Very relatable, although definitely not exclusive to girls. 😉
Unfortunately highschool managed to very quickly stamp out my interest in reading by requiring us to read vast amounts of Boomer material and having to come up with a book report for every piece of that slop we had to forcefully consume. I’ve never recovered from that. 😞
Try to restart reading things you liked right before high school and hopefully redevelopment your interest. It’s definitely worth it. Reading makes my life at least somewhat tolerable.
Seeing posts like this makes me wonder what I would’ve been diagnosed with when I was younger. And how different my life would have been, if I had access to the right medication. I am pretty certain I had ADD and am probably somewhere on the spectrum. Symptoms lessened with age, ADD in particular, in my early 30s. I still have some face blindness where I can only remember faces in a certain context and won’t recognize people outside of it. I once didn’t recognize my own grandfather when I met him on the subway. Ah, well.
I would have been Asperger’s Syndrome, but there was absolutely nothing to be done about it at the time, so a diagnosis (as my psychologist actually said) was all downside. Eventually coping mechanisms developed, some through hyperfocus, e.g. learning how to identify emotions in others with body posture and language, microexpressions, voice analysis etc., was a deep rabbit hole, but it’s served me well. If I turn it fully on I seem creepily intense in my focus, so I mostly don’t, but it’s there if I need it and just mildly on brings me up to parity with normies. I’ve done similar things with exercise, diet, meditation, and more.
Solving (my) problems, one hyperfocus at a time ;)
To life being full.
adhd doesn’t just go away or get better when you get older, you just learn coping strategies that mask the symptoms better. i know from personal experience. i still struggle to do stuff and medication helps a lot. might be worth a shot.
For some people it does change. After all, our bodies are not static. The brain in particular has five major eras[1], with big turning points at around ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. For me, the one at 32 changed me a lot and let me finally understand that my life wasn’t typical.
But it is of course true that you learn to cope better and once you’re done with school/uni, a lot of the situations that ADD made really bad for me simply don’t occur anymore. Any kind of test situation was awful.
Hey me too, sometimes would read until the sun came up. Then I would go to school without having slept at all and my teachers would want to put me in the, and I quote; “special class”.
At the same time my parents knew I was autistic but refused to get a diagnoses because of the stigma and how that would reflect on them.
“You aren’t autistic, you act just like them and they aren’t autistic.” - Your parents, likely.
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It really is, takes a toll though.
It’s fun while it lasts, but it would be more enjoyable if it wasn’t consuming my entire existence while it’s happening to the detriment of literally even bodily functions. Or if it didn’t frequently result in me hitting the wall in a violent fashion after.
I feel that so deeply… You got this ! :)
Kinda, but not really. I was raised by UU folks. I was exposed to cool weird stuff and it was okay.
Real
