A big part of growing up was discovering how ADHD affects me and makes me different from everyone else. A big part of my adult life has been wishing I was neurotypical.
I don’t say that lightly, because wishing to be neurotypical is wishing to not be me. I am ADHD as much as ADHD is me, and yet lately I’ve been haunted by that wish anyway. I come on here a lot to talk about my experiences with ADHD, about overcoming things a neurotypical person would never have to face.
But there’s one thing I haven’t overcome yet: accepting who I am. For most of my life, I’ve hardly told anyone I have ADHD. Part of me thought that if people didn’t know, then maybe I didn’t really have it either, and I could feel normal that way.
But telling people, or not telling them, was never going to change who I am.
The truth is, every time I have been open about it, my life has gone better for it. Especially in my romantic relationships. I remember an ex who couldn’t understand why I was the way I was, and that was on me. I never gave them the context. So when I was frustrated, they read it as laziness. When I was overwhelmed, they read it as distance. When it finally came to light, things got a little easier between us. And that’s the part I keep coming back to: as reluctant as I’ve been to accept who I am, acceptance is what actually helped.
