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