As a student/person with ADHD, I have struggled a lot. Sometimes, it was torture to do what seemed like a simple everyday task. “It’s not that hard, just use your common sense”, people would say to me. I struggled a lot as a child and I never learned how to effectively cope with having ADHD. As of now, I’m still learning about myself and my brain.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve always known I was different from everybody else but I didn’t understand why I was so different. It was like everyone was playing a game and I was the only one who didn’t understand the rules of that game, no matter how many times someone explained it to me. I just didn’t get it. This made it challenging for me to make friends. It was also challenging for my mother as well as my teachers. They would tell me that I was bright and that I had so much potential, I just needed to try harder. I felt like nobody understood me, and I was right. In fact, I didn’t even understand myself so how could I expect someone else to? When something didn’t make sense to me, sometimes I would get very overwhelmed and have meltdowns (sometimes I still do). Still, nobody understood me. People would often correct me and tell me to “try harder” or that I needed to apply myself or that I was just being lazy but what they didn’t realize was that I was already trying so hard. In fact, I would try so hard that everything else around me no longer mattered. I’d stop doing chores so I could work harder on homework and sometimes I’d stop doing homework so I could work harder on chores. Still, nothing was good enough. I was tired of feeling like I had to work harder at life than everybody else. Sometimes, I just got so frustrated that I gave up. It was so incredibly exhausting for me to try and try and try all day every day, to walk on eggshells just to feel like the effort I was putting in was good enough. Not even great, I just wanted to reach good enough. It felt more like walking on glass. I felt like it would never even matter what I did or didn’t do because regardless it wasn’t going to be good enough. The honest truth was, it never would be good enough. The reason for that was that I didn’t have people who understood and supported me, who really saw ME instead of seeing my flaws and my challenges. I didn’t even see me. I saw what everyone else wanted and needed me to be and I saw that no matter how hard I tried I could never be what society expected of me. Why? My brain is different.
Imagine for a second that you are a child who feels all these things, feels like everyone is against you or out to put you down. Imagine being treated like you are rebellious, lazy, and a liar when you know that you aren’t but can’t explain it because you don’t understand why you don’t understand. Imagine being treated like you are a broken toy instead of a human being every day and that you need to be fixed. Does it make you want to just shrink into a corner and be invisible? Does it make you feel isolated and alone? That’s how I felt. That’s how I still feel sometimes. Imagine being put on medicine and having a family who does nothing to learn about your challenges, just wanting a “quick fix” to make you look and act normal and to fit in with everybody else. At first, they might get away with it, but later on, that child will grow up and start to realize what is really going on. Just like I did, they will realize that they are a person who understands nothing about themselves and that now it affects every part of their life even more so than it did when they were a child and that they have no idea how to cope with ADHD, all they have is medicine that only helps their ability to focus better and regulate their emotions. I’m not saying medicine is bad, I’m simply saying that medicine alone is not meant to be a coping strategy for ADHD. It teaches you nothing about your weaknesses or your strengths.
Because of my ADHD, my working memory (kind of like RAM on a computer) holds a lot less information than that of a “neurotypical”. I would often forget things that people would say to me (even seconds after they said it), or I would misplace one of my belongings because I forgot where I laid it. This happens to everyone occasionally, but it happens to me weekly, sometimes daily. Last week, I laid my keys (which hold a little wallet with my student ID, driver’s license, and debit card as well) down in the lobby of one of the buildings at my college. I went to class without it. After class, I realized I had misplaced it and I re-traced my steps only to find nothing. Then, I had a panic attack and began to weep… Not cry. Weep. As a child, I would often forget a task my parents had told me to complete and when I told them the truth, they called me a liar and said: “You’re too young to have a bad memory.” I grew up believing that there was something wrong with me when there wasn’t. Yes, my brain is different than others’ and I have some significant challenges that I have to learn to cope with and find ways to be successful.
ADHD is not all bad, even though it may seem that way from what I have already said. People with an ADHD brain are typically bright, funny, empathetic, generous, and are known for their ability to think outside of the box. We are excellent problem solvers who love to wrestle with new or challenging ideas and we love deadlines. With that said, we also procrastinate. The reason for this is that our brain has two settings: now and… not now. The brain of a “neurotypical” person receives the amount of stimulation needed and gets hits of dopamine as they complete tasks, or in other words, their brain rewards them by making them feel good and as if they have accomplished something. The ADHD brain is a little different. Our brain is chronically understimulated and doesn’t receive nearly as many hits of dopamine for completing a task unless we do it last minute, or the task is of personal interest to us. With that said, we are very intelligent and capable people and we have the desire and the ability to be successful and having ADHD doesn’t mean that people should lower their expectations of us, we just need people with the patience to see that we are trying and that there is not always only one right way to do something. All a person with ADHD wants from the world is for them to see us as we are and to accept us even though we do not think the same way. Don’t give up on us. Don’t try to force us to think inside of a box that we can’t even see.
If you would like to learn more about ADHD:
Visit and subscribe to the “How To ADHD” channel on Youtube.
Thanks for reading, and take care of yourselves!
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” –Albert Einstein
Stop The Stigma 