I Feel Sooo ADD Today!

“God! I feel so ADD today! I can’t seem to do anything today!” I hear things like this all the time coming from people who do not have ADD or ADHD. In short, do not call your inability to focus for one day, ADD. It is not a thing that happens one day then “poof” disappears the next. ADD/ADHD is a serious learning disability and when people make light of it creates a stigma that ADD/ADHD is not a big deal.

I remember being a little kid and being told, “Sit down and do your homework!” by my parents. I would sit there for hours. A homework assignment that should take thirty minutes took me about four hours. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do my homework. It was that everything distracted me. Sitting at the table, looking out of our huge kitchen windows, I would daydream until the cows came home. I would start reading the question, “Bob has four apples and Cindy has five. If Bob gives...” By now, my mind would have wandered over to a different world where Bob was a dragon and Cindy a princess in distress. Stories would swarm my mind and my work would never get done.

As I got older, it only got more difficult. Homework got harder and tests got more difficult. My unchecked ADD was running wild and I could not sit down long enough to do my homework. There was always something better or more fun to do. I could be drawing or riding a bike but I must write an essay on the history of nothing. Procrastination became the only way to do things. I would wait to do my homework as late as possible, often right before the class started.

I felt like a failure. I saw people study hard and do their homework. These people seemed super human to me. How? How did they have so much dedication? People I was smarter than were doing better in school than me simply because they could turn in things on time and manage their time well.

Growing up your entire childhood thinking you aren’t as good as anybody else is a very frustrating feeling. I never felt smart or worthy. My mood began to fall as my hopelessness for school skyrocketed. My life seemed so bleak. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up because I never thought I could be anything. My ADD brought on my depression, my feeling of inadequacy.

I was able to get into college but I felt like if only I had worked harder I could have gone somewhere better. I tried to do better but college was just as hard. My mind was like scrambled eggs and this feeling caused me to hate myself — I mean, really hate myself. I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for trying to kill myself and self-harm. I am not saying everyone with ADD ends up this depressed or frustrated, but my experience is an example of how far it can go.

My family always pushed education onto me and I felt like a failure for not being able to do it properly.

This is why I get upset when people trivialize ADD/ADHD (and other disorders and illnesses). Those people have never felt the struggle of being the way I am. None of them have walked in my shoes or even cared to think of how it actually feels to be ADD. While I sit here sulking in what I feel is a lifetime of inadequacy, they can chalk up one bad day to what they think ADD is.