Insert horrified looks when I tell me friends some “funny stories” from my childhood. :D
“Pug, you’re an incredibly smart kid, but you’re lazy.”
Me, unable to remember homework, but acing every test and going above-and-beyond on any project with freeform requirements, leading to solid Bs and Cs despite half my assignments being a flat 0 for not being turned in: “Yeah.”
… kind of wish someone looked a little deeper into the issue at the time.
Growing up neurodivergent in the 80s and not being disruptive enough to demand said deeper look may lead to:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Internalization of negative self-worth
- Avoidance of formal higher education
- Early burnout
- Lifelong vague dissatisfaction
- Disillusionment with the world and its systems
- Being terminally online searching frantically for the next dopamine hit
Who are you and how did you read my diary?
… uncle jerry?
Same. There’s more of us?
Help lol
It ain’t much but it’s honest work.
Oh hey thanks! I was looking for that!
I only have about half of those, so…yay?
Ha. Rookie! /j
My mom used to talk in code a lot for no fucking reason. She’d throw out the weirdest segues and irrelevant stories. When I (barely) graduated from a gifted kids high school, she jumped from telling me she was proud of me, to telling me that when my sister was little, all her teachers told her that she should be “tested” - heavily implying it was for learning disabilities - and added that “none of [her] babies are retarded.”
2 things - that sister had dyscalculia and never got beyond an associates degree because she kept failing math. And it took until my mom died to figure out she was also talking about me - and every one of my siblings.When going through my mom’s things, I found out that she ignored the advice of several teachers and school counselors to get me tested for ADHD. Because she didn’t want a ‘damaged’ kid.
Now that’s a tough pill to swallow. How’d you cope with that?
It prompted me to begin the process of being evaluated.
Insofar as the emotional aspects?
I had made a choice not to speak with her many years before. She was a badly broken person who refused to change in any way. Her response to having her failings pointed out was defensiveness and accusations against the accuser.
Sometimes you doubt yourself when it comes to cutting off a parent. Was it really that bad? Were they really that harmful?
I don’t think it’s fair to say I ever hated her. I went from mad to sad for her, to just disappointed.
Learning these things about her was more or less met with a bitter chuckle. Rueful, I suppose. It was further validation that she put her ego over my well-being. But I can’t change what is. I can’t undo a life of forgetting, of failing at things because despite accidentally deploying almost every ADHD coping mechanism, I still needed additional help.
I do regret that I didn’t know I had ADHD much earlier in life. It would have made so many things easier. I’m probably delayed about 10-15 years professionally because of struggles in school, as well as poor social skills (which are better in recent years, mind you). My most noticeable symptom is that I have object permanence issues - awareness of ADHD probably would have prevented me from developing some negative self assumptions*, and perhaps empowered me to not harm, or at least mitigate some of that harm for people who just ceased to exist for me when life was tumultuous and my working memory was too small to encompass them.
*And the assumptions are, if not valid, then reasonable to understand - when I am not interacting with someone, they just crystallize in my head into the person they last were. I have crushes on people I haven’t seen in years because they haven’t changed in my head. Conversely, I have a friendship with another object permanence person that is fantastic. We see each other once or twice a year and it’s like we never stopped talking. But for most people I atrophy and attenuate. I fade. People forget me. They get upset because I don’t reach out. I don’t remember they exist. And so when I see someone I haven’t seen in years and I remember them and want to give them a big hug and treat them like they are exactly as close as we were the last time we saw each other, they (rightfully) treat me like a stranger, and it hurts in a way that I … am going to talk to my therapist about, because I’m off the rails. But I feel that I don’t have a social home, because there’s no place my social self lives. I am a ghost.
That’s why I picked this username, actually. Because it means I’m still here.I want to give you a virtual hug as I could had written the exact same things for me. I struggle with the same stuff and now being close to my 40s it is exhausting. I got diagnosed with ADHD before almost 5 years but as I look deeper into I tend to believe it must be more like a childhood trauma result than just genetics. Lookup C-PTSD and the overlapping symptoms are way too much for this would be just a coincidence. But every step towards a better situation is a good step.
That is a beautiful but tragic story. I’m in a similar situation, ADHD/autism - got diagnosed way too late literally after high school and after trying desperately to begin college and struggling ridiculously hard. I am basically 30 now I struggle with the same things you mentioned. “People permanence” is a problem for me too. I struggle with socializing and relationships too in so many ways I can’t possibly keep up. I often feel very lonely no matter who is there talking with me.
Fuck, man, the stigmatization of neurodivergence has done so much damage to so many people :(
It really, really has.
Can’t have ADHD if you don’t get tested! Fucking brilliant.
Same for me, but they hadn’t identified ADHD yet
I got this but my parents did know I had ADHD. My mom didn’t want to put me on mods though, so I mostly just got weird stuff done to manage it. Like making me sit in the bathroom with no distractions, not allowed to leave until homework was done, among other things.
ADHD still affects me in the workplace, but I’m fortunately in a position where it’s not too detrimental and my bosses both like me and understand my challenges.
I feel this comment.
One problem I had though was that some of my teachers were like, “I think he should be tested for ADHD and/or autism,” and my parents going on a tirade about it not being real or some shit.
Of course I only found that out after I got diagnosed with ADHD (still haven’t got the courage to ask my doc about autism though) and told my parents therefore triggering they’re tirade aimed at me where they mentioned my teachers talking about it pretty consistently in school.
Would have loved getting that diagnosis when I was younger than 29.
Same here. I didn’t get diagnosed until a couple of years ago but the signs were always there…
Now I’m just biding my time until my youngest two get the diagnosis (my husband and I both are ADHD, and our other kids have already been diagnosed).
And now these horribly abused children are adults with their own children.
Thankfully a lot of them are learning to break the cycle of parental mental abuse
You don’t have to die alone!
You can get sterilized then start (or join) an anarcho-communist polyamorous commune. If you find the right mix of traumas, it can function really well! Or end in fire. But it will be exciting, and you won’t be alone!
I agree, my anarcho-communist polycule is fun. And very queer.
Oh good, find a whole group of people to disappoint instead of one at a time.
That’s what we need, more good old sex cults.
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. "
"Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. "
I did not get out early, but my eventual spouse and I were on the same page: the crazy stops with me.
My sister had different plans and now has two neurodivergent kids. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
I’m pretty sure that one of my parents and their siblings are all ND. I don’t think it’s terrible, but the unawareness certainly is.
I loved how mental healthcare was treated like satanism in the '90s. Especially by the religious.
That’s because mental health care threatens to dismantle the carefully crafted delusions the church has worked for millennia to establish.
I started getting treated for ADHD at age 45. I confronted my mom about how she and my dad treated me when I was young, constantly berating and punishing me for “not living up to my potential”, “not caring enough about school”, “not applying myself”, and explained that my behavior was almost certainly undiagnosed ADHD.
She was like, “Yeah. I know, right?”
It seems to me that mental health issues, including, but not limited to, ADHD, are being taken more seriously.
Previously, the lazy, slacker, troublemaker kids were just beaten until they did what they were told.
Yeah, I’d say the threat of violence is a pretty good motivator to overcome the symptoms of mental conditions, and at least mask so hard that people can’t tell that you’re a complete fucking mess, right up until the day that your mental health degrades so much that you off yourself.
Thanks.
With certain very rare exceptions to specific individuals…
Fuck the Boomers.
And their parents.
Signed “You’ll never be able to function in normal civilized society with that attitude!”
Dick parfaits for the lot of em.
Bruh, Boomers and Gen Xers are some of the most ignorant people alive.
Out of sheer sarcastic curiosity why don’t you spell it out for us. What, exactly, does this brilliant theory have for its objective proof?
Exhibit A: They’re politics. All the problems we have today were voted in by them
Exhibit B: They are objectively less educated than later generations.
I could go on
Less educated, but you failed to provide the requsted actual objective proof and substituted opinion? Less educated, yet you can’t use “they’re” properly? Your actions seem to indicate you’re a secret Gen X’er by your own metrics. Many of our political problems stem from the Reagan Administration, yet Gen X, which started in 1965 (and I think that’s too early to start that bracket), would have been too young to legally vote for Reagan.
I could go on
Oh, by all means. Please do.
Less educated, yet you can’t use “they’re” properly?
Bro it’s called autocorrect. This is what mean, your generation is not tech literate either.
Lol, your response is “No, u…” because you can’t be bothered to proofread?
I’m getting a pretty solid impression that you blame others for your problems while accepting no responsibility for your part in them.
Have a nice day.
I posted my proof. And this is the lame ass deflection tactics your generation always uses. You’re trying to discredit all my arguments because of one typo. And no, I don’t proof read for internet arguments. It’s not that important to me.
But you know go ahead and tell yourself you’re right because you want to conflate a lack of education with autocorrect typos.
No, you posted statistics that show silent and boomer generations as less educated than X, and millennials marginally more educated than X. So therefore by your own statistics boomers and silent are the most ignorant generations alive. You can’t even read your own statistics. You have a conclusion that you’re sticking to no matter what, even if your own “proof” proves you wrong. You skipped past every other rebuttal I offered or you blame autocorrect, boomers, and X for everything wrong. You didn’t even know who Gen X could vote for, and I bet you didn’t even check to see who the largest voting blocks were for following presidents. You just keep making shit up to suit who you want to blame for whatever issues you have.
Dude, just stop. Pretty shitty attitude when every X’er I know understands millennial problems, along with following gens, and really fucking hopes you can get your ass out there and vote so ALL of us can fix shit and live in a better place. E: feel free to check my comment history if you want to know where I stand.
Read Neurotribes by Steve Silberman
One asshole at Hopkins, leo kanner, sat on neuridiversity info all through most boomer childhoods.
Their parents got blamed for it by their own depression-era parents.
There was only one way to be, only certain foods, everything else was either a sin or a personal failure. Those kids could not answer questions honestly, just repeat back the same approved cultural pablum that maga wants to go back to.
Simple has several meanings.
The only light was Dr. Spock, but too subtle for many readers, he had to couch things carefully in his time and the culture was deafening.
Only after Lorna Wing released her work in the 70s did it start to normalise for some Gen Xers.
*Mr. Spock 🖖
lol i know, no reason to downvote 😅
I don’t have downvoting.
@db0 I am genuinely curious. Your post has no any tag, but why does it is on my ‘hashtags’ tab?
So far I can see three of your posts on the tab.
I am using Tusky.
Lemmy is adding the tags in the activitypub metadata which mastodon then correctly reads. The tags don’t need to be in the text of the post for mastodon to parse them (neither do the reply usernames for that purpose). It’s just that in your normal mastodon interface, it only parses things from your text, so you’re used to seeing it there.
EDIT: In this specific case, you’re seeing it in the #adhd tag, because it’s tagged like this for being posted in the !adhd@lemmy.dbzer0.com comm.
