As a kid there was always an internal struggle to operate in a way that others saw as socially acceptable. To be on the same page as everyone else who seemed to have memorized a rule book I never got to read. When I was younger it felt like I was living in someone else’s world, one I couldn’t understand no matter how much they explained it to me. It felt like I was on a different wave length then the rest of the world, like everyone was tuned in to FM radio and I was stuck on AM. We were all on the same channel but I was hearing different music.
Now that I’m older nothing has changed about the way I see the world but what has changed is the reason why. ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. When I first found out I had it I cried, the word disorder scared me. In my mind if I had a “disorder” and people found out life would be harder, they would look at me different as maybe less or an easy target. As a child I didn’t understand that the way people saw me was already a result of my ADHD and the way it affected every aspect of my life. they called me a crybaby because I felt emotions too strongly and was sensitive to rejection, a key characteristic of rejection sensitive dysphoria a symptom of adhd. I was loud and disruptive because I have trouble with volume regulation. I was lazy because my brain would physically not let me do certain tasks until I did 100 other things first or a deadline was coming up. And I “made everything about me” because relating things to myself was the only way I could understand what was going on in the world around me. But I didn’t know this until I was older.
When I was younger I was told my ADHD was the reason I could not focus and nothing more. I didn’t know it was the reason I could only understand things in school if I related them to TV shows because that’s what I was hyper fixated on, or the reason I would draw in the margins of my papers as a form of fidgeting to help me pay attention. I was told it was just the focusing and I think that’s because that’s what the people telling me this believed because I often got in trouble for these things I couldn’t control.
People tried so hard to retune my brain to hear the music they heard. To get me on to FM with them and for a while I tried to help them do that. Every time I tried connecting dots in a way I understood I was told “Not everything is about TV try to use real life” even though thinking in references made sense, Every time I got yelled at for drawing on my papers even though I knew if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to focus. But no one believed me and so I started to believe it was my fault . So i so desperately wanted to see the world like they did, to escape the isolation that was a world no one else even tried to understand. No one wanted to try to go to AM so why should I want to stay on it. No one wanted to try and understand me so why I should continue to try to get them too.
I hated who I was compared to everyone around me, but I didn’t completely hate the way I saw the world. I was always able to look at things with very little judgement because I didn’t understand why I should judge them. When I was happy the feeling was pure euphoria, and that euphoria was easy to get. I was always able to see beauty in things others couldn’t because I didn’t understand why the things were labeled ugly. The way my brain see’s things and the way I exist is truly a gift in my opinion now but a gift that others will never get to understand. When I got older, I started to learn more. Learned that ADHD was a form of neurodivergence, learned that it was more than just focusing issues, learned that all the things about myself that other people deemed socially unacceptable were not my fault and a lot of
Unruly Bodies 
Thank you for sharing this, it can be hard getting a mental health diagnosis as a kid, it can be frightening and even frustrating because neurodivergence is so stigmatized that suddenly being seen as it changes everything. I really adore the metaphor you used, that neurodivergence is your brain operating in a different wavelength than everyone else is. It not only presents it as “normal” (not a broken radio, but simply in a different wavelength) but also that it’s not an ailment. I’ve seen other mental health diagnosed individuals trying to take the power their diagnosis can take away from them, and turn it around in a “Yeah, I am ___, and it’s not bad, it’s beautiful and I can be happy and successful.” I’ve seen it more with Autism, but I’ve also seen it with people with ADHD too. There are the issues these diagnosis can cause, there are symptoms that can make everyday a headache or frustrating, but there is beauty and room for understanding that you have this, but you are still you. You’re the same funny or kind or loving person you always were.
I love the metaphor of being on a different wavelength than the others around you, I can relate to it in some ways. For me its more of me vs my family/culture, and in some ways I’ve been able to identify certain aspects of my self to be different to them but I myself haven’t asked a professional if I possibly have a mental health issue due to their ideas on that subject. Learning about yourself when so many others can’t do that from their own perspective sounds like it was tough, especially when the idea that friendships and family relationships in media provoke that perspective on those close dynamics. The perspective that you had hated yourself for being different hit close for me, a lot of shame comes with being the deviant under other people’s perspectives, particularly, with family and anyone you consider to be close to.