two classes my first year because i couldn’t keep up with the deadlines. the day before my second year, my best friend died, and i stopped going to classes. my teachers didn’t connect the dots because they assumed based on the previous year that i was just lazy and didn’t care about school. i failed several classes that year and never got the mental health assistance i needed, and my reputation at the school was pretty much shot. one teacher even went out of his way to try and fail me because he didn’t believe i deserved a degree. he tried to claim i’d plagiarized one of my papers to put a mark on my transcript. luckily he didn’t or i may have had to drop out. i had to do an extra year to make up for all the classes i’d failed, and barely graduated.

i did end up dropping out of my attempted masters degree (the only school that would take me with such a low gpa, and the only school that offered no scholarships or assistantships) because all of the teachers refused to give me any sort of accommodations, noting my bad grades from undergrad. i was given no patience or grace, my disability was not respected, and i had to drop out.

these experiences (which are just a handful of many) were so traumatic that they gave me diagnosed ptsd. i’m almost 30 and i’m still in therapy learning to cope with the horrifying levels of self hatred, anxiety, and dysfunction that my academic experiences gave me. i’m still learning how to even begin to function and take care of myself after i was told for so long by people who were supposed to help and support me that i didn’t deserve to succeed.

i fully understand how stressful it is to mask your neurodivergence in order to succeed, and how that can affect your mental health. i understand the high levels of anxiety and dysfunction in former gifted kids. i get that, and i respect it. but i’m honestly so tired of ppl trying to say there’s no difference in that experience vs. mine. that someone who had a 4.0 all through high school and college and got a good job is just as materially affected as someone who couldn’t just push through, who couldn’t make it through higher education, who couldn’t graduate high school, who can’t hold a job at all.

these experiences are all valid but they are DIFFERENT. and when the only people i ever hear about when talking about adhd are the former gifted kids, it makes me feel so incredibly alone. and maybe if there were a greater variety of voices and experiences that were showcased, people like me wouldn’t feel so isolated and self-critical. maybe we’d realize that we deserve grace and kindness too, even if we didn’t get to be the gifted kids.