I'm going to be heavy and share my own story of dealing with ADHD. It isn't like the ones posted so far, and I don't have a short way to tell it. Probably because so much of it is still raw for me to face, makes it hard to abbreviate it and feel honest.
My story is one I've had to learn to tell from more perspectives than my own, because my perspective was warped through the lenses of a kid who feared nothing and would do anything. I identified with all the books about kids going on adventures, and I was determined to have my own. I did, and they're the sort people don't believe me about until they hear it verified by second and third parties who lived through them with me. I'm a bit more mellow these days, but the backdrop of how and why that all happened was ADHD.
There is a quote: 'Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you'. Well, that is my mother in a nutshell. She was a rape survivor that nobody believed before she met my father, she was targeted by local police after she pissed one off (a sheriff's office who even today have a reputation for corruption and abuse of power), she'd had wages stolen by men who claimed they did the work she had done and was actively dismissed when she contested it and/or fired. The list goes from there. She came from a very poor family, quit college to raise me at 19, and dealt with the stigma that mental health wasn't even a thing to consider having evaluated. Doctors were for richer families and you got by how you got by, no complaining. Only, she did have mental health issues, and so did my Grandfather, and lucky me - I had them too.
Her bad experiences shaded my entire upbringing. When it finally drove a wedge between my parents, I was five. The divorce meant I had someone talking in my ear about how drugs were dangerous and can't be trusted without a voice to mediate that. Plus, since I grew up below the poverty line, I'd witnessed a lot of drug addicts up close and how much they ruined their lives. Still, the schools tried, but they sort of sabotaged it even if my mother hadn't. They were doing a full blast DARE campaign the same year I got my ADHD diagnosis. There was no way medication was going to work with me, because I would rather fake taking it than 'ruin my life' with drugs. So my parents bought drugs for me they couldn't afford while I faked taking them and spit them down the sink.
My ADHD behavior was off the charts, and it only took one bad teacher to give me an excuse. I still remember what she said: 'Stay there or I'll break your legs.' I looked her over, told her she'd have to catch me first, and ran off. They had cops looking for me all day, I showed up six hours later at my home several miles away. That was Kindergarten, and I'd only start to run away more and more after that. School didn't interest me, and as far as I was concerned? I was getting away with having my adventures. But for my mother, it wasn't so easy. Finding work was hard, keeping work while dealing with my going missing was harder. The stress destroyed her. She couldn't afford to keep me in school, but she couldn't afford me not being in school either. That meant she couldn't work if she wanted to be sure I was safe, and who would provide for us if she didn't?
I remember telling her I was hungry after we were given lunch one day, and her collapsing on the floor in a sobbing mess. She hadn't eaten anything that day, and she'd given us the last food in the house. That is the sort of memory that etches into a child, the sort of thing you feel guilty about even though you don't know what you'd done wrong. I started to go out and hang out with other people. Bum food, raid the fridge at friend's houses and at distant relative's houses. To try not to be a burden, and that made me only more of an outlier. Took me further from having anything resembling a normal upbringing. This was happening while I was still only six, and this is the compact version of everything that went on.
Every year after that, she'd struggle to find work and a way to get someone to help care for me and my siblings. Every summer the family members who'd helped her would pull out or the boyfriend would leave, and she'd lose her job because she had to be home with us. It was like that for years, the cycle of poor to dirt poor. Nobody wanted to deal with me, my ADHD made me uncontrollable, and my circumstances only cemented the perception that I was the only one who knew what was the best thing for me to do.
Then there was school. I tested well, I wasn't a slow learner or anything, but I was so disruptive that nobody else in my classes would learn. I'd routinely go throught he workbook and ignore the teacher entirely, then when it was done get up and harass the class because I was bored. I got suspended many times, then finally expelled. Then I went to a new school and it happened again. Eventually they put me in a school that was deep in the bad part of town where I was one of two white kids in the entire place, they had barbed wire on the fences, and I'd get assaulted by the older kids in if I used the restroom. I was hurt so badly that I blacked out, and that was the day my mother gave up on it and let me teach myself. For context, I was still only eight. From there until I was maybe fourteen, I just was told what to learn and left to my own devices. Sometimes I'd learn a thing, and sometimes I wouldn't, but we'd always crunch the week before the state tests and I'd be fine.
But it wasn't safe for me to do what I did. I was a kid actively putting myself in dangerous situations in New Orleans, the pasty boy who'd go for bike rides through the projects. Most people were really chill, but cover enough ground and you'll find someone who isn't. I had run-ins with gangs, I got attacked a few times, and it was the day I showed up three hours after dark breathing fast and deathly pale she decided we'd move. I'd spent half the day being chased. For sport. She cashed in money she didn't have, bought a house with a mortgage she couldn't afford, and I went from being able to visit the French Quarter to walking two miles and being rewarded with a different color cow. I didn't think about my diagnosis with ADHD at all by this point. It was a thing in the past, and I'd clearly made the right choice avoiding drugs. It made me stronger, or so I told myself.
After we moved, I did a brief stint in junior high that went terribly as I learned just how different country culture was from New Orleans culture, and just how incredibly racist the people in that region were against blacks in other parts of Louisiana. Ever been called a N-lover for telling someone not to say a racist joke? Well, let me tell you how MY first day in the country went. There were fist-fights, the suspensions started up again for an entirely different reason. I broke my hand in one of them with a kid named Jenkins. I'd been learning jazz piano until that happened, and I was getting pretty good. Had to give up on it. My hand still doesn't work quite right. The Internet was pretty much my only escape after that. I couldn't walk somewhere to do something, I couldn't socialize with the local kids because they were either bigots or related to bigots (which I hated them for). So the internet was where I would retreat and stay. We'd set up a computer room in the barn-like guest house, and it became my new home. At least my mother could hold a job down now.
In a sort of quirk of fate, spending that time online nearly killed me, and did kill my high energy. Not because it was the internet or because I just 'slowed down' as I got older. Because a pesticide company had used our property as a dumping ground for a chemical called Dursban before we bought the place.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dursban-banned/
This was the year Dursban was announced to be getting phased out, and the pesticide company wanted to get rid of it before they'd have to dispose of it at high cost. We were the lucky lottery winners that got several thousand times the recommended quantity pumped into the pilings. Not only did it kill bugs, it made everyone in my family horribly sick. Myself and my brother (The two gamers who spent time near the exposed pilings) got the sickest, and we've permanent health issues because of it. It was a whole thing, but the sum of it is: Because I wasn't HYPER anymore, we decided I didn't have ADHD anymore. I'd 'beat it' through willpower, nevermind the rest of what was going on. There was a lawsuit where my mother tried to get justice. They stonewalled us. We lost money we didn't have trying to get that justice, and failed. My mother was, again, justified in her outlook on life and became more drastic in her views about chemicals. I got a new diagnosis as a survivor of chemical poisoning, a chronic one I'll have until the day I die.
Fast forward. I got my GED, went to a cheap local college, and failed my first semester. Channeling the rules lawyer in me, I found a way to contest my grades, got ADA accomodations because of my condition, and went on to have a successful college career where attendance didn't matter. I changed majors a half dozen times (haha college loans), survived a hurricane, fell in love, got married, went to a better college for more degrees, got a job, bought a house (haha more debt), and finally had some kids of my own. All this time I was still convinced ADHD was a thing of my past that would never come back to haunt me, and wasn't at all interfering with my life or my relationships. Spoilers: I was fucking wrong.
It took having a son just like me to be my wake up call. Before he was even in school there were behaviors that raised red flags, but they were rationalized away. Yet when we put him in daycare there were issues. He got into fights with other children, he wouldn't follow directions, he did whatever he wanted. We changed daycares, it happened again. We argued for intervention, and they flubbed it. Worse, we found out a teacher was so conditioned not to talk to parents about the truth of these things that she had been blatantly lying to cover up his misbehavior. It just cemented that the bad behavior was okay for him, and each year things got worse. Each year we tried interventions, only to have IEPs that listed symptoms he didn't have and care that didn't work.
Until this year. When I finally got a diagnosis for what he is really going through because my wife and I poured our souls into helping him and took years off our life in stress. After my wife had been pushed to the point of asking if she should give up on a career to care for him, the way my mother had for me. He finally got medication, the RIGHT medication, and now?
He is doing amazing. He is a star student, he does well in class, he is making new friends, he does well at home. Getting him the help me needed and seeing the difference in the trajectory of his life from my own made me realize that all of his troubles were my troubles. Only our circumstances were different. That he is like me, and I didn't get better. I just got too sick and used to hiding it for people to recognize what it was. Even me, especially me.
I'm not angry with my parents for my experiences. They've made me who I am, and I still believe those struggles did help to make me a better person. Better isn't the same as healthy, and now that I've been rediagnosed I'm going to see what ADHD treatment means for my life. I have to go through three months of state-mandated counseling before they'll start me on meds, so... Perhaps this time next year I'll be unrecognizable from the person typing this. I don't know, but I feel a lot of empathy for everyone else's struggles. I had parents who loved and supported me, even though they didn't know how and ended up making things harder in the process. So yeah, there is my ADHD origin story.
