Insert horrified looks when I tell me friends some “funny stories” from my childhood. :D
“Pug, you’re an incredibly smart kid, but you’re lazy.”
Me, unable to remember homework, but acing every test and going above-and-beyond on any project with freeform requirements, leading to solid Bs and Cs despite half my assignments being a flat 0 for not being turned in: “Yeah.”
… kind of wish someone looked a little deeper into the issue at the time.
Growing up neurodivergent in the 80s and not being disruptive enough to demand said deeper look may lead to:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Internalization of negative self-worth
- Avoidance of formal higher education
- Early burnout
- Lifelong vague dissatisfaction
- Disillusionment with the world and its systems
- Being terminally online searching frantically for the next dopamine hit
My mom used to talk in code a lot for no fucking reason. She’d throw out the weirdest segues and irrelevant stories. When I (barely) graduated from a gifted kids high school, she jumped from telling me she was proud of me, to telling me that when my sister was little, all her teachers told her that she should be “tested” - heavily implying it was for learning disabilities - and added that “none of [her] babies are retarded.”
2 things - that sister had dyscalculia and never got beyond an associates degree because she kept failing math. And it took until my mom died to figure out she was also talking about me - and every one of my siblings.
When going through my mom’s things, I found out that she ignored the advice of several teachers and school counselors to get me tested for ADHD. Because she didn’t want a ‘damaged’ kid.
It prompted me to begin the process of being evaluated.
Insofar as the emotional aspects?
I had made a choice not to speak with her many years before. She was a badly broken person who refused to change in any way. Her response to having her failings pointed out was defensiveness and accusations against the accuser.
Sometimes you doubt yourself when it comes to cutting off a parent. Was it really that bad? Were they really that harmful?
I don’t think it’s fair to say I ever hated her. I went from mad to sad for her, to just disappointed.
Learning these things about her was more or less met with a bitter chuckle. Rueful, I suppose. It was further validation that she put her ego over my well-being. But I can’t change what is. I can’t undo a life of forgetting, of failing at things because despite accidentally deploying almost every ADHD coping mechanism, I still needed additional help.
I do regret that I didn’t know I had ADHD much earlier in life. It would have made so many things easier. I’m probably delayed about 10-15 years professionally because of struggles in school, as well as poor social skills (which are better in recent years, mind you). My most noticeable symptom is that I have object permanence issues - awareness of ADHD probably would have prevented me from developing some negative self assumptions*, and perhaps empowered me to not harm, or at least mitigate some of that harm for people who just ceased to exist for me when life was tumultuous and my working memory was too small to encompass them.
*And the assumptions are, if not valid, then reasonable to understand - when I am not interacting with someone, they just crystallize in my head into the person they last were. I have crushes on people I haven’t seen in years because they haven’t changed in my head. Conversely, I have a friendship with another object permanence person that is fantastic. We see each other once or twice a year and it’s like we never stopped talking. But for most people I atrophy and attenuate. I fade. People forget me. They get upset because I don’t reach out. I don’t remember they exist. And so when I see someone I haven’t seen in years and I remember them and want to give them a big hug and treat them like they are exactly as close as we were the last time we saw each other, they (rightfully) treat me like a stranger, and it hurts in a way that I … am going to talk to my therapist about, because I’m off the rails. But I feel that I don’t have a social home, because there’s no place my social self lives. I am a ghost.
That’s why I picked this username, actually. Because it means I’m still here.
Fuck, man, the stigmatization of neurodivergence has done so much damage to so many people :(
You got the “good” (/s) adhd. There’s the other adhd where you suck at tests because you can’t pay attention and you don’t do the homework or projects either.
Well, I definitely didn’t pay attention in class. I slept through a number of my classes on the regular. But I was a little bookworm desperately short of books, so I gleefully and willingly poured over the textbooks in my free time. Or in math class, which bored me to tears and I was never any good at.
We have starkly different opinions about our textbooks. I found mine achingly uninteresting. Regular fiction/fantasy/sci-fi books? I could devour a novel in a day. “Sailed the ocean blue in 1492”? Couldn’t be bothered.
I got this but my parents did know I had ADHD. My mom didn’t want to put me on mods though, so I mostly just got weird stuff done to manage it. Like making me sit in the bathroom with no distractions, not allowed to leave until homework was done, among other things.
ADHD still affects me in the workplace, but I’m fortunately in a position where it’s not too detrimental and my bosses both like me and understand my challenges.
I feel this comment.
One problem I had though was that some of my teachers were like, “I think he should be tested for ADHD and/or autism,” and my parents going on a tirade about it not being real or some shit.
Of course I only found that out after I got diagnosed with ADHD (still haven’t got the courage to ask my doc about autism though) and told my parents therefore triggering they’re tirade aimed at me where they mentioned my teachers talking about it pretty consistently in school.
Would have loved getting that diagnosis when I was younger than 29.
My mother was actually very open about mental illness, took it very seriously. I was diagnosed bipolar from a young age because she was looking out for me.
Unfortunately, the idea of ‘ADHD’ in the minds of non-specialist observers was tied in with the idea of hyperactivity at the time, and I was anything but a hyperactive kid.
Poorly, on both. I took longer than normal to complete my degree’s credits, and spiraling depression and anxiety closed off most of the ‘usual’ avenues of employment. I eventually managed to scrape out a living in a field which didn’t require my degree. C’est la vie.
And now these horribly abused children are adults with their own children.
Thankfully a lot of them are learning to break the cycle of parental mental abuse
You don’t have to die alone!
You can get sterilized then start (or join) an anarcho-communist polyamorous commune. If you find the right mix of traumas, it can function really well! Or end in fire. But it will be exciting, and you won’t be alone!
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. "
"Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. "
I did not get out early, but my eventual spouse and I were on the same page: the crazy stops with me.
My sister had different plans and now has two neurodivergent kids. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
I’m pretty sure that one of my parents and their siblings are all ND. I don’t think it’s terrible, but the unawareness certainly is.
I was told that I was under the influence of demons! Which, to a child raised in a deeply religious household, will absolutely destroy any sense self-worth you have. Especially when the goal is to make you act like the complete opposite of who / what you simply are at your core.
Too bad for my parents, because now I both don’t like people and have a burning hatred for religious establishments!
With certain very rare exceptions to specific individuals…
Fuck the Boomers.
And their parents.
Signed “You’ll never be able to function in normal civilized society with that attitude!”
Dick parfaits for the lot of em.
I loved how mental healthcare was treated like satanism in the '90s. Especially by the religious.
