Shut Up. My brain Won’t Listen. | My Journey with Undiagnosed ADHD
An ode to my abnormal brain
My mom recently showed me videos of when I was a kid, probably younger than five or six. I was a happy kid, because I didn’t have a care in the world. Seeing how I behaved in those videos, I was astonished no one pointed out that, hey, those are some classic signs of ADHD. Why is she just rolling on the floor of some random building? Stop touching everything. Why won’t you go to sleep already? What do you mean you want to play? You’ve been playing all day! You’re not tired? I’ve never seen you stay still.
As I got older, these behaviors went away and were replaced by daydreams, distractions, and dissatisfactions.
I jumped from book to book, hobbies to hobbies. School got less interesting, because I couldn’t care less about the derivative of infinity, or whatever. No one thought I had a problem, because I always did well in school, and my grades would reflect that. What they didn’t know was that behind the scenes, I’d never pay attention to a single lecture. I’d be on my laptop, gushing over my most recent fictional crush and memorizing the succession lines in the War of the Roses. By the following week, I had already moved on to whatever my new obsession was at the time.
