My Journey with ADHD
People with atypical neurology often find themselves not knowing where they fit in society. From an early age, people with ADHD find themselves at odds with an educational system that forces them to sit down and focus for hours on end. Once a child gets home from school, they are expected to sit down and focus even longer on their homework. These tasks feel directly counter-intuitive to the way their mind works. For a child with ADHD, it can feel as though the institutions they must participate in are specifically designed to work against them; a round peg being forced into a square hole.
The discomfort of living with ADHD only grows as one gets older. The effort required of a child increases, and the patience of teachers and parents decreases. The criticism, confusion, and frustration of others become a heavy burden. Sometimes the child pushes back, lashing out at the world. Sometimes the child internalizes the criticism, confusion, and frustration of their teachers and parents, creating a self-loathing belief that there is something wrong with them. Anxiety, depression, and unhealthy coping mechanisms follow shortly behind.
This is what happened to me. As a child, frustrated adults snapped at me countless times, saying things like “Tyler, focus!” or “Why can’t you just pay attention?” Their words implied that prolonged focus and attention are simple and easy tasks. By not doing them, I was either lazy, stupid, insubordinate, or all of the above.
The sad truth is that society would often rather force a unique individual to change rather than accommodate them. This is just as true about the education system as it is about the professional world. Society is generally not structured to accommodate many outliers.
ADHD has colored all of my experiences. It affects the way I think. It affects the way I learn. It affects the way I communicate. I’ve been fired from several jobs, and in every case I could point to ADHD as a primary factor of my job performance. Now I’m a 33 year old man with no job and a mountain of student debt. What should I do?
The bright side is that while society at large doesn’t accommodate many outliers, the pendulum also swings the opposite way. It is not the cookie-cutter conformist who innovates, pushes boundaries, and inspires change. It is the outlier, the atypical thinker, and the rebel who do these things.
Career Happiness Formula
After doing a mountain of research, and learning from my mistakes, this is a list of tips I've put together to help myself keep track of the kind of person I want to be. If you are someone with ADHD, maybe it can help you too.
- Follow your passions
- Harness your strengths & create workarounds to your weaknesses
- Job qualities that help: Variety, Creativity and Problem Solving, A Sense of Purpose, Continual Learning, and Movement and Independence
- Job qualities that DO NOT help: Office Politics, Paperwork, Noisy Coworkers
- Do what you love!
Conclusion
I genuinely love the way my mind works. I love how creative I am. I love that my mind will snatch ideas out of thin air like fish from a stream. I love that I can spend hours brainstorming and exploring things that excite me. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t change the way my mind works even if I could. If I had the power to change anything, it would be the world around me. I’d change my environment to better suit me—not the other way around. But it took a very long time to arrive at a place of love and compassion for myself.
I see ADHD as both my superpower and my kryptonite. It might have caused struggles in my life, but I strongly believe it has the potential to be my greatest asset. It’s time I create the world that fits my mind and my ideal, not someone else’s.
About the Creator
Tyler C Clark
I'm a poet who discovered a love for fiction. This seems like a good place to stretch my legs.
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The secret journey to regaining emotional stability
Do you feel that the anxious and avoidant types both seem to be strong and independent, but in fact they are sensitive and fragile. They often fall into emotions because of small things and start to be anxious and avoidant? If anxious and avoidant types want to change these, what they actually need is to compensate for their missing parts and heal their injured parts. In this issue, we will teach the avoidant and anxious types how to cultivate themselves again, making their emotions more stable, more rational in relationships, and at the same time gaining the ability to actively output emotional value. If anxious and avoidant types want to overcome the sensitive and fragile parts of themselves and obtain stable emotions, they need not only cognitive adjustments, but also need to heal the traumatized parts of themselves and compensate for the regretful parts of themselves. For example, the regret of the avoidant type is that they have not been paid serious attention to and have never truly rebelled. Therefore, the avoidant type will not fight for their own needs in many situations, resulting in uncomfortable situations and relationships, and they are always running away and wandering. The trauma of the anxious type is that they are trapped in unstable relationships and have been hurt by the instability in intimate relationships. The slightest fluctuation will make the anxious type feel nervous and anxious. Therefore, anxious and avoidant types are inherently fragile, sensitive, and unstable. In summary, these reasons are that something is missing during the growth stage, or they have suffered some trauma, so if you want to solve these problems, this is the time. Compensate when you need to compensate, heal when you need to heal, exercise when you need to exercise, just treat yourself as a child and raise yourself again. If the avoidant and anxious types re-train themselves, what kind of growth can they gain? First of all, emotions will become more and more stable. For example, you can be aware of your emotions at the first time, avoid emotions from affecting your thoughts and judgments, and learn to regulate your emotions. Secondly, you can truly understand yourself and know your real needs and fears. In the process of re-nurturing yourself, you can clearly understand your needs and fears, that is, you can know why you are attracted to a certain person, why you behave like this, and then you can better understand what you need.
By angelababy2 days ago in Psyche
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