Assuming it was this hard for everyone else and I was just really, really, inexplicably bad at this…so I’ll work harder to overcome my personal shortcomings!
Undiagnosed thought: “I’m always forgetting my important things, this is really difficult”
Society: “everyone forgets things”
Undiagnosed thought: that fluorescent light is so incredibly loud and the way it flickers is creating this strange rainbow effect on my computer and it hurts my eyes and I’m really struggling here.
Society: working in an office sucks, the lights, the distractions, it’s normal to have unfocused moments.
You repeat enough of these thoughts - I feel like I’m struggling with my emotional regulation, could it be ADHD? Well as a teen it was hormones, as a uni student it was “freshman anxiety”, then I was getting divorced so my emotional state was blamed on that, then I was always moving house so it made sense that my mood was always a hair trigger.
There were always just enough environmental factors to mask the underlying condition.
And it works! Until you burnout in your 30s because no one else is actually giving 150% all the time.
I did the same with a physical illness! I was born with a hip deformity so my whole life any pain or issues around my hips was just totally brushed off until I got aggressively assertive in my 20s because with the physical symptoms I was able to feel more confident in my perception of my reality and advocate to my doctor (where as with mental health, it’s harder, sure I think I feel this symptom but it’s in my head it’s fleeting what if I’m remembering experiencing my own thoughts wrong? Years of describing how I feel to therapists, being told it’s nothing out of the ordinary, so I’ve convinced myself it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing)
Turns out I had nerve damage in my spine the whole time, but we all just assumed I was being overly dramatic and sensitive about the known hip issue.
Same with my ADHD. We all (myself included) thought it was just really bad anxiety in addition to me being bad at sticking to the homework for therapy so it made sense I wasn’t getting better.
But we know more about how it presents, so if I was a kid going through the process again I’d be less likely to be misdiagnosed in the first place.
You know when enough of society agrees on the whole light things, or forgetting things, or about noises…
Maybe, just maybe… Being a hyper focused machine used for mass productivity in a country designed around stripping as much value from your existence as possible…
That it maybe is a common position and the drugs to “equal” yourself to others is just a lie to make you think that is the normal way for people to live?
Most people aren’t giving 150% because they don’t think about anything they do and just hope for the best and rely on connections and luck to get through.
Pretty sure we as a society should be trying to accommodate other people and help them as they need to be needed instead of demanding conformity to a position we are just pretending is the normal. But hey when the drugs are this good…
Assuming it was this hard for everyone else and I was just really, really, inexplicably bad at this…so I’ll work harder to overcome my personal shortcomings!
Undiagnosed thought: “I’m always forgetting my important things, this is really difficult”
Society: “everyone forgets things”
Undiagnosed thought: that fluorescent light is so incredibly loud and the way it flickers is creating this strange rainbow effect on my computer and it hurts my eyes and I’m really struggling here.
Society: working in an office sucks, the lights, the distractions, it’s normal to have unfocused moments.
You repeat enough of these thoughts - I feel like I’m struggling with my emotional regulation, could it be ADHD? Well as a teen it was hormones, as a uni student it was “freshman anxiety”, then I was getting divorced so my emotional state was blamed on that, then I was always moving house so it made sense that my mood was always a hair trigger.
There were always just enough environmental factors to mask the underlying condition.
And it works! Until you burnout in your 30s because no one else is actually giving 150% all the time.
I did the same with a physical illness! I was born with a hip deformity so my whole life any pain or issues around my hips was just totally brushed off until I got aggressively assertive in my 20s because with the physical symptoms I was able to feel more confident in my perception of my reality and advocate to my doctor (where as with mental health, it’s harder, sure I think I feel this symptom but it’s in my head it’s fleeting what if I’m remembering experiencing my own thoughts wrong? Years of describing how I feel to therapists, being told it’s nothing out of the ordinary, so I’ve convinced myself it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing)
Turns out I had nerve damage in my spine the whole time, but we all just assumed I was being overly dramatic and sensitive about the known hip issue.
Same with my ADHD. We all (myself included) thought it was just really bad anxiety in addition to me being bad at sticking to the homework for therapy so it made sense I wasn’t getting better.
But we know more about how it presents, so if I was a kid going through the process again I’d be less likely to be misdiagnosed in the first place.
You know when enough of society agrees on the whole light things, or forgetting things, or about noises…
Maybe, just maybe… Being a hyper focused machine used for mass productivity in a country designed around stripping as much value from your existence as possible…
That it maybe is a common position and the drugs to “equal” yourself to others is just a lie to make you think that is the normal way for people to live?
Most people aren’t giving 150% because they don’t think about anything they do and just hope for the best and rely on connections and luck to get through.
Pretty sure we as a society should be trying to accommodate other people and help them as they need to be needed instead of demanding conformity to a position we are just pretending is the normal. But hey when the drugs are this good…