I was browsing through youtube maybe 10 minutes ago and I was watching a video on ADD. I “suffer” from ADD if you want to say I suffer that is. Long story short, I could sympathise with everything in the video.
The point is though, I was going through the comments, through all the “lol it’s just an excuse”, “ADD Kids are just lazy” bull crap and I came across this comment.
“im 9 and i have seveir ADHD i dont like it cuz im just diffrent from the other girls at my school i havent got a good handwriting level but in storys i do cuz my dad says that when ur children with ADHD ur very imagnetive so all those people who think we are weirdos we might be to u but we are not”
I cried reading that.
I cried, because that little kid inside me, latched onto that comment and held on tight. I cried because that little child inside me found something it could relate to like someone else understood what that kid felt. All through my school days back when I was younger, I’d get picked on, laughed at, excluded and generally made to feel like a freak. All because I was different.
It can be really hard on a young kid, it can really break them apart. The way I learned to deal with it was to just not care what others thought, to make the choice to separate myself from society in my mind. To view the order of things as the human race and then myself. Two separate entities.
I’m totally oblivious to social cues when interacting with people, I speak too quickly, I talk about anything that comes into my head and there’s always a million things in there at once, I talk before I think, I do things sometimes like make random noises or fidget just because it entered my head, I can’t concentrate, I can’t remember things, Manners are hard to understand…let alone follow, my emotions are strong and uncontrollable, I interrupt people without meaning to, sometimes I’ll even miss things going on in the world around me.
The thing is, ADD and ADHD doesn’t make us bad people to be around, sure it might make it challenging, but if you can see past that we’re awesome people. We’re loyal, loving, caring, bubbly, spontaneous, random, intelligent, creative and adventurous. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade my ADD for the world. I love how my mind works.
It’s amazing to one’s self. It’s like I have this infinitely large world inside my head inside which I can do anything. It’s like a holo-deck on star trek is the best way I can explain it. A giant black cube as real to me as the ground we walk on, which I can just turn into anywhere in space and time and run a scenario of events, letting the ADD compute and extrapolate on what happens inside there. The possibilities of this are endless. From fast forwarding through a series of events to see what’s going to happen to taking something apart with your mind to see how it works. Even building fantastic worlds and machines all within my own mind, able to roam them, touch them, smell them, see them, hear them and sense them as if they were real. I would never give that up, ever.
Years of the abuse from others though will destroy anyone’s confidence though so we’re easy to hurt, quick to shy away, nervous at first with someone new, we won’t stand up for ourselves (But we’ll sure as hell stand up for others, sometimes even total strangers)
I’ve lost friends thanks to ADD before and I think I lost someone’s love because of it too.
I guess whether you’re 9 or 21, with ADD, we still face our own challenges.
For the 9 year old, it’s fighting to keep up with what comes so easy to everyone else in your class, it’s being called lazy and made to feel stupid by your teachers, it’s that fear in your heart every day you go to school just knowing you’re going to do something to get in trouble and you’re going to be yelled at and nothing will stop it. Over time, you feel like you’re not good enough, self-esteem goes down the toilet and you just remove yourself from everything and everyone.
For the 18-21 year old, it’s being that weirdo that’s mocked behind your back, it’s that daily fight to try keep words like “Freak” and “Weirdo” from getting to you, it’s having to see your girlfriend or boyfriend have to defend why they chose to go out with you on a daily basis, it’s being on constant alert trying not to do something to wear them down, it’s the struggle against a system in society built for those that can do everything your brain can’t.
When I read that comment from that little innocent girl, I cried for two reasons. One it resonated with my own daily struggle, but secondly and mainly, it was because you could see in her words how much she has to defend herself from others as well as the voice inside her own head and how I remember being exactly the same all too well.
And seeing a little girl have to go through that breaks my heart.
