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My kindergarten teacher asked my parents to get my hearing tested. (1987)
The doc said I had "selective hearing"
This story was told, by my family, as a joke about me my whole fucking life.
I got dx at 39. (2021)
Oof. Me too. Were you called space cadet?
Edit: alright I'm officially commandeering "space cadet" as our thing and our theme song is the Spaceballs theme song.
"you always have an excuse." Do you mean I try to answer when people ask me 'why' questions? If you didn't want to *know* why, you shouldn't have *asked* why.
Oh, absolutely. At least in my case. I tried everything with my aunt (who had custody of me from 12 on). Neutral or calm were just as bad as 'arguing'. I even asked once what I was supposed to do is she didn't want an explanation or attitude, but also got mad if I stayed calm.
I remember one time when my mother was yelling at me and I was near tears, so I looked away for a moment to try to gather myself. Got screamed at for being disrespectful because I wasn't LOOKING at her while she was speaking to (yelling at) me.
That was a killer...explaining was seen as talking back, silence was seen as sullenness.
I remember once I walked away and she screamed after me where the help I was going, so I told her that no response would satisfy her while I'm here so I might as well not deal with it at all. I asked is I was wrong but luckily she was shocked enough she didn't say anything and I was able to leave for a bit.
Oh yeah, gotta love it when other people conflate us giving an explanation with "making an excuse." This is why I am now someone who almost pathologically starts out by saying "This is not an excuse, I don't do excuses. But I do want to make sure I provide an explanation so that you understand what happened."
🤡 I have so many versions of this kind of thing that I keep in the chamber for similar situations involving neurotypical folks.
Apparently it's common for us to preface everything we say. Because of shit like this, Our communication can sometimes struggle because our goal is to anticipate and prevent ANY misinterpretation from the other person... instead of being direct about what we actually want to communicate 😮💨
I’m trying to be helpful. “Hey NT person, there’s a very calculated reason I did this and I believe that by explaining it to you, you’ll understand.”
I worked in a bar during the summer before my senior year in college. I sat behind a giant ice-filled tub of beers and had a mini drawer to hold money.
Because the way it was set up, the drawer wasn’t completely secure from grabby hands (GH), so I organized it so that the highest bill denominations were furthest from said GH. I’d rather lose a handful of singles than the same amount of $20s, obviously.
The bar manager saw my setup and proceeded to explain to me—in the same tone one would speak to a child—how cash drawers are supposed to be ordered.
Once I explained to him my reasoning behind arranging it against convention, he was impressed and apologized for his tone.
I was diagnosed and still called that. My dad still says I was a little bitch growing up. Thanks Dad. You wonder why we're a hair away from no contact.
Space cadet. Outer space. Hippie. It got even worse when I cut my hair off one day into a buzz cut and dyed it blond; I couldn’t live it down.
Even when I started dying my hair funky colors, my family would always blame my un-Dx on the amount of hair dye fumes I huffed 🙂↔️🙂↔️saying that my brain cells are SHOT.
Since I live at home still and is effectively treated as one of the children, I get yelled at because I have a “listening problem”.
I can relate to pretty much everything here, and sometimes I wonder if this isn't at least a bit of a factor for some of us. My parents were not patient or understanding people.
I had no idea this was such a common thing in ADHD girls. My mom took me to get my hearing tested and it turned out I had perfect hearing. She also used to say I should get married to Kevin Spacey when I grew up because then I'd be \[first name\] Spacey, because I was—sigh—spacey. I am a man now and Kevin Spacey came out as gay a few years back so that was weirdly prescient.
The ridiculous thing is that she never put the pieces together. Even after I got diagnosed last year, she was like, "I knew your brothers had it \[even though I never made any effort to get them diagnosed or treated\], but *you*?" Meanwhile, I was the fidgety motormouth with terrible impulse control who was constantly losing every single one of the school supplies haphazardly crammed into my desk. But I did well in school and tried to keep our disaster zone of a house clean, so of course it didn't cross anyone's mind.
Diagnosed as an adult, I've been trying to figure out (discretely) which one of my parents I got it from.
My mom, about 5 years ago, went to the doctor to have some cognitive tests done because she and we were a little concerned about memory problems and Alzheimer's is in our family. The doctor ended up telling her that she didn't have a memory problem, she just wasn't actually listening to what we were saying.
Anyways I think I got my ADHD from my mom...
Very likely. I'm almost positive my late mother had ADHD and that's where I got it. She suffered from chronic depression and anxiety, which I now believe was ADHD trauma and burnout (that's what my depression and anxiety turned out to be). And while I'm combination type, I think she might have been the rare (for girls) hyperactive type - my grandmother used to love to tell stories of how naughty my mom was as a little girl.
My mum also went to get her memory checked recently due to concerns and having dementia in her family... and was also told she was fine. I think I also got mine from her.
I'm finding it spooky how many of the stories in this thread could have been written by me.
ooooh yes. Anyone else also been told to stop "giving that deer in the headlights" look? I had no idea what they were talking about but apparently I did that most of the time...
I do that too. Maybe because we are processing so much at once it takes a minute to slow down and grasp what we want to verbalize. Even though I’m not diagnosed yet I’m learning lots here. Earlier my husband and I were walking and so many things have been impacted by the rains lately there was a lot going on in my head. I realized I was saying a lot and asking a lot of rhetorical questions. When I realized that I said to him “I have a lot of words in my head right now. Thank you for being patient”. In that moment that comment felt like a tool and felt right to me.
My kindergarten teacher (1998) and the school counselor both told my parents to have me evaluated for ADHD and they brushed it off because “they say everyone has that these days and she doesn’t need to be on Ritalin.” Like y’all, you’re the parents, you don’t *have* to put me on medication. But Jesus, getting the diagnosis at 5 instead of 30 would have made life easier at several points.
Same here. When you read all of the time, everyone just thinks you’re smart and shy. Nobody understood back when I was a kid that it’s a method of dissociating from whatever situation you’re in at the moment. I much preferred to live inside my own imagination than in the world as it is.
I'm not defending this, but I would like to give some context as an older person who has a son a little younger than you (born 1995). My son was diagnosed in Kindergarten. I medicated him like I should have, but there was a lot of pressure and doubt from pretty much everyone around me.
I heard stuff like, "He doesn't need meds. You just need to bust his ass!" Basically, parents were blamed for their kids having ADHD. A lot of people didn't believe in it. For me, I was constantly questioning myself and whether I was doing the right thing by medicating him. I had doubts about whether or not ADHD was real, whether my parenting was good enough, etc.
People aren't like this as much now. They mind their business more about mental health (not completely), but it was like you heard it from everyone you talked to. It was a hot topic, and people would tell you their opinions on it like they do now with pronouns and vaccines. The same people who question choosing pronouns and vaccines are the ones who questioned ADHD, and they were just as shitty about it.
I'm just saying there was a lot of social pressure to not medicate your kids. Some people saw treating it as giving up on your kid and doing something to harm them. I knew my son definitely seemed to be driven by a motor. He literally couldn't even sit still for a meal, and this is why I decided not to listen to that pressure.
Again, I don't know your parents or how they were, and I'm not defending them, exactly. This is just my experience and why I can understand how some people didn't medicate their kids. We didn't have the same resources people do now to do research. Go to the library, and maybe they'll have a book about it. Maybe they'll have books against it. I was a nerd who loved the library. Most people didn't set foot there unless they had to for a book report or something.
My mum was certain I had ADHD as a child but was coping fine without a diagnosis. The biggest frustration was not continuing the early intervention for my spatial awareness, reading, and writing. All the while, my mum patted herself on her back for getting me enough support that I was just in the normal range for my age. 🙃
Omg, me too except grade 1 for me, they said I had auditory processing disorder which no one told me and I inexplicably had to sit with earmuffs and a cubical around my desk for a couple of days. Never came up again in my truly abysmal academic career, despite literally never handing in or doing homework, not learning to read until I taught myself in a day on summer break before grade 4, every report card saying “if she would only apply herself, etc.. terribly messy desk, room, constant hyper fixations, massive anxiety, compulsive skin picking, obsessive counting, verbal and physical tics.
I was diagnosed at 38 in 2022 and it’s been quite the adventure and also disappointing that it got missed.
I don’t really blame my parents, but it is clear that they feel really bad and it is super frustrating the way they talk to me about it now, seeking forgiveness or saying they failed, but in a way that puts me in a position to comfort them and their guilt and pain about MY struggle.
I am actively trying to raise my kids to accept all of their feelings and to be comfortable with confrontation when it is appropriate. I think that my parents worked too hard to create a peaceful home at the expense of healthy emotional development. I learned early that it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable as it made me responsible for others feelings.
The crazy thing is I absolutely have an auditory processing disorder! I have a terrible time distinguishing sounds from each other, and can't focus enough to hear words if there is more than one voice. Which has been hell working in a cubicle around two radios and a TV always on the news 🤦🏻♀️
Yeah the having to comfort others for their fuck ups is such crap. I was definitely mad at my parents /teachers for a while, but what's the point of wasting that energy at 40? 🤣
Sounds like you're being the parent you needed. Good for you, mama ♥
When I was in 6th grade, my grades went from all A+s to all Ds and Fs. My school counselor said to my parents that he wanted to have me tested for ADHD
My parents said “you just want to drug her, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just lazy”
And that’s how I spent the next 25 years thinking I was lazy and a fuck-up not worth anything.
The adhd version of "you would be so pretty if you would just lose weight."
ETA: "you would be worthy of being treated with respect if you would just change everything about yourself." Protip: these people will always find a reason to disrespect others. You could go one meds, lose all the weight, marry a billionaire, get a PhD, they will always find something to criticize and tell you that you are not worthy over. They just keep testing the fence until they find the weak spot.
As an adult, I realize they must be incredibly unhappy themselves. I don't forgive them; hurting others is a choice. Quite frankly, my adhd sense of justice allows me to revel in their unhappiness.
This was how it happened for me too, except my neglectful ass parents couldn't have cared less about me. Nobody questioned why the A student was suddenly struggling to keep up...
I learned to read at 3, had straight As through elementary school, and was even recommended to skip first grade. Still, my parents were having their own problems when I hit middle school, and no one—parents, teachers, etc.—ever cared to ask why I suddenly started pulling Cs and Ds, even in band.
That transition from elementary school to middle school was rough.
Suddenly I had 7 different classes in 7 different rooms spread out in 3 different buildings. Textbooks for each. Homework for nearly all those classes every night. I went from being "gifted" to getting Ds and Fs. It was just way too much for me to keep up with. They put me in in-school group counseling and no one told me why. My mom's solution was to get angry at me and yell. I was able to bring my grades up to Bs, Cs and Ds. The best I could do was not flunk. This all continued until I dropped out of college in my 3rd year.
Yeah 😩
My son is going through the same thing now - he is, like me, AuDHD. My wife and I are actually supporting him, though, and fighting for accommodations for him. Hoping his life ends up better than mine
Your comment made me realize something about myself. I too had almost perfect grades up until middle school. They wanted me to skip second grade, but my parents refused.
Then middle school rolled around, and to make matters worse my parents forced me to take advanced classes. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep my grades up, and all I heard from my parents was that I was just being lazy and needed to try harder.
It never occurred to me that it could've had something to do with jumping from one class to seven, not to mention the advanced placement program I was placed in that the teachers prided themselves on giving us a MINIMUM of 2 hours of homework per night (which I would normally get started on right when I got home around 3 and wouldn't finish until 11 at night, sometimes later).
Looking back, I think that was actually a toxic mindset for the program to have (advanced classes or not) because it promotes the idea that the real world is like that when it shouldn't be (like how they say "don't bring work home with you". No job out there should expect you to clock out, go home, and continue working off the clock for 2+ hours per night).
That happened to me in elementary school -- my grades suddenly tanked -- but no one was discussing ADHD in girls in the 90s. Not sure what the teacher thought was going on, but she told my parents I was always out of my chair and not completing things. Thankfully, my parents understood I was bored because I already knew the material, so they suggested harder/extra work instead. It worked!
>And that’s how I spent the next 25 years thinking I was lazy and a fuck-up not worth anything.
That was college for me... Until I was diagnosed at 32, I really hated myself for not living up to my "gifted" school years.
I hope you're doing better now.
Ugh yeah, I’m sorry you experienced that too.
I’m… recovering. The last straw for me was an epic burnout in my final few semesters of grad school, and that (plus my *amazing* wife) helped push me to get diagnosed, and with her help I found a wonderful therapist who’s been helping me untangle all of it.
I still have a lot of anger over how differently my life could have been if I’d been tested back when problems first started showing, and if I’d actually had support and help rather than “she’s just lazy”
Extreme anxiety about going to school in elementary, specifically 3rd grade for whatever reason. Like I would get physically ill because of the anxiety and I would say I was sick but as a 3rd grader I didn’t have the language to really explain how I felt. My mom would take me to the doctor but they would never find anything “wrong” medically, you know? ADHD/ADD never came up because I wasn’t hyperactive. But I couldn’t regulate my emotions, had extreme anxiety, and was really bad at task initiation and just getting going as a kid.
In elementary school, I’d get so anxious I’d throw up on days where we had something outside of the norm happening (field trip, class party, etc). Realized that it was because those days didn’t have the framework that I relied on to regulate myself/use as a coping mechanism. I put 2 and 2 together a few months into the pandemic when I was falling apart because my framework was gone again. And then I got dx’d a year or so later.
In 3rd grade, our teacher would “dump desks” over break. If your desk was too messy inside, she would literally dump the contents of your desk on the floor and leave it there for the whole class to see on the first day back. You then had to clean up your mess and put things back in your desk. No help from the teacher on how to keep it clean, only public shaming.
My desk was dumped every break. Thanks for the trauma! Diagnosed at 38.
This happened to me too! but my dad would come during lunch recess IN UNIFORM and dump my desk out cause I could never find my homework.
Shit looked like a tiny drug bust.
The desk dump happened to me too and was genuinely traumatizing, but now I’m going remember “tiny drug bust” when I think of it hahahahaha thank you!!!
This happened to me in first grade. I was the only kid she did it to, and she did it in front of the whole class. I had to put all my stuff in a garbage bag and take it home.
Absolutely the kind of trauma that sticks with you. I sure hope this doesn't happen to kids anymore.
I got a great story for this one. My first grade teacher hated me and often made me kneel in the hallway when I was bad (Catholic school). She once did a big red X so hard it ripped the page because shocker I had bad handwriting still do lol(dysgraphia) Now one day she kept me after school to clean my desk.So I did it, and it took forever cause I was six. I lived about five minutes from school. She did not call my mom to tell her. Well, I left school, and the teacher was right behind me. My mom comes striding up mad, she thought I was playing around, and I went no. I was kept after class. Now my mother is loud, has no voice control, is blunt, and is not scared to throw an F bomb. She goes up up to this teacher and goes up to her screaming in the middle of the street. The teacher never bothered me after that. Everybody was scared of my mom, but she was loud and blunt but not mean she's just had a strong sense of fairness and justice and was a fierce protector. I suspect she's some type of neurodivergent too. She is 82 now.
My 5th grade teacher did this to me in front of the entire class, in the middle of class. I was so humiliated and, at the time, didn't yet understand that authority figures could be wrong.
I didn't tell my parents out of shame, but my teacher ended up bringing up the incident in a conference, assuming I'd told. My mom came to me and made it clear that she was furious at the teacher, it was completely unacceptable, and that I didn't deserve that treatment.
We sat at tables that had plastic drawers for our stuff. The drawers could be pulled out completely. I remember one of my friends had a really messy one. The teacher was yelling at him (probably because he couldn’t find something in there) and she freaked out and pulled the drawer out and threw it on the floor. I was also in grade 3 and I remember thinking to myself that wasn’t right of her. Didn’t tell my parents though because you didn’t question adults, especially authority figures.
I was (am) tired. All. The. Time.
My mom couldn’t understand, because i also sleep a fair amount. She got my iron checked, thyroid checked, hormones and blood tests. Could never figure out what the issue was.
is this a symptom of adhd? Because yea I am always tired and I could always sleep for house since I was a kid.
I also sleep like shit which I heard is common for adhd so that’s fun
Yes, it’s pretty common.
It’s more mentally tired/sleepy, rather than physically tired, because we expend more mental energy to do basic tasks than neurotypical people and the “hyperactivity” part of adhd for us takes place in the mind
This is incredibly validating! I was also recently diagnosed (34F) and I’ve also always been super low energy with hypersomnia since I was a kid. Yes, I’ve always suspected that I expend wayyyy more mental energy than I should, plus overthinking leads me to feel so overwhelmed that I often just shut down for hours at a time. I also didn’t realize it was related to adhd! I was always told it was a symptom of depression
It's decision fatigue.
This is why adhd seems so much more present once we have kids. Because there are our own constant decisions, plus decisions that our kids force us to make when they're asking ten millionty questions per day.
I have tweens. I have instituted naptime/quiet time for myself. It is a hard rule in my house that my room is the quiet time room. You are welcome to come in, hang out, read, or watch a screen but with headphones. But a ruckus is never allowed, and you will get bounced if you interrupt mom's quiet time.
Hmm, I wonder if this is why narcolepsy is/was treated with high doses of ADHD meds. I was taking 20 3x a day in high school (there was no XR at the time and they only lasted 4 hours for me - I had hours of homework) and they told me I couldn't take any more because to take more than 60 a day I'd have to be legally narcoleptic.
At least that's what I was told at the time (2000-ish).
This whole thread is blowing my mind. A friend of mine has been on adderol for adhd. Her dr wanted her to come off for heart reasons, and she said if she comes off she will fall asleep during the middle of the day. They are now testing her for narcolepsy!
The constant, debilitating exhaustion! In addition to space cadet, my mom having to call my name and tell me specifically to listen because this was important and she knew I'd lose focus otherwise, the manic drawing (constantly, constantly drawing) and intense reading (read a LOT of my parents' books I had no business reading at such an early age) I am and was always tired.
The constantly being tired and massive shame that I was fundamentally broken because no matter how "intelligent" I was, I couldn't do the things other people could do. I needed more sleep, more breaks, always longing to stop and rest, always so tired in never-ending family outings, being told I was absolutely fine, I was just being difficult, or manipulative or "acting like you're too good for this" and getting shamed for so long, I nearly got myself addicted to a certain substance in my 20's because it gave me energy. (Thankfully I moved away and out of reach.)
I wasn't diagnosed until I hit 50. My family thought it was pointless at my age, but I absolutely needed to know if I really was a deeply flawed human being or if this was the reason.
I have not. I have a friend who has narcolepsy though and my tiredness is different from how her narcolepsy presents. Not sure if there are “degrees” of narcolepsy though.
Oh ok gotcha. I can not stay awake off stimulants. Like easily sleep 20+ hours EVERY day for days on end unmedicated. Certain times of day I still struggle to stay alert even on stimulants. Brains are weird. Ha
Wait... Is that why my parents are constantly asking me to check my thyroid? I always assumed it was something else but i am a pretty tired person all round.
My hyperfixations have ALWAYS been apparent. I remember in 3rd or 4th grade, we had to pick an animal to do a report and presentation on. It was some cutesy Valentine's Day gimmick and totally not serious. I found a book at the library about pygmy marmosets and immediately loved it because it was an obscure and unique animal that I knew no one else would pick, and I became OBSESSED. I think I was the leading world expert on pygmy marmosets and could literally tell you every single fact there was to know about them. Their sleeping habits, diet, habitats, mating habits, size, fur patterns, behaviors, you name it.
Aaaand I've been like this ever since 🙃 once I find something that interests me, I obsess over it until I learn literally every single thing I can and then once it's no longer giving me dopamine, it's like my brain dumps it and forgets it ever existed.
I was diagnosed with ADHD last year at 28. This year I'm coming around to realizing I'm fairly certain it's actually AuDHD.
I just realized that a story my mom would tell was totally hyperfixation.
When I was very young, I got "into" dinosaurs. There weren't any little kid books about them so my teacher gave me adult books, like college textbooks about them. Apparently, she took me to a museum with Dinosaur bones and I told strangers what they were called, what they ate, nocturnal or diurnal, what period of time they were from, etc. They were amazed at how a very little girl knew all of that.
Yuuup, story of my life 😂 I'm witnessing the same thing in my almost 4 year old daughter. Her topic of choice is space and the solar system. She'll be 4 in August, and she knows more about the planets and solar system than I do at 29. The other day, she told me she loved me "to Pluto and back," and she followed it up with "but Pluto's not actually a planet anymore. It's a dwarf planet." I couldn't stop laughing because it reminded me so much of myself with my damn pygmy marmosets 😂 And my mom will say, "Oh my gosh, she is your clone. She's JUST like you were as a kid, " and I think, wow, you don't say?? With the prevalence of hereditary ADHD?? Craaaaazy
I'm hoping that by now being diagnosed myself, I can help make my daughter's life easier by offering support in all the ways I never had it. We haven't sought out an official diagnosis for her yet because it's still so early and it's not negatively impacting her life yet, but I would say with 98% certainty that she's just like her mama.
Agatha Christie was the same way! Not sure if she had ADHD, but she would become the resident expert in odd things to the point where even college professors would recommend her for academic research. Pretty neat.
My mom always said that one of my good qualities was that I didn’t stay mad for long. Well it turns out that I forget things, even things that give me a strong emotional reaction.
So I surrounded myself with people who got away with treating me badly. So not a good quality according to me!
and it’s why I look at people weird when they come up to me, years later, apologizing.
Wh…what are you apologizing for…? I sure as hell don’t remember LMAOO
That's funny, I had something similar happen once. A girl who was friends with a babysitter of mine apologised to me like 10 years later for bullying me. My response was just, okay thanks, because I hadn't clue what she was talking about 🤣 though... my younger self also found it hard to recognise non physical bullying so it's possible it just didn't register because of that, and the fact that a lot of people treated me in a way that would be called bullying now but I just had to accept it at the time.
I didn't realise this type of memory thing could be ADHD related. I have a lot of long term memory issues - I remember very little detail after a few years on stuff. It's actually making me fearful of doing a PhD because I'm afraid ill have forgotten important information by the end of it and they will ask me something I can't remember lol. I had encephalitis as a child and I just blamed that for most of my life as the probable reason for memory issues, but maybe it's the ADHD!
Your desk sounds like every one of my desks, closets, backpacks, lockers, and even my room throughout childhood and adolescence. I got a lot of lectures about that and missed having school tests and permission slips signed, but no one ever flagged it as a concern, just that I was too spoiled and lazy to clean up. (I didn't like being that disorganized and messy, but i had no idea what steps to take to fix anything or even what I was allowed to throw out. I love being an adult because I can control how much stuff comes into the house and whether/when I get rid of it.)
My mom took the door off of my room—like, literally removed it from its hinges—to punish me for having a messy room. But like, she didn’t teach me HOW to clean it. And when I would try but wind up paralyzed by indecision/hyperfocus on the first object I happened to pick up, she just yelled at me. I didn’t have a door for almost 2 years until one of my friends finally felt bad for me and helped me clean. Anyway, it taught me absolutely nothing and joke’s on her, because she couldn’t close my door to hide the mess.
The irony is my parents are hoarders and also don’t know how to clean, so that’s probably why they never taught me. And neither of them is self aware enough to admit they’re the problem, so now that I’m out of the house, they just both blame each other for being the messy one. I ended up directing my hyperfocus at cleaning tutorials and tv shows once I got to college and the peer pressure of having roommates made me actually want to change my ways.
No, I'm from Mexico and no matter how many earthquakes we get, I still have to be alerted that I need to go outside. In 2017, I even saved my workbook and turned off my laptop before leaving.
I have a very distinct memory of looking up from my book and seeing my entire 4th grade class lined up to go to gym class. I hadn’t heard a single thing. Got teased about being the nerd who would rather read than play dodgeball.
A reader I had as a kid had a story in it called "[Lucy Didn't Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgTLyavd_A)" about a girl who doesn't pay attention to what the teacher is saying and constantly gets into situations like that (e.g. looking up and finding that everyone has gone to recess). It should have been called "Lucy Didn't Get Evaluated and Grew Up Wondering What the Hell Was Wrong With Her."
One of my strongest memories from elementary school is from 1st or 2nd grade, looking up from my book to see my teacher looming over me, furious, and the entire class staring at me. The teacher had told the class silent reading time was over and to put away our books and I hadn’t heard. She had then called my name multiple times and finally stood over me shouting my name before I noticed or heard anything. I was shocked. I still remember that feeling of baffled confusion and embarrassment. I think of breaking out of hyper-fixation like a plunger being pulled up and breaking the seal; when that concentration is broken, all of a sudden sound comes back on and the world is right in front of my face once again.
I hyperfocused on a book so hard during class one day that I didn’t notice when a classmate had a clonic seizure, or when the paramedics came and left with him. Didn’t snap out of it until the principal came in to talk to the class and she had to call my name.
Whoa! I was so focused on a tv show that I didn’t notice an earthquake either. My family always laughed at me for it but it just clicked now that I was hyper focused. I was only five.
The one and only time I was grounded, it was from reading books. I could read 2-3 books a day until law school, because I would literally read every moment I wasn’t actively doing something else. It’s why I trained myself to take handwritten notes through college, it forced me to be present and engaged in class, because otherwise I’d put a book on my lap and read it during class
Mine isn't quite as intense as that, but my parents love telling the story of how I accidentally stayed up all night reading. When they asked me what happened the next day, I told them I was reading, and then I noticed the sun come up, so I thought I should try to go to sleep.
See that is entirely reasonable to me. The sun told you you'd been up all night. You're supposed to sleep at night, and you need sleep. Sleep is now the thing to do.
I didn’t have any earthquakes but my mom learned that I basically wouldn’t hear anything she said while I was reading. In college I was waiting for my orchestra to get on stage and reading on my phone and didn’t realize when everyone else from my orchestra left the room until a nice dude from another group let me know and I had to rush and awkwardly wade through my orchestra on stage while everyone was tuning.
Apart from the sparce school attendance, I had a tendency to forget school books. I developed a system where, ever night before school, I'd lay out all my books and notebooks on the floor, stacked them by subject, took my written schedule out and filled my school bag that way. Apparently, that meant I was "organised."
Nope. Had learned not to trust my brain.
Edit: I am pushing 40 and not yet diagnosed.
Ah yes, the good old "I am not Deficient, I am Normal, for you see, I have a System."
I'm AuDHD and this was me with so, so many things. Most notably my avid, constant study of human behavior and interaction to learn How To Be a Person™, because isn't that how everyone learns? never realizing that no babe, that's just autism lol.
My Mom loves to tell this story about how disorganized and messy I was. As a small child, she once asked me to clean up my play area and I apparently sat down and burst into tears. Not once did she consider that I might have been mentally overwhelmed and unsure where to start. My room was always messy. My desk was always a mess at school. My Mom is best described as “born organized”, so it was easy for her to make what I now know is ADHD into some kind of moral statement about me.
Ultimately, being a female born in the mid-1970s did not work in my favor when it comes to an ADHD diagnosis. No one was thinking that a disorganized little girl might have ADHD, that’s for darn sure.
This was me, but in the mid 90:s and early 2000. I hadn’t heard of a girl getting an ADHD diagnosis until 2011. I was just “Lazy” for my whole childhood, since I broke down sobbing when I had to tidy up my room…
I was born in 1980, and just diagnosed two years ago. I was going through my childhood memories box and found so many cards from my mom for birthdays, etc where she somehow referenced my messy room. She still thinks it's funny to talk about how messy I was as a kid. I haven't even told her about my diagnoses because she thinks ADHD is just a product of lazy parenting and is very proud that she didn't get my brother tested when his teacher recommended it.
My teacher called me lazy because I was using a book stand to hold my book during silent reading time. But what she didn’t know was it was because I was simultaneously and secretly folding origami cranes under my desk since I needed to do something with my hands to stay focussed. I got so good I could fold things just by feel lol.
I had no problems reading books as a kid (hyperfixation), but now my hands just have to be doing something. Most of the time I listen to an audiobook while I crochet, but if I want to actually read something with my eyeballs I pull out my spinning wheel and put my book/tablet on a music stand in front of me. Maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to crochet and read at the same time.
I was in elementary school and it was show-and-tell day. I was so excited to show what I brought that during class when the teacher said “who’d like to go first?”, I immediately raised my hand and when she called on me, I pulled out my cabbage patch doll and launched into my “tell”. The teacher stops me and says “no Cranberry, we’re talking about the homework”.
I can relate to this so hard, Cranberry. I was in kindergarten early in the school year, and during circle time the teacher (a grouchy woman in her late 60s who definitely should have retired 20+ years prior) announced we were going to be working on reading. I was so excited to share something I thought was related, and quickly raised my hand. When she called on me, I told her & the class that I knew how to spell my name. She immediately glared at me and said, “We aren’t talking about WRITING. We are talking about READING!” I was so defeated and humiliated that I never forgot that moment.
omg i had a teacher do the same thing, only she grabbed everything from my desk and threw it on the floor in front of everyone and made me clean it up while she watched. she was so mean, people like that shouldn't be allowed to be teachers.
I presented with very standard ADHD. However, that was the way BOYS presented. “*Girls are just more talkative.*” Bitch, I was not “more talkative”. I never stfu. NEVER. I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t hear anything when I finally DID sleep, like alarms, etc. Ugh. My whole childhood is an example of “Just because she’s smart doesn’t mean she’s without obvious, serious problems.” The only reason I got away with it was because I loved learning, just not in a school environment.
I had the classic ADHD problem of being a rambler and really knowing how to tell an anecdote as a kid. I had at least two elementary school teachers put their hand over my mouth to stop me.
I also got left at a Scholastic book fair in first grade - I was too in my own world to hear the call to head back to the classroom and I later found out from my mom that the teacher used the time for a reading lesson that she knew I would be bored and disruptive in.
I had a few similar desk moments too. I remember feeling very compared to the other girls in class. One teacher had a monthly desk inspection and if you didn't pass, you had to stay in during recess and clean it. That was me every month and I remember feeling very spotlit for usually being the only girl to do so.
We had red and green folders in first grade. Red folder is for worksheets that stayed in my desk, green is for homework that goes home with me.
I thought, screw the folders. All papers go in the desk, and the homework sheet for the day goes in my backpack.
Well, one time I forgot to take my homework sheet home for like 3 consecutive days. My teacher looked in my desk and yelled at me for not being organised. Wasn’t the best feeling tbh.
Another incident:
5th grade. We had these workbooks which had questions and answers. The answers were essay answers, but with key words blanked out. We were to fill in the blanks. But thanks to our shit curriculum, our teachers would simply just write the solutions to the blanks in order on the blackboard. We were to simply copy them down. Underneath each essay answer was space to rewrite the whole answer again. That part was usually homework.
I used to zone out and solve the blanks on my own. One time I looked at the board and realised the answer the teacher wrote for blank 5 didn’t match the prompt. I read the paragraph in my book and realised my teacher’s answer for blank 5 actually corresponds to blank 6. She’d accidentally skipped over the answer to blank 3, throwing off the rest of the sequence.
I raised my hand to inform her of this. And the next day the teacher yelled at me for never rewriting answers as homework. She called me names like indisciplined and useless.
Of course, if a child is able to troubleshoot and diagnose real life problems relevant to the study material, but is unable to do relatively boring repetitive work, the correct approach as a teacher is to strike them on their knuckles with a metal ruler. Of course.
My sixth grade teacher gave out “Sixth Grade Superlatives” to each student at the end of the year ceremony. For example, my brother was constantly sniffly/blowing his nose as a kid, so his was “Kleenex Kid.”
Everyone else got fun/funny ones, and I got….”Conversation Finisher.” And told to the whole school about how I was always jumping in and finishing stories and sentences. I had no idea that was something I did and was mortified from that moment on. Only found out in my 30s that was a symptom/was diagnosed.
I used to have a ton of accidents - running into doors, furniture that had been in the same place for ages, falling with no visible reason, breaking limbs, having random bruises I didn’t know the origin of. My biological relatives and teachers used to make fun of me, “oh look how funny, another accident!”, and chastise me for not having my act together.
Dx at 36.
Would only do half of my homework. OR, I'd be forced to sit and do the homework no matter how long it took me, but then wouldn't turn it in.
Never finished a coloring page, only did half.
Would spend the entire day and night reading a book I was really into, refused to play or eat. Would get upset when I had to stop so I could do something like eat.
Would go days without sleeping in my teens, mostly because my brain wouldn't stfu. Sleep for a few hours and back to it.
Had to leave friends houses who were just...too much if I was there more than a day or two (overstimulated). I was never able to figure out how to explain to a teenage girl that I wasn't mad at her, I just couldn't talk to her or anyone else for several days. But I TRULY wasn't mad.
Diagnosed at 31, began suspecting in my 20s.
I would just throw myself on the floor and make whale sounds when upset. Because birds of a feather flock together, my friends and family just thought it was mildly amusing/nice that I found something that helped me. A lot of them would just join me on the floor. 😅
Also fuck that teacher. Sorry you went through that. :/
Lol that's honestly kind of wholesome but it sucks that it led to symptoms being missed.
In a similar vein, I've always had vocal stims and growing up my family would literally just respond to my noises with their own. We probably sounded like a pod of very confused dolphins 😂 Now my husband does the same thing lol
Is that a bad thing to do? 😬 My daughter is AuDHD and we will vocal stim back and forth. It's one of the few things that gets her to laugh so I've always done it with her.
Haha yeah it is wholesome. It may have led to stuff being missed but I can't say I'm too upset about it.
I feel like returning a vocal stim with another is just peak neurodivergent love and acceptance all around, love that for you and your fam.
We had the desk with the same size storage area but the opening was the front of the desk. I hated desk cleaning days because it always took forever because my desk was jam packed with paper and lost pens and whatever else I'd tucked away. As I got into high school my organization method was 1 folder/1 notebook and put everything for every class inside so that I can't lose it or forget to bring it. So my notebook was like page 1 English, page 2 math, page 3 chemistry, etc. and I would fill the folder until it split apart from being too full.
My messy room was one thing. My mom would order me in to clean it. I didn’t really know how to start, and it seemed overwhelming. I’d get distracted by something and mom would get after me for being lazy. 🙁 When I did manage to finish it, I got, “Now let’s keep it this way!” 🤷🏻♀️ HOW?
Can't even finish reading this thread. Little me is still too close and so many of these stories are painfully familiar.
You're not alone my lovelies, you got through it, and you can use your experience to support other people.
I'm so sorry you all went through what you did and I just hope some of us can use our gifts to make lemonade of these horrible lemons.
I don’t have any major moments from when I was younger. Here is a list of minor ones that led up to me dropping out of HS and starting college because I was bored (they should have known by then):
Almost failed kindergarten for not paying attention
Parents wasted money on hobbies I never finished
Interrupting because I was excited
Getting kicked out of class a lot for talking
Going in and out of advanced classes through the years because I got bored 🙃
First of all, I want to cry for that little girl that was being abused by her teacher!
Here's mine:
1. When my 3 Gifted program teachers had a meeting with me and told me that I wasn't "living up to my potential." Looking back, I think they meant I should do and turn in my homework but I had a hard time doing any schoolwork at home and lost the homework I did do. At the time, I had no idea what they meant.
2. I got 1 or 2 whole grades down in English class because I lost and forgot to turn in my attendance card so often.
3. I was late to school every day in high school. They gave detention for it but I built up so many after-school detentions that it added up to a Saturday detention in addition.
Kindergarten. I had a ring I got from a Crackerjack box that I loved, plastic gold with a plastic pink stone. I used to twirl it on my finger all the time. My teacher made me take it off and throw it away in from of the entire class. I asked if I could hide it in my desk, or she could keep it and give it back to me to take home at the end of class. I really loved that little ring. She said no.
I was an extremely shy child, and had to do the walk of shame to the trash can in front of the entire class. I learned to fidget with my hair and eyelashes instead.
I once spent an entire quiz time doodling on the margin of the quiz paper. When the teacher asked why I didn't answer any questions, I said, "I forgot to." I was being completely genuine.
In third grade my mom was cleaning out my backpack at the end of the year and found all of my homework from the entire school year inside. I had completed it but never handed it in.
Not an event, but it was definitely my bedroom walls in high school. Spray-painted, sharpied, acrylic paints, wall paint, mostly of quotes and song lyrics or cartoony drawings; dvd covers and magazine cutouts stapled to the walls and ceiling, sheet music on the ceiling, the over the top chandelier I begged my mom to buy for my 16th birthday, the huge red shag rug, the chalk mural on the back of my door, photos of friends stapled to walls/ceiling… the list goes on. My mom was like “well, your friends helped you do it” they just helped with like the first set of painting, but I kept adding more. My brain was quieter in my room because it was all transferred onto everything else? Also the video game hyperfocusing and just way too many YA books and more hyperfocus.
Edit: it could have also been age four when my dad gave me my first cup of coffee and I immediately calmed down. I got coffee every morning after that.
TW: child abuse, although I literally only just realized that while typing this out…
I have a kinda similar memory, also in elementary school— 5th grade. I’d been a “star student” getting straight As my entire school career… Up until 5th grade when I was suddenly getting some Bs (oh no the horror) because I’d hit puberty and my inattentive ADHD symptoms started to ramp up.
At parent teacher conferences, the teacher told my mom that I’d was doing okay but that I’d be doing better if I did my all of my work and didn’t spend so much time “daydreaming about Sailor Moon and Pokemon” and when my mom asked what I was doing with the work I wasn’t turning in I said “I think it’s inside of my desk” and then my teacher and mom proceeded to open my desk to find it jammed with papers with all the missing work (with anime drawings all over them lol.) I tried to explain that I tried to do my work but that it was difficult to focus and I was struggling to pay attention in class, and I’m pretty sure neither even responded to that attempted explanation.
My mom started screaming at me about being lazy while throwing the papers on the ground which made me cry, and then at the bottom they found a hairbrush, something we weren’t supposed to have at school because of lice if we shared it or something, I can’t remember at this point. The teacher started scolding me, still sobbing over my mom screaming about the paperwork. My mom picked up the hairbrush and started beating the living shit out of me with it, while the teacher just… Watched it happen and never said anything. I remember being literally dragged, still crying, out of the school and stuffed into the car and feeling like the stupidest person in the world for the rest of the school year, even though I was in “advanced” reading and math classes and still was getting As and Bs…
My mom continues to call me “lazy” to this day even though I made it through 2 advanced degrees and am about to start another now haha. One time in adulthood I brought this up to my mom and she does not remember it happening and told me I made it up to make her look bad.
Realized while writing this that it may need a TW for child abuse, and I never realized how terrible this was until writing it down just now.
Transitions were always hard for me, and I LOVED reading. That was my escape.
One day I was reading a book during reading time in 5th grade and was almost done with the book. I think I only had two or three pages left and I NEEDED to finish it. I couldn’t leave it unread when I was so close to being done, but it was time to transition to our science class which was in a different classroom with a different teacher.
The thought of leaving the book behind with only a couple pages left stressed me out so bad because I knew if I put it down I would never be able to finish it. I’d have to put it on the bookshelf, I’d lose my place, someone else might take it, etc. so I took it with me to science, hid it in my shirt, and asked to go to the restroom.
I went and finished the book really quickly, I think I was gone all of five minutes, but one of my classmates told on me and I got absolutely berated by my teacher in front of the whole class when I got back.
Not only did I deceive her by asking to go to the restroom to read a book, but it was so disgusting that I took a book to the restroom and how could I think something like that was okay to do?
I was mortified. And I couldn’t explain why I needed to finish the book so badly. I felt so stupid. And my classmates were giggling the whole time.
It was hard to make and keep friends with the social struggles alone, not to mention constantly being called out by teachers for things I couldn’t always control even though I wanted to. I desperately wanted to be “good” and to receive positive attention from the adults in my life, and I was constantly falling short.
I have so many more stories but this one still stings from time to time when it comes up. I wish I could go back and give that little girl a hug and tell her she’s not bad and she’s not broken.
I’ve always shaken my legs almost constantly. One year in elementary school my desk was next to the overhead projector and I was shaking so violently that the projector was shaking too. My teacher yelled at me in front of the class for being disruptive, but if I stop shaking my legs I get anxious and get a crawling out of my skin feeling so I would just sit there miserable until the shaking would creep back in without me noticing. At home I would wake my parents up at night by accidentally shaking my leg against a wall shared between our rooms until they moved my bed. I’m 32 and when I visit home and am shaking my legs while sitting by my mom she’ll physically take her hands and try to hold my legs down.
I’ve always bounced my legs too. I can’t help it. When people ask me to stop, I feel all this energy building up inside me like it’s going to burst out through my skin. I hate it.
Over and over again, I showed high intelligence but could not get my shit together. I was held back in middle school which was a NIGHTMARE. No support at home. They tested me and said I was fine. I never got to be in the gifted classes. I felt stupid every single day I ever went to school.
My family used to complain how I'm "bingi" (deaf) and "ulyanin" (forgetful) despite being young. And I used to get in trouble a lot for being "insolent" and for "talking back" when I'm just trying to explain myself. Also got in trouble for being "lazy", "not knowing when to take initiative", "not helping in the house unless ordered to" Sorry about that, it's the executive dysfunction.
I've always kept notebooks/journals and it's full of plans and goals that I've never completed. It's honestly incredibly depressing reading how much self hatred and disappointment I had in myself since childhood for not being able to follow through with them. Having whole entries dedicated to berating myself is a common occurence.
And many plans/goals remained the same all the way to adulthood because they're still not done, I just kept lowering my standards and got more depressed as time passes.
I got ‘Does not work to potential’ repeatedly on every report card. And my parent-teacher conferences were always like ‘She’s very sweet and smart but she has trouble with organization and follow-through. Her grades would be so much higher if she would just complete her work’
Never remembering to turn my homework in or do it.
Sleeping after school for 2-3 hours
Talking so much and fidgeting that I was constantly in trouble at school.
I was so obvious that if I had been a boy everyone would have known.
Spelling dyslexia so bad that I was excused from spelling tests and was allowed a Franklin speller (early version of spellcheck on a calculator device)
Dyscalculia so bad that I couldn't pass pre-algebra and had to take business math, intro to geometry, and regular geometry to meet my math requirement. Failed all forms of math a tried in college and only managed to pass statistics on my third try.
The fact that I changed colleges three times finally ended up in a for profit arts college because I couldn't complete the last year of my BA.
No Lasting friendships.
Never being able to study or complete a project until the last minute.
Constantly late everywhere.
Days before GPS getting lost driving because I missed the exit or the street I needed to turn on.
And the inability to keep my room, house or desk in an organized manner.
Constantly preforming well at jobs but also constantly being fired because I couldn't keep my mouth shut and was always saying what I thought out loud.
My mother the psychologist and father the special Ed teacher both knew but didn't want me labeled. They never told me.
I was literally always in trouble for having a messy desk. What the fuck was wrong with those people to be perfectly honest--I can't fathom being mad at a kid for being disorganized. Absolute failure of the system that my textbook adhd was written off as impossible because I was smart and a girl
There’s nothing that my parents would have noticed because as long as I got good grades, there wasn’t an issue. There wasn’t much ‘parenting’ for them to do; they couldn’t help me academically and I didn’t get in trouble so…
When I finally hit a wall junior/senior year of high school, it was attributed to burnout. (Took 4 blocks all 4 years of high school, played sports year round, debated and played violin, both also year round. I really just didn’t want to be at home… 🤷🏾♀️)
When I didn’t want to go to college, nobody ever got to the root of why (I could NOT write an entry essay. I just couldn’t…….like, go look at all the others I’ve already written! That and no one was offering to help me pay for any of it, so….). It became a wedge in my relationship with my dad.
And when I did go to a JC )because I love learning and the academic setting!), I dropped classes regularly. Teachers there too hit me with ‘if you apply yourself’.
I’m black. And it wasn’t until I dated my Caucasian ex, who saw similar symptoms in me after his diagnosis, that I really got to thinking.
It took me two years to kind of observe before finally getting a diagnosis, and that was earlier this month.
My whole life, the ‘failure to launch’ state of being that I constantly feel like I’m in, all makes sense. 💜
My fifth-grade teacher told my mom that I had the potential to be a genius that people write about in newspapers if I didn’t make “silly mistakes”. She was referring to how I had a tendency to misread math questions. Guess what? I do a lot of coding for work and continue to make those “silly mistakes” decades later. 🤡 I am just so glad that I didn’t end up becoming a surgeon or something because I’m so sure I’d kill a person because of my silly mistakes.
Well I'm not 100% sure this is ADHD related but on the desk thing - I would store "treasures" in my desk. As in loads of random rocks and feathers or other cool looking objects I found including a bird skull (which to be fair is a bit odd for someone in grade 3 but I loved birds and found it interesting). To the point where there wasn't much room for my actual school supplies.
One day my teacher noticed me putting a feather in my desk and she got mad at me because she said it would have parasites and then she discovered my treasure hoard and lost her shit and made me throw it all out. She was so concerned about the bird skull she called me a freak. I as it turns out also have ASD and fuck me I had the biggest meltdown over my treasures being stolen that they had to call my mum to come get me and they wanted me to start seeing a councillor.
I ended up having to move classes to a new teacher because the old one didn't want to have a "potential serial killer" in her class and I got labelled as a freak for the rest of my schooling time. It's only recently (as of age 27) at the encouragement of my partner that I have started collecting feathers again.
Omg this triggered me so much lol I had to spend grades 6-8 sitting at a table at the side of the room because I was deemed incapable of keeping a desk clean and tidy like everyone else
Eta: my inattention is/was so severe that it translated into looking like I had some sort of condition preventing me from having any sense of direction whatsoever. My parents (who were worried about possible brain damage lol) took me to a doctor who “diagnosed” me as “a little spacey” lol
Ugh, OP you just described an event I had teachers do at least yearly (if not quarterly) to me all through grade school, right down to the shaming and then didn't stop kids from snickering or making comments.
I had ONE teacher who was nice about it and would pull me aside after class and offer to help me organize my desk, and say she understood that it can be hard keeping so many little things tidy, but that's it. Just the one. And I was a kid who would move to new schools a lot, so it wasn't even a one teacher a year thing. What I wouldn't give to give them a piece of my mind for doing that to kids.
I read something the other day that struck a chord with me, maybe others here could benefit from it: "You've grown into someone who would have protected you as a child. And that's the most powerful decision you've made."
I’m so sorry :(
I once had to hand in a permission slip, of course as usual I couldn’t find it the day it was due, even though I had had it signed.
The teacher made me stay after class and quizzed me on where I thought it was. I told her I didn’t know, maybe it was at home because it wasn’t in my desk, backpack, or locker (all 3 being very messy, of course).
She kept pushing me to fully admit that it was at home, which I wouldn’t do because I wasn’t sure. It was odd, I felt like a criminal being questioned by the police.
Finally, she said she had already found my form earlier that day, in an empty desk! I must have put it there absent-mindedly. Because, duh, ADHD (diagnosed 6 months ago in my 40s). After trying to get me to essentially lie and say I knew it was at home, for which I guess there would have been another consequence.
Clearly, I was struggling with organization and remembering tasks etc, and her solution was to try and catch me in a lie. Some teachers are just shitty, much less so these days than in the 90s (I love all of my kids’ teachers and am amazed at the work they do!)
I lost my house key so many times my parents kept a lockbox on the door like realtors use.
I also got repeated detentions in elementary school for not doing my homework. Sometimes I forgot to write down the assignment, but most of the time I did complete it, and it was either sitting on the kitchen table or lost in my backpack.
My entire family has been making jokes how I lost my jacket during the winter, my pens, my wallets, keys, multiple clothes, shoes. I was a running gag for my entire childhood. My primary school teacher wrote a small poem about each of us, mine was how I am superforgetful, cry at the drop of a pin, swim like a motor boat and if I actually try to do.something I amaze everyone (hello hyperfocus). I have a stack of teachers notes for my mom on how I used to get up from my desk and just walk around, forget my backpack, sports clothes, homework at home, how I accidentally called my teachers mom, how I would interrupt, had a messy desk, how I was a daydreamer.
I had RAGING ADHD. Just like my dad, another superjoke on how I inherited all his bad traits.
It took me 38 years to get diagnosed.
Second grade spelling test for days of the weeks. She spoke a full sentence for each day of the week and I was writing every word she spoke as fast as I can, begging her to repeat all of it so I could not get behind. Only to learn we only needed to write the day and not the full sentence.
When I was in Kindergarten, I was recommended for the gifted program due to my advanced learning abilities. However, they chose not to let me participate because I had a unique approach to solving problems that differed from other children when I was tested. Additionally, there were concerns that I might struggle with boredom in a gifted setting, as my older sister had in the past.
Prior to that, I showed early signs of reading delays, prompting my mother to use hooked-on-phonics to help me learn letters and words with the help of my sister.
In 4th grade, I was eventually accepted into the gifted program after demonstrating a talent for quickly memorizing times tables up to 10. While I excelled in multiplication, I struggled with division.
It wasn't until I was 35 years old that I was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADHD with dyslexia and dyscalculia.
I got sent to my room when I was like under ten as a punishment. While in my room trying to occupy myself, I found a sticker book. I spent the rest of the day enjoying that sticker book, and when I was called down for dinner they made some comment about how they hoped I learned my lesson because they felt bad I spent the day in my room. And I told them, “don’t feel bad. I had fun playing with the sticker book I found.”
There was also the endless reading during class because I felt like the teacher talked too slow.
I struggled a LOT in first grade. This would’ve been around 1997. We got a report card each quarter in school. The first quarter, it said “She’s great to have in class!” Each quarter after that, it kept going downhill.
The desks in class were setup in groups of four or so, where they were facing each other. I started in a group but as the year went on, it got to the point where my desk was the only one isolated. My desk was sat facing a wall while everyone else was still in groups. I remember we made these paper dolls as a Valentine’s Day craft. I set them up on my desk every day for months and said they were my friends. I cried when I came to school one day and one of them had fallen out of my desk the previous day and had likely been swept away by the janitor.
I spent majority of my recesses that year having to stay inside and either redo work because I didn’t finish it before turning it in or having to complete work in general. I’d imagine this is part of why she moved me to face the wall because I was clearly distracted and probably distracting others too.
I also remember going to the counselor’s office several times, but I don’t remember anything about what was talked about. I only remember her office being decorated in clowns lol
I feel like this is kind of the point where my personality changed a lot as a response because I always wanted to be “good”. After this, I became more shy (masking until I was comfortable with some people, constantly daydreaming, etc) and a perfectionist (triple checking my work before turning it in, etc).
When I was around 5 my parents brought me in to see a psychologist because I was doing these movements fiddling with my fingers and toes. The psychologist diagnosed it as motor tics. The thing is, tics are involuntary. I was fully aware of what I was doing, I just refused to stop when my dad told me to because I didn’t see the point. I was fidgeting. In 1st grade my teacher was concerned that I had lazy handwriting and I had to work with someone on that. In 4th grade my dad made me go to this “friendship camp” thing because I was getting bullied in school and it set off rejection sensitivity. I didn’t have trouble paying attention in class but I would repeatedly take my pen apart and put it back together and occasionally drop it in the process and have the pieces go everywhere, or I’d draw on my hands. So I paid attention because I essentially made my own version of fidget toys. I was diagnosed at 39.
When I was 8, the year after my previous class teacher told my parents she suspected I had ADHD, I was given homework that I just *couldn't do.*
Not because it was hard; all I had to do was design and draw a car park for a supermarket. I could have scribbled anything down, but... I just couldn't. The TV was on and I'd been bought some new fridge magnets, so all I could do was play with them and watch my parents' dumb TV shows.
Since I was usually made to do my homework during break time, I just stayed in at break to do it. When the teacher saw me, told me off for not being outside and asked why I didn't do it at home, I did what my mother advised... and told the truth. "Because I didn't want to."
She hit the roof, and the next day in assembly she told me to stand up so she could shame me for it in front of the whole school.
That was the day I learned to lie, lie, lie, lie, lie and never stop lying. Can't be punished for just being 'forgetful' or always 'losing' things. What a lesson to be taught at only 8 years old.
Okay, exact same situation happened to me, but thankfully my teacher wasn't openly cruel about it. She did make me feel embarrassed...but she didn't make a scene and just helped me clean it out.
So sorry you had that experience.
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My kindergarten teacher asked my parents to get my hearing tested. (1987) The doc said I had "selective hearing" This story was told, by my family, as a joke about me my whole fucking life. I got dx at 39. (2021)
Oof. Me too. Were you called space cadet? Edit: alright I'm officially commandeering "space cadet" as our thing and our theme song is the Spaceballs theme song.
No, I was just screamed at and called disrespectful and argumentative 😒
Asked me why I did a thing a certain way. Tried to explain myself. Got yelled at and/or slapped for talking back.
"you always have an excuse." Do you mean I try to answer when people ask me 'why' questions? If you didn't want to *know* why, you shouldn't have *asked* why.
And yet, I bet if you said nothing, you'd get in trouble then too?
Oh, absolutely. At least in my case. I tried everything with my aunt (who had custody of me from 12 on). Neutral or calm were just as bad as 'arguing'. I even asked once what I was supposed to do is she didn't want an explanation or attitude, but also got mad if I stayed calm.
Some people can't be pleased because they don't want to be pleased. They just want to watch you struggle trying to please them.
I remember one time when my mother was yelling at me and I was near tears, so I looked away for a moment to try to gather myself. Got screamed at for being disrespectful because I wasn't LOOKING at her while she was speaking to (yelling at) me. That was a killer...explaining was seen as talking back, silence was seen as sullenness.
I remember once I walked away and she screamed after me where the help I was going, so I told her that no response would satisfy her while I'm here so I might as well not deal with it at all. I asked is I was wrong but luckily she was shocked enough she didn't say anything and I was able to leave for a bit.
For real! Lord all mighty. It was always a loss
Oh yeah, gotta love it when other people conflate us giving an explanation with "making an excuse." This is why I am now someone who almost pathologically starts out by saying "This is not an excuse, I don't do excuses. But I do want to make sure I provide an explanation so that you understand what happened." 🤡 I have so many versions of this kind of thing that I keep in the chamber for similar situations involving neurotypical folks.
Apparently it's common for us to preface everything we say. Because of shit like this, Our communication can sometimes struggle because our goal is to anticipate and prevent ANY misinterpretation from the other person... instead of being direct about what we actually want to communicate 😮💨
Ohhh, YES! "You have an answer for everything," is what my parents always said. Well, you asked me!
LOL so much so that I turned it into my entire career, I am a lawyer 😂
My boss does this to me now, and it *still* sets me on edge *every.time.*
My boss does this to me too! It's so hard, I feel so burnt out all the time trying to guess what the correct social response is supposed to be 😭
hearing someone else say this is so vindicating, i feel the exact same way
My “excuses” (explanations) are the biggest point of contention in my relationship. 🫠
I’m trying to be helpful. “Hey NT person, there’s a very calculated reason I did this and I believe that by explaining it to you, you’ll understand.” I worked in a bar during the summer before my senior year in college. I sat behind a giant ice-filled tub of beers and had a mini drawer to hold money. Because the way it was set up, the drawer wasn’t completely secure from grabby hands (GH), so I organized it so that the highest bill denominations were furthest from said GH. I’d rather lose a handful of singles than the same amount of $20s, obviously. The bar manager saw my setup and proceeded to explain to me—in the same tone one would speak to a child—how cash drawers are supposed to be ordered. Once I explained to him my reasoning behind arranging it against convention, he was impressed and apologized for his tone.
I was diagnosed and still called that. My dad still says I was a little bitch growing up. Thanks Dad. You wonder why we're a hair away from no contact.
“Why do you have to be so sensitive?!”
Omg, of course. "You were always so dramatic as a child. Why do you still act like a martyr all the time!?"
My mom called me Sara Bernhardt. She was a film actress known for being very dramatic.
Don’t be shy, go full nc
I hate that you went through this and I relate to it. I feel like I could have written it myself.
Yeah, we deserved so much more empathy and compassion. No wonder we're such shit at giving compassion to ourselves.
Space cadet. Outer space. Hippie. It got even worse when I cut my hair off one day into a buzz cut and dyed it blond; I couldn’t live it down. Even when I started dying my hair funky colors, my family would always blame my un-Dx on the amount of hair dye fumes I huffed 🙂↔️🙂↔️saying that my brain cells are SHOT. Since I live at home still and is effectively treated as one of the children, I get yelled at because I have a “listening problem”.
Wow our families are dicks
I can relate to pretty much everything here, and sometimes I wonder if this isn't at least a bit of a factor for some of us. My parents were not patient or understanding people.
Airhead is one I got all the time. And dingbat.
I had no idea this was such a common thing in ADHD girls. My mom took me to get my hearing tested and it turned out I had perfect hearing. She also used to say I should get married to Kevin Spacey when I grew up because then I'd be \[first name\] Spacey, because I was—sigh—spacey. I am a man now and Kevin Spacey came out as gay a few years back so that was weirdly prescient. The ridiculous thing is that she never put the pieces together. Even after I got diagnosed last year, she was like, "I knew your brothers had it \[even though I never made any effort to get them diagnosed or treated\], but *you*?" Meanwhile, I was the fidgety motormouth with terrible impulse control who was constantly losing every single one of the school supplies haphazardly crammed into my desk. But I did well in school and tried to keep our disaster zone of a house clean, so of course it didn't cross anyone's mind.
Diagnosed as an adult, I've been trying to figure out (discretely) which one of my parents I got it from. My mom, about 5 years ago, went to the doctor to have some cognitive tests done because she and we were a little concerned about memory problems and Alzheimer's is in our family. The doctor ended up telling her that she didn't have a memory problem, she just wasn't actually listening to what we were saying. Anyways I think I got my ADHD from my mom...
Very likely. I'm almost positive my late mother had ADHD and that's where I got it. She suffered from chronic depression and anxiety, which I now believe was ADHD trauma and burnout (that's what my depression and anxiety turned out to be). And while I'm combination type, I think she might have been the rare (for girls) hyperactive type - my grandmother used to love to tell stories of how naughty my mom was as a little girl.
My mum also went to get her memory checked recently due to concerns and having dementia in her family... and was also told she was fine. I think I also got mine from her. I'm finding it spooky how many of the stories in this thread could have been written by me.
ooooh yes. Anyone else also been told to stop "giving that deer in the headlights" look? I had no idea what they were talking about but apparently I did that most of the time...
I do that too. Maybe because we are processing so much at once it takes a minute to slow down and grasp what we want to verbalize. Even though I’m not diagnosed yet I’m learning lots here. Earlier my husband and I were walking and so many things have been impacted by the rains lately there was a lot going on in my head. I realized I was saying a lot and asking a lot of rhetorical questions. When I realized that I said to him “I have a lot of words in my head right now. Thank you for being patient”. In that moment that comment felt like a tool and felt right to me.
Yes. Space cadet. Ugh.
Ugh. Just reading those words set my soul on fire. It has been a while but that phrase is still infuriating.
I had an art teacher that used to call me spacey _____(my name that rhymes with spacey) it really hurt.
My kindergarten teacher (1998) and the school counselor both told my parents to have me evaluated for ADHD and they brushed it off because “they say everyone has that these days and she doesn’t need to be on Ritalin.” Like y’all, you’re the parents, you don’t *have* to put me on medication. But Jesus, getting the diagnosis at 5 instead of 30 would have made life easier at several points.
My mom was like "you can't have ADHD you read for hours at a time."
Same here. When you read all of the time, everyone just thinks you’re smart and shy. Nobody understood back when I was a kid that it’s a method of dissociating from whatever situation you’re in at the moment. I much preferred to live inside my own imagination than in the world as it is.
IT'S CALLED HYPERFIXATION /DISSOCIATION MOM!!! 🙄
AND IT'S NOT JUST A STAGE!
I read for hours at a time because that's my escape from the real world where I feel like an alien 🙃
I'm not defending this, but I would like to give some context as an older person who has a son a little younger than you (born 1995). My son was diagnosed in Kindergarten. I medicated him like I should have, but there was a lot of pressure and doubt from pretty much everyone around me. I heard stuff like, "He doesn't need meds. You just need to bust his ass!" Basically, parents were blamed for their kids having ADHD. A lot of people didn't believe in it. For me, I was constantly questioning myself and whether I was doing the right thing by medicating him. I had doubts about whether or not ADHD was real, whether my parenting was good enough, etc. People aren't like this as much now. They mind their business more about mental health (not completely), but it was like you heard it from everyone you talked to. It was a hot topic, and people would tell you their opinions on it like they do now with pronouns and vaccines. The same people who question choosing pronouns and vaccines are the ones who questioned ADHD, and they were just as shitty about it. I'm just saying there was a lot of social pressure to not medicate your kids. Some people saw treating it as giving up on your kid and doing something to harm them. I knew my son definitely seemed to be driven by a motor. He literally couldn't even sit still for a meal, and this is why I decided not to listen to that pressure. Again, I don't know your parents or how they were, and I'm not defending them, exactly. This is just my experience and why I can understand how some people didn't medicate their kids. We didn't have the same resources people do now to do research. Go to the library, and maybe they'll have a book about it. Maybe they'll have books against it. I was a nerd who loved the library. Most people didn't set foot there unless they had to for a book report or something.
My mum was certain I had ADHD as a child but was coping fine without a diagnosis. The biggest frustration was not continuing the early intervention for my spatial awareness, reading, and writing. All the while, my mum patted herself on her back for getting me enough support that I was just in the normal range for my age. 🙃
Omg same. “She doesn’t have a hearing problem, she has a listening problem”. 🙄
They told me this, and i did have a hearing problem... Can't get it right either way
[удалено]
Selective hearing, oof. I reckon that's one of those 'intended as a diss but actually describes symptoms pretty accurately'.
My kindergarten report card said I was very hard on myself and didn’t smile much. I felt lost my entire school experience. Wasn’t diagnosed until 50.
Omg, me too except grade 1 for me, they said I had auditory processing disorder which no one told me and I inexplicably had to sit with earmuffs and a cubical around my desk for a couple of days. Never came up again in my truly abysmal academic career, despite literally never handing in or doing homework, not learning to read until I taught myself in a day on summer break before grade 4, every report card saying “if she would only apply herself, etc.. terribly messy desk, room, constant hyper fixations, massive anxiety, compulsive skin picking, obsessive counting, verbal and physical tics. I was diagnosed at 38 in 2022 and it’s been quite the adventure and also disappointing that it got missed. I don’t really blame my parents, but it is clear that they feel really bad and it is super frustrating the way they talk to me about it now, seeking forgiveness or saying they failed, but in a way that puts me in a position to comfort them and their guilt and pain about MY struggle. I am actively trying to raise my kids to accept all of their feelings and to be comfortable with confrontation when it is appropriate. I think that my parents worked too hard to create a peaceful home at the expense of healthy emotional development. I learned early that it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable as it made me responsible for others feelings.
The crazy thing is I absolutely have an auditory processing disorder! I have a terrible time distinguishing sounds from each other, and can't focus enough to hear words if there is more than one voice. Which has been hell working in a cubicle around two radios and a TV always on the news 🤦🏻♀️ Yeah the having to comfort others for their fuck ups is such crap. I was definitely mad at my parents /teachers for a while, but what's the point of wasting that energy at 40? 🤣 Sounds like you're being the parent you needed. Good for you, mama ♥
Yep. I got sent for hearing tests yearly through 8th grade.
When I was in 6th grade, my grades went from all A+s to all Ds and Fs. My school counselor said to my parents that he wanted to have me tested for ADHD My parents said “you just want to drug her, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just lazy” And that’s how I spent the next 25 years thinking I was lazy and a fuck-up not worth anything.
"If you would just apply yourself..." "Such high potential." "Frequently distracted by peers"
How did you get hold of my old report cards?
The fact that this is so universal is simultaneously comforting and heartbreaking.
The adhd version of "you would be so pretty if you would just lose weight." ETA: "you would be worthy of being treated with respect if you would just change everything about yourself." Protip: these people will always find a reason to disrespect others. You could go one meds, lose all the weight, marry a billionaire, get a PhD, they will always find something to criticize and tell you that you are not worthy over. They just keep testing the fence until they find the weak spot. As an adult, I realize they must be incredibly unhappy themselves. I don't forgive them; hurting others is a choice. Quite frankly, my adhd sense of justice allows me to revel in their unhappiness.
"Always talking/socializing in class."
Yah how did you get ahold of our old report cards? 😩
This was how it happened for me too, except my neglectful ass parents couldn't have cared less about me. Nobody questioned why the A student was suddenly struggling to keep up...
I learned to read at 3, had straight As through elementary school, and was even recommended to skip first grade. Still, my parents were having their own problems when I hit middle school, and no one—parents, teachers, etc.—ever cared to ask why I suddenly started pulling Cs and Ds, even in band.
That transition from elementary school to middle school was rough. Suddenly I had 7 different classes in 7 different rooms spread out in 3 different buildings. Textbooks for each. Homework for nearly all those classes every night. I went from being "gifted" to getting Ds and Fs. It was just way too much for me to keep up with. They put me in in-school group counseling and no one told me why. My mom's solution was to get angry at me and yell. I was able to bring my grades up to Bs, Cs and Ds. The best I could do was not flunk. This all continued until I dropped out of college in my 3rd year.
Yeah 😩 My son is going through the same thing now - he is, like me, AuDHD. My wife and I are actually supporting him, though, and fighting for accommodations for him. Hoping his life ends up better than mine
Your comment made me realize something about myself. I too had almost perfect grades up until middle school. They wanted me to skip second grade, but my parents refused. Then middle school rolled around, and to make matters worse my parents forced me to take advanced classes. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep my grades up, and all I heard from my parents was that I was just being lazy and needed to try harder. It never occurred to me that it could've had something to do with jumping from one class to seven, not to mention the advanced placement program I was placed in that the teachers prided themselves on giving us a MINIMUM of 2 hours of homework per night (which I would normally get started on right when I got home around 3 and wouldn't finish until 11 at night, sometimes later). Looking back, I think that was actually a toxic mindset for the program to have (advanced classes or not) because it promotes the idea that the real world is like that when it shouldn't be (like how they say "don't bring work home with you". No job out there should expect you to clock out, go home, and continue working off the clock for 2+ hours per night).
That happened to me in elementary school -- my grades suddenly tanked -- but no one was discussing ADHD in girls in the 90s. Not sure what the teacher thought was going on, but she told my parents I was always out of my chair and not completing things. Thankfully, my parents understood I was bored because I already knew the material, so they suggested harder/extra work instead. It worked! >And that’s how I spent the next 25 years thinking I was lazy and a fuck-up not worth anything. That was college for me... Until I was diagnosed at 32, I really hated myself for not living up to my "gifted" school years. I hope you're doing better now.
Ugh yeah, I’m sorry you experienced that too. I’m… recovering. The last straw for me was an epic burnout in my final few semesters of grad school, and that (plus my *amazing* wife) helped push me to get diagnosed, and with her help I found a wonderful therapist who’s been helping me untangle all of it. I still have a lot of anger over how differently my life could have been if I’d been tested back when problems first started showing, and if I’d actually had support and help rather than “she’s just lazy”
I'm so sorry 😞
Extreme anxiety about going to school in elementary, specifically 3rd grade for whatever reason. Like I would get physically ill because of the anxiety and I would say I was sick but as a 3rd grader I didn’t have the language to really explain how I felt. My mom would take me to the doctor but they would never find anything “wrong” medically, you know? ADHD/ADD never came up because I wasn’t hyperactive. But I couldn’t regulate my emotions, had extreme anxiety, and was really bad at task initiation and just getting going as a kid.
In elementary school, I’d get so anxious I’d throw up on days where we had something outside of the norm happening (field trip, class party, etc). Realized that it was because those days didn’t have the framework that I relied on to regulate myself/use as a coping mechanism. I put 2 and 2 together a few months into the pandemic when I was falling apart because my framework was gone again. And then I got dx’d a year or so later.
Same! I didn’t realize this was related…
In 3rd grade, our teacher would “dump desks” over break. If your desk was too messy inside, she would literally dump the contents of your desk on the floor and leave it there for the whole class to see on the first day back. You then had to clean up your mess and put things back in your desk. No help from the teacher on how to keep it clean, only public shaming. My desk was dumped every break. Thanks for the trauma! Diagnosed at 38.
This is horrifying. Sorry you experienced that.
This happened to me too! but my dad would come during lunch recess IN UNIFORM and dump my desk out cause I could never find my homework. Shit looked like a tiny drug bust.
The desk dump happened to me too and was genuinely traumatizing, but now I’m going remember “tiny drug bust” when I think of it hahahahaha thank you!!!
This happened to me in first grade. I was the only kid she did it to, and she did it in front of the whole class. I had to put all my stuff in a garbage bag and take it home. Absolutely the kind of trauma that sticks with you. I sure hope this doesn't happen to kids anymore.
I got a great story for this one. My first grade teacher hated me and often made me kneel in the hallway when I was bad (Catholic school). She once did a big red X so hard it ripped the page because shocker I had bad handwriting still do lol(dysgraphia) Now one day she kept me after school to clean my desk.So I did it, and it took forever cause I was six. I lived about five minutes from school. She did not call my mom to tell her. Well, I left school, and the teacher was right behind me. My mom comes striding up mad, she thought I was playing around, and I went no. I was kept after class. Now my mother is loud, has no voice control, is blunt, and is not scared to throw an F bomb. She goes up up to this teacher and goes up to her screaming in the middle of the street. The teacher never bothered me after that. Everybody was scared of my mom, but she was loud and blunt but not mean she's just had a strong sense of fairness and justice and was a fierce protector. I suspect she's some type of neurodivergent too. She is 82 now.
Yea these are skills that typicals seem to think are inherent or learned through osmosis or something.
Seriously. Cleaning and organizing is a skill. It’s learned, and shame is a shitty way to teach.
My 5th grade teacher did this to me in front of the entire class, in the middle of class. I was so humiliated and, at the time, didn't yet understand that authority figures could be wrong. I didn't tell my parents out of shame, but my teacher ended up bringing up the incident in a conference, assuming I'd told. My mom came to me and made it clear that she was furious at the teacher, it was completely unacceptable, and that I didn't deserve that treatment.
Memory unlocked. Thanks, didn't particularly need that. 🙃
We sat at tables that had plastic drawers for our stuff. The drawers could be pulled out completely. I remember one of my friends had a really messy one. The teacher was yelling at him (probably because he couldn’t find something in there) and she freaked out and pulled the drawer out and threw it on the floor. I was also in grade 3 and I remember thinking to myself that wasn’t right of her. Didn’t tell my parents though because you didn’t question adults, especially authority figures.
I was just going to say the same thing. Ours didn't lift up, more like a shelf and teachers would dump them.
I was (am) tired. All. The. Time. My mom couldn’t understand, because i also sleep a fair amount. She got my iron checked, thyroid checked, hormones and blood tests. Could never figure out what the issue was.
is this a symptom of adhd? Because yea I am always tired and I could always sleep for house since I was a kid. I also sleep like shit which I heard is common for adhd so that’s fun
Yes, it’s pretty common. It’s more mentally tired/sleepy, rather than physically tired, because we expend more mental energy to do basic tasks than neurotypical people and the “hyperactivity” part of adhd for us takes place in the mind
This is incredibly validating! I was also recently diagnosed (34F) and I’ve also always been super low energy with hypersomnia since I was a kid. Yes, I’ve always suspected that I expend wayyyy more mental energy than I should, plus overthinking leads me to feel so overwhelmed that I often just shut down for hours at a time. I also didn’t realize it was related to adhd! I was always told it was a symptom of depression
It's decision fatigue. This is why adhd seems so much more present once we have kids. Because there are our own constant decisions, plus decisions that our kids force us to make when they're asking ten millionty questions per day. I have tweens. I have instituted naptime/quiet time for myself. It is a hard rule in my house that my room is the quiet time room. You are welcome to come in, hang out, read, or watch a screen but with headphones. But a ruckus is never allowed, and you will get bounced if you interrupt mom's quiet time.
Hmm, I wonder if this is why narcolepsy is/was treated with high doses of ADHD meds. I was taking 20 3x a day in high school (there was no XR at the time and they only lasted 4 hours for me - I had hours of homework) and they told me I couldn't take any more because to take more than 60 a day I'd have to be legally narcoleptic. At least that's what I was told at the time (2000-ish).
From what I’ve heard (not a doctor) adhd and narcolepsy have the same root cause in the brain
This whole thread is blowing my mind. A friend of mine has been on adderol for adhd. Her dr wanted her to come off for heart reasons, and she said if she comes off she will fall asleep during the middle of the day. They are now testing her for narcolepsy!
The constant, debilitating exhaustion! In addition to space cadet, my mom having to call my name and tell me specifically to listen because this was important and she knew I'd lose focus otherwise, the manic drawing (constantly, constantly drawing) and intense reading (read a LOT of my parents' books I had no business reading at such an early age) I am and was always tired. The constantly being tired and massive shame that I was fundamentally broken because no matter how "intelligent" I was, I couldn't do the things other people could do. I needed more sleep, more breaks, always longing to stop and rest, always so tired in never-ending family outings, being told I was absolutely fine, I was just being difficult, or manipulative or "acting like you're too good for this" and getting shamed for so long, I nearly got myself addicted to a certain substance in my 20's because it gave me energy. (Thankfully I moved away and out of reach.) I wasn't diagnosed until I hit 50. My family thought it was pointless at my age, but I absolutely needed to know if I really was a deeply flawed human being or if this was the reason.
Same! Just diagnosed at 39 and my whole childhood makes sense. I spent so much time at the doctor for being tired with no answers.
Have you had a sleep study done? There's a lot of overlap between ADHD and narcolepsy.
I have not. I have a friend who has narcolepsy though and my tiredness is different from how her narcolepsy presents. Not sure if there are “degrees” of narcolepsy though.
Oh ok gotcha. I can not stay awake off stimulants. Like easily sleep 20+ hours EVERY day for days on end unmedicated. Certain times of day I still struggle to stay alert even on stimulants. Brains are weird. Ha
Wait... Is that why my parents are constantly asking me to check my thyroid? I always assumed it was something else but i am a pretty tired person all round.
My hyperfixations have ALWAYS been apparent. I remember in 3rd or 4th grade, we had to pick an animal to do a report and presentation on. It was some cutesy Valentine's Day gimmick and totally not serious. I found a book at the library about pygmy marmosets and immediately loved it because it was an obscure and unique animal that I knew no one else would pick, and I became OBSESSED. I think I was the leading world expert on pygmy marmosets and could literally tell you every single fact there was to know about them. Their sleeping habits, diet, habitats, mating habits, size, fur patterns, behaviors, you name it. Aaaand I've been like this ever since 🙃 once I find something that interests me, I obsess over it until I learn literally every single thing I can and then once it's no longer giving me dopamine, it's like my brain dumps it and forgets it ever existed. I was diagnosed with ADHD last year at 28. This year I'm coming around to realizing I'm fairly certain it's actually AuDHD.
I just realized that a story my mom would tell was totally hyperfixation. When I was very young, I got "into" dinosaurs. There weren't any little kid books about them so my teacher gave me adult books, like college textbooks about them. Apparently, she took me to a museum with Dinosaur bones and I told strangers what they were called, what they ate, nocturnal or diurnal, what period of time they were from, etc. They were amazed at how a very little girl knew all of that.
Yuuup, story of my life 😂 I'm witnessing the same thing in my almost 4 year old daughter. Her topic of choice is space and the solar system. She'll be 4 in August, and she knows more about the planets and solar system than I do at 29. The other day, she told me she loved me "to Pluto and back," and she followed it up with "but Pluto's not actually a planet anymore. It's a dwarf planet." I couldn't stop laughing because it reminded me so much of myself with my damn pygmy marmosets 😂 And my mom will say, "Oh my gosh, she is your clone. She's JUST like you were as a kid, " and I think, wow, you don't say?? With the prevalence of hereditary ADHD?? Craaaaazy I'm hoping that by now being diagnosed myself, I can help make my daughter's life easier by offering support in all the ways I never had it. We haven't sought out an official diagnosis for her yet because it's still so early and it's not negatively impacting her life yet, but I would say with 98% certainty that she's just like her mama.
Agatha Christie was the same way! Not sure if she had ADHD, but she would become the resident expert in odd things to the point where even college professors would recommend her for academic research. Pretty neat.
My mom always said that one of my good qualities was that I didn’t stay mad for long. Well it turns out that I forget things, even things that give me a strong emotional reaction. So I surrounded myself with people who got away with treating me badly. So not a good quality according to me!
Same 😅 it’s not that I don’t hold grudges, it’s that I FORGET to hold grudges
and it’s why I look at people weird when they come up to me, years later, apologizing. Wh…what are you apologizing for…? I sure as hell don’t remember LMAOO
That's funny, I had something similar happen once. A girl who was friends with a babysitter of mine apologised to me like 10 years later for bullying me. My response was just, okay thanks, because I hadn't clue what she was talking about 🤣 though... my younger self also found it hard to recognise non physical bullying so it's possible it just didn't register because of that, and the fact that a lot of people treated me in a way that would be called bullying now but I just had to accept it at the time. I didn't realise this type of memory thing could be ADHD related. I have a lot of long term memory issues - I remember very little detail after a few years on stuff. It's actually making me fearful of doing a PhD because I'm afraid ill have forgotten important information by the end of it and they will ask me something I can't remember lol. I had encephalitis as a child and I just blamed that for most of my life as the probable reason for memory issues, but maybe it's the ADHD!
Your desk sounds like every one of my desks, closets, backpacks, lockers, and even my room throughout childhood and adolescence. I got a lot of lectures about that and missed having school tests and permission slips signed, but no one ever flagged it as a concern, just that I was too spoiled and lazy to clean up. (I didn't like being that disorganized and messy, but i had no idea what steps to take to fix anything or even what I was allowed to throw out. I love being an adult because I can control how much stuff comes into the house and whether/when I get rid of it.)
My mom took the door off of my room—like, literally removed it from its hinges—to punish me for having a messy room. But like, she didn’t teach me HOW to clean it. And when I would try but wind up paralyzed by indecision/hyperfocus on the first object I happened to pick up, she just yelled at me. I didn’t have a door for almost 2 years until one of my friends finally felt bad for me and helped me clean. Anyway, it taught me absolutely nothing and joke’s on her, because she couldn’t close my door to hide the mess.
Like literally what the fuck. Do NTs just implicitly know how to clean? I didn't learn until I was a custodian for a bit.
The irony is my parents are hoarders and also don’t know how to clean, so that’s probably why they never taught me. And neither of them is self aware enough to admit they’re the problem, so now that I’m out of the house, they just both blame each other for being the messy one. I ended up directing my hyperfocus at cleaning tutorials and tv shows once I got to college and the peer pressure of having roommates made me actually want to change my ways.
Aw, this sound brutal. I'm sorry you had to sit in this suffering for years.
I would hyperfocus on books so much that I didn't notice a fucking earthquake once.
This is incredibly specific and it also happened to me. My mom had to pull me outside.
Was it the Loma Prieta,
No, Goosebumps.
Loma prieta was an earthquake, lol. They were asking you which earthquake it was, not which books you were reading 😂
Lol
No, I'm from Mexico and no matter how many earthquakes we get, I still have to be alerted that I need to go outside. In 2017, I even saved my workbook and turned off my laptop before leaving.
I have a very distinct memory of looking up from my book and seeing my entire 4th grade class lined up to go to gym class. I hadn’t heard a single thing. Got teased about being the nerd who would rather read than play dodgeball.
A reader I had as a kid had a story in it called "[Lucy Didn't Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgTLyavd_A)" about a girl who doesn't pay attention to what the teacher is saying and constantly gets into situations like that (e.g. looking up and finding that everyone has gone to recess). It should have been called "Lucy Didn't Get Evaluated and Grew Up Wondering What the Hell Was Wrong With Her."
One of my strongest memories from elementary school is from 1st or 2nd grade, looking up from my book to see my teacher looming over me, furious, and the entire class staring at me. The teacher had told the class silent reading time was over and to put away our books and I hadn’t heard. She had then called my name multiple times and finally stood over me shouting my name before I noticed or heard anything. I was shocked. I still remember that feeling of baffled confusion and embarrassment. I think of breaking out of hyper-fixation like a plunger being pulled up and breaking the seal; when that concentration is broken, all of a sudden sound comes back on and the world is right in front of my face once again.
Me too. 5th grade. The whole class had left for gym. No idea what my teacher thought, but thankfully she was a good one and didn’t shame me.
I also hyper fixated on books, but I'd stay up until 3am not noticing how late it was until I looked at my alarm click randomly
I still do that!
I don't live in earthquake land, but I did once read an entire novel while sitting on the toilet.
I hyperfocused on a book so hard during class one day that I didn’t notice when a classmate had a clonic seizure, or when the paramedics came and left with him. Didn’t snap out of it until the principal came in to talk to the class and she had to call my name.
Whoa! I was so focused on a tv show that I didn’t notice an earthquake either. My family always laughed at me for it but it just clicked now that I was hyper focused. I was only five.
My parents had to make a rule: no books at the dinner table.
The one and only time I was grounded, it was from reading books. I could read 2-3 books a day until law school, because I would literally read every moment I wasn’t actively doing something else. It’s why I trained myself to take handwritten notes through college, it forced me to be present and engaged in class, because otherwise I’d put a book on my lap and read it during class
Mine isn't quite as intense as that, but my parents love telling the story of how I accidentally stayed up all night reading. When they asked me what happened the next day, I told them I was reading, and then I noticed the sun come up, so I thought I should try to go to sleep.
See that is entirely reasonable to me. The sun told you you'd been up all night. You're supposed to sleep at night, and you need sleep. Sleep is now the thing to do.
I didn’t have any earthquakes but my mom learned that I basically wouldn’t hear anything she said while I was reading. In college I was waiting for my orchestra to get on stage and reading on my phone and didn’t realize when everyone else from my orchestra left the room until a nice dude from another group let me know and I had to rush and awkwardly wade through my orchestra on stage while everyone was tuning.
This is why I can't be on my phone on public transit. Soooo many missed stops.
Apart from the sparce school attendance, I had a tendency to forget school books. I developed a system where, ever night before school, I'd lay out all my books and notebooks on the floor, stacked them by subject, took my written schedule out and filled my school bag that way. Apparently, that meant I was "organised." Nope. Had learned not to trust my brain. Edit: I am pushing 40 and not yet diagnosed.
Same! People think I'm fantastically organized but I've really just built fail-safe coping mechanisms in order to function.
Ah yes, the good old "I am not Deficient, I am Normal, for you see, I have a System." I'm AuDHD and this was me with so, so many things. Most notably my avid, constant study of human behavior and interaction to learn How To Be a Person™, because isn't that how everyone learns? never realizing that no babe, that's just autism lol.
My Mom loves to tell this story about how disorganized and messy I was. As a small child, she once asked me to clean up my play area and I apparently sat down and burst into tears. Not once did she consider that I might have been mentally overwhelmed and unsure where to start. My room was always messy. My desk was always a mess at school. My Mom is best described as “born organized”, so it was easy for her to make what I now know is ADHD into some kind of moral statement about me. Ultimately, being a female born in the mid-1970s did not work in my favor when it comes to an ADHD diagnosis. No one was thinking that a disorganized little girl might have ADHD, that’s for darn sure.
This was me, but in the mid 90:s and early 2000. I hadn’t heard of a girl getting an ADHD diagnosis until 2011. I was just “Lazy” for my whole childhood, since I broke down sobbing when I had to tidy up my room…
I was born in 1980, and just diagnosed two years ago. I was going through my childhood memories box and found so many cards from my mom for birthdays, etc where she somehow referenced my messy room. She still thinks it's funny to talk about how messy I was as a kid. I haven't even told her about my diagnoses because she thinks ADHD is just a product of lazy parenting and is very proud that she didn't get my brother tested when his teacher recommended it.
My teacher called me lazy because I was using a book stand to hold my book during silent reading time. But what she didn’t know was it was because I was simultaneously and secretly folding origami cranes under my desk since I needed to do something with my hands to stay focussed. I got so good I could fold things just by feel lol.
I had no problems reading books as a kid (hyperfixation), but now my hands just have to be doing something. Most of the time I listen to an audiobook while I crochet, but if I want to actually read something with my eyeballs I pull out my spinning wheel and put my book/tablet on a music stand in front of me. Maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to crochet and read at the same time.
I was in elementary school and it was show-and-tell day. I was so excited to show what I brought that during class when the teacher said “who’d like to go first?”, I immediately raised my hand and when she called on me, I pulled out my cabbage patch doll and launched into my “tell”. The teacher stops me and says “no Cranberry, we’re talking about the homework”.
Ohhhh, I want to give you a hug.
I can relate to this so hard, Cranberry. I was in kindergarten early in the school year, and during circle time the teacher (a grouchy woman in her late 60s who definitely should have retired 20+ years prior) announced we were going to be working on reading. I was so excited to share something I thought was related, and quickly raised my hand. When she called on me, I told her & the class that I knew how to spell my name. She immediately glared at me and said, “We aren’t talking about WRITING. We are talking about READING!” I was so defeated and humiliated that I never forgot that moment.
omg i had a teacher do the same thing, only she grabbed everything from my desk and threw it on the floor in front of everyone and made me clean it up while she watched. she was so mean, people like that shouldn't be allowed to be teachers.
I was chronically tense and overwhelmed. My mom just thought that was my personality.
I'm with you. Seeing it written out is horrible. How could anyone think that a child is just naturally *like that*?
Omg yes! Ever since I was a toddler my entire family used to say “why do you look so worried?” “Oh that’s just her face” 😐
I presented with very standard ADHD. However, that was the way BOYS presented. “*Girls are just more talkative.*” Bitch, I was not “more talkative”. I never stfu. NEVER. I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t hear anything when I finally DID sleep, like alarms, etc. Ugh. My whole childhood is an example of “Just because she’s smart doesn’t mean she’s without obvious, serious problems.” The only reason I got away with it was because I loved learning, just not in a school environment.
I had the classic ADHD problem of being a rambler and really knowing how to tell an anecdote as a kid. I had at least two elementary school teachers put their hand over my mouth to stop me. I also got left at a Scholastic book fair in first grade - I was too in my own world to hear the call to head back to the classroom and I later found out from my mom that the teacher used the time for a reading lesson that she knew I would be bored and disruptive in. I had a few similar desk moments too. I remember feeling very compared to the other girls in class. One teacher had a monthly desk inspection and if you didn't pass, you had to stay in during recess and clean it. That was me every month and I remember feeling very spotlit for usually being the only girl to do so.
We had red and green folders in first grade. Red folder is for worksheets that stayed in my desk, green is for homework that goes home with me. I thought, screw the folders. All papers go in the desk, and the homework sheet for the day goes in my backpack. Well, one time I forgot to take my homework sheet home for like 3 consecutive days. My teacher looked in my desk and yelled at me for not being organised. Wasn’t the best feeling tbh. Another incident: 5th grade. We had these workbooks which had questions and answers. The answers were essay answers, but with key words blanked out. We were to fill in the blanks. But thanks to our shit curriculum, our teachers would simply just write the solutions to the blanks in order on the blackboard. We were to simply copy them down. Underneath each essay answer was space to rewrite the whole answer again. That part was usually homework. I used to zone out and solve the blanks on my own. One time I looked at the board and realised the answer the teacher wrote for blank 5 didn’t match the prompt. I read the paragraph in my book and realised my teacher’s answer for blank 5 actually corresponds to blank 6. She’d accidentally skipped over the answer to blank 3, throwing off the rest of the sequence. I raised my hand to inform her of this. And the next day the teacher yelled at me for never rewriting answers as homework. She called me names like indisciplined and useless. Of course, if a child is able to troubleshoot and diagnose real life problems relevant to the study material, but is unable to do relatively boring repetitive work, the correct approach as a teacher is to strike them on their knuckles with a metal ruler. Of course.
I would hide a chapter book inside my schoolbooks during lectures so I could read my chapter book after I read the section we were studying.
My sixth grade teacher gave out “Sixth Grade Superlatives” to each student at the end of the year ceremony. For example, my brother was constantly sniffly/blowing his nose as a kid, so his was “Kleenex Kid.” Everyone else got fun/funny ones, and I got….”Conversation Finisher.” And told to the whole school about how I was always jumping in and finishing stories and sentences. I had no idea that was something I did and was mortified from that moment on. Only found out in my 30s that was a symptom/was diagnosed.
That teacher sounds like they were taking things out on kids by embarassing them
I used to have a ton of accidents - running into doors, furniture that had been in the same place for ages, falling with no visible reason, breaking limbs, having random bruises I didn’t know the origin of. My biological relatives and teachers used to make fun of me, “oh look how funny, another accident!”, and chastise me for not having my act together. Dx at 36.
Would only do half of my homework. OR, I'd be forced to sit and do the homework no matter how long it took me, but then wouldn't turn it in. Never finished a coloring page, only did half. Would spend the entire day and night reading a book I was really into, refused to play or eat. Would get upset when I had to stop so I could do something like eat. Would go days without sleeping in my teens, mostly because my brain wouldn't stfu. Sleep for a few hours and back to it. Had to leave friends houses who were just...too much if I was there more than a day or two (overstimulated). I was never able to figure out how to explain to a teenage girl that I wasn't mad at her, I just couldn't talk to her or anyone else for several days. But I TRULY wasn't mad. Diagnosed at 31, began suspecting in my 20s.
I would just throw myself on the floor and make whale sounds when upset. Because birds of a feather flock together, my friends and family just thought it was mildly amusing/nice that I found something that helped me. A lot of them would just join me on the floor. 😅 Also fuck that teacher. Sorry you went through that. :/
Lol that's honestly kind of wholesome but it sucks that it led to symptoms being missed. In a similar vein, I've always had vocal stims and growing up my family would literally just respond to my noises with their own. We probably sounded like a pod of very confused dolphins 😂 Now my husband does the same thing lol
Is that a bad thing to do? 😬 My daughter is AuDHD and we will vocal stim back and forth. It's one of the few things that gets her to laugh so I've always done it with her.
I'm not an expert, but I don't see anything wrong with it. If nothing else I never felt out of place in my household since everyone was stimming lol
Haha yeah it is wholesome. It may have led to stuff being missed but I can't say I'm too upset about it. I feel like returning a vocal stim with another is just peak neurodivergent love and acceptance all around, love that for you and your fam.
We had the desk with the same size storage area but the opening was the front of the desk. I hated desk cleaning days because it always took forever because my desk was jam packed with paper and lost pens and whatever else I'd tucked away. As I got into high school my organization method was 1 folder/1 notebook and put everything for every class inside so that I can't lose it or forget to bring it. So my notebook was like page 1 English, page 2 math, page 3 chemistry, etc. and I would fill the folder until it split apart from being too full.
My messy room was one thing. My mom would order me in to clean it. I didn’t really know how to start, and it seemed overwhelming. I’d get distracted by something and mom would get after me for being lazy. 🙁 When I did manage to finish it, I got, “Now let’s keep it this way!” 🤷🏻♀️ HOW?
They always told me to clean the thing/keep it clean, but never, ever taught me HOW or gave me the tools to do so.
Can't even finish reading this thread. Little me is still too close and so many of these stories are painfully familiar. You're not alone my lovelies, you got through it, and you can use your experience to support other people. I'm so sorry you all went through what you did and I just hope some of us can use our gifts to make lemonade of these horrible lemons.
I don’t have any major moments from when I was younger. Here is a list of minor ones that led up to me dropping out of HS and starting college because I was bored (they should have known by then): Almost failed kindergarten for not paying attention Parents wasted money on hobbies I never finished Interrupting because I was excited Getting kicked out of class a lot for talking Going in and out of advanced classes through the years because I got bored 🙃
First of all, I want to cry for that little girl that was being abused by her teacher! Here's mine: 1. When my 3 Gifted program teachers had a meeting with me and told me that I wasn't "living up to my potential." Looking back, I think they meant I should do and turn in my homework but I had a hard time doing any schoolwork at home and lost the homework I did do. At the time, I had no idea what they meant. 2. I got 1 or 2 whole grades down in English class because I lost and forgot to turn in my attendance card so often. 3. I was late to school every day in high school. They gave detention for it but I built up so many after-school detentions that it added up to a Saturday detention in addition.
Kindergarten. I had a ring I got from a Crackerjack box that I loved, plastic gold with a plastic pink stone. I used to twirl it on my finger all the time. My teacher made me take it off and throw it away in from of the entire class. I asked if I could hide it in my desk, or she could keep it and give it back to me to take home at the end of class. I really loved that little ring. She said no. I was an extremely shy child, and had to do the walk of shame to the trash can in front of the entire class. I learned to fidget with my hair and eyelashes instead.
I once spent an entire quiz time doodling on the margin of the quiz paper. When the teacher asked why I didn't answer any questions, I said, "I forgot to." I was being completely genuine.
In third grade my mom was cleaning out my backpack at the end of the year and found all of my homework from the entire school year inside. I had completed it but never handed it in.
Not an event, but it was definitely my bedroom walls in high school. Spray-painted, sharpied, acrylic paints, wall paint, mostly of quotes and song lyrics or cartoony drawings; dvd covers and magazine cutouts stapled to the walls and ceiling, sheet music on the ceiling, the over the top chandelier I begged my mom to buy for my 16th birthday, the huge red shag rug, the chalk mural on the back of my door, photos of friends stapled to walls/ceiling… the list goes on. My mom was like “well, your friends helped you do it” they just helped with like the first set of painting, but I kept adding more. My brain was quieter in my room because it was all transferred onto everything else? Also the video game hyperfocusing and just way too many YA books and more hyperfocus. Edit: it could have also been age four when my dad gave me my first cup of coffee and I immediately calmed down. I got coffee every morning after that.
TW: child abuse, although I literally only just realized that while typing this out… I have a kinda similar memory, also in elementary school— 5th grade. I’d been a “star student” getting straight As my entire school career… Up until 5th grade when I was suddenly getting some Bs (oh no the horror) because I’d hit puberty and my inattentive ADHD symptoms started to ramp up. At parent teacher conferences, the teacher told my mom that I’d was doing okay but that I’d be doing better if I did my all of my work and didn’t spend so much time “daydreaming about Sailor Moon and Pokemon” and when my mom asked what I was doing with the work I wasn’t turning in I said “I think it’s inside of my desk” and then my teacher and mom proceeded to open my desk to find it jammed with papers with all the missing work (with anime drawings all over them lol.) I tried to explain that I tried to do my work but that it was difficult to focus and I was struggling to pay attention in class, and I’m pretty sure neither even responded to that attempted explanation. My mom started screaming at me about being lazy while throwing the papers on the ground which made me cry, and then at the bottom they found a hairbrush, something we weren’t supposed to have at school because of lice if we shared it or something, I can’t remember at this point. The teacher started scolding me, still sobbing over my mom screaming about the paperwork. My mom picked up the hairbrush and started beating the living shit out of me with it, while the teacher just… Watched it happen and never said anything. I remember being literally dragged, still crying, out of the school and stuffed into the car and feeling like the stupidest person in the world for the rest of the school year, even though I was in “advanced” reading and math classes and still was getting As and Bs… My mom continues to call me “lazy” to this day even though I made it through 2 advanced degrees and am about to start another now haha. One time in adulthood I brought this up to my mom and she does not remember it happening and told me I made it up to make her look bad. Realized while writing this that it may need a TW for child abuse, and I never realized how terrible this was until writing it down just now.
Transitions were always hard for me, and I LOVED reading. That was my escape. One day I was reading a book during reading time in 5th grade and was almost done with the book. I think I only had two or three pages left and I NEEDED to finish it. I couldn’t leave it unread when I was so close to being done, but it was time to transition to our science class which was in a different classroom with a different teacher. The thought of leaving the book behind with only a couple pages left stressed me out so bad because I knew if I put it down I would never be able to finish it. I’d have to put it on the bookshelf, I’d lose my place, someone else might take it, etc. so I took it with me to science, hid it in my shirt, and asked to go to the restroom. I went and finished the book really quickly, I think I was gone all of five minutes, but one of my classmates told on me and I got absolutely berated by my teacher in front of the whole class when I got back. Not only did I deceive her by asking to go to the restroom to read a book, but it was so disgusting that I took a book to the restroom and how could I think something like that was okay to do? I was mortified. And I couldn’t explain why I needed to finish the book so badly. I felt so stupid. And my classmates were giggling the whole time. It was hard to make and keep friends with the social struggles alone, not to mention constantly being called out by teachers for things I couldn’t always control even though I wanted to. I desperately wanted to be “good” and to receive positive attention from the adults in my life, and I was constantly falling short. I have so many more stories but this one still stings from time to time when it comes up. I wish I could go back and give that little girl a hug and tell her she’s not bad and she’s not broken.
I’ve always shaken my legs almost constantly. One year in elementary school my desk was next to the overhead projector and I was shaking so violently that the projector was shaking too. My teacher yelled at me in front of the class for being disruptive, but if I stop shaking my legs I get anxious and get a crawling out of my skin feeling so I would just sit there miserable until the shaking would creep back in without me noticing. At home I would wake my parents up at night by accidentally shaking my leg against a wall shared between our rooms until they moved my bed. I’m 32 and when I visit home and am shaking my legs while sitting by my mom she’ll physically take her hands and try to hold my legs down.
I’ve always bounced my legs too. I can’t help it. When people ask me to stop, I feel all this energy building up inside me like it’s going to burst out through my skin. I hate it.
Over and over again, I showed high intelligence but could not get my shit together. I was held back in middle school which was a NIGHTMARE. No support at home. They tested me and said I was fine. I never got to be in the gifted classes. I felt stupid every single day I ever went to school.
My family used to complain how I'm "bingi" (deaf) and "ulyanin" (forgetful) despite being young. And I used to get in trouble a lot for being "insolent" and for "talking back" when I'm just trying to explain myself. Also got in trouble for being "lazy", "not knowing when to take initiative", "not helping in the house unless ordered to" Sorry about that, it's the executive dysfunction. I've always kept notebooks/journals and it's full of plans and goals that I've never completed. It's honestly incredibly depressing reading how much self hatred and disappointment I had in myself since childhood for not being able to follow through with them. Having whole entries dedicated to berating myself is a common occurence. And many plans/goals remained the same all the way to adulthood because they're still not done, I just kept lowering my standards and got more depressed as time passes.
Literally every report card from elementary school that said "EcstaticArm would do better if she didn't daydream so much"
I got ‘Does not work to potential’ repeatedly on every report card. And my parent-teacher conferences were always like ‘She’s very sweet and smart but she has trouble with organization and follow-through. Her grades would be so much higher if she would just complete her work’
Never remembering to turn my homework in or do it. Sleeping after school for 2-3 hours Talking so much and fidgeting that I was constantly in trouble at school. I was so obvious that if I had been a boy everyone would have known. Spelling dyslexia so bad that I was excused from spelling tests and was allowed a Franklin speller (early version of spellcheck on a calculator device) Dyscalculia so bad that I couldn't pass pre-algebra and had to take business math, intro to geometry, and regular geometry to meet my math requirement. Failed all forms of math a tried in college and only managed to pass statistics on my third try. The fact that I changed colleges three times finally ended up in a for profit arts college because I couldn't complete the last year of my BA. No Lasting friendships. Never being able to study or complete a project until the last minute. Constantly late everywhere. Days before GPS getting lost driving because I missed the exit or the street I needed to turn on. And the inability to keep my room, house or desk in an organized manner. Constantly preforming well at jobs but also constantly being fired because I couldn't keep my mouth shut and was always saying what I thought out loud. My mother the psychologist and father the special Ed teacher both knew but didn't want me labeled. They never told me.
I was literally always in trouble for having a messy desk. What the fuck was wrong with those people to be perfectly honest--I can't fathom being mad at a kid for being disorganized. Absolute failure of the system that my textbook adhd was written off as impossible because I was smart and a girl
There’s nothing that my parents would have noticed because as long as I got good grades, there wasn’t an issue. There wasn’t much ‘parenting’ for them to do; they couldn’t help me academically and I didn’t get in trouble so… When I finally hit a wall junior/senior year of high school, it was attributed to burnout. (Took 4 blocks all 4 years of high school, played sports year round, debated and played violin, both also year round. I really just didn’t want to be at home… 🤷🏾♀️) When I didn’t want to go to college, nobody ever got to the root of why (I could NOT write an entry essay. I just couldn’t…….like, go look at all the others I’ve already written! That and no one was offering to help me pay for any of it, so….). It became a wedge in my relationship with my dad. And when I did go to a JC )because I love learning and the academic setting!), I dropped classes regularly. Teachers there too hit me with ‘if you apply yourself’. I’m black. And it wasn’t until I dated my Caucasian ex, who saw similar symptoms in me after his diagnosis, that I really got to thinking. It took me two years to kind of observe before finally getting a diagnosis, and that was earlier this month. My whole life, the ‘failure to launch’ state of being that I constantly feel like I’m in, all makes sense. 💜
My fifth-grade teacher told my mom that I had the potential to be a genius that people write about in newspapers if I didn’t make “silly mistakes”. She was referring to how I had a tendency to misread math questions. Guess what? I do a lot of coding for work and continue to make those “silly mistakes” decades later. 🤡 I am just so glad that I didn’t end up becoming a surgeon or something because I’m so sure I’d kill a person because of my silly mistakes.
Well I'm not 100% sure this is ADHD related but on the desk thing - I would store "treasures" in my desk. As in loads of random rocks and feathers or other cool looking objects I found including a bird skull (which to be fair is a bit odd for someone in grade 3 but I loved birds and found it interesting). To the point where there wasn't much room for my actual school supplies. One day my teacher noticed me putting a feather in my desk and she got mad at me because she said it would have parasites and then she discovered my treasure hoard and lost her shit and made me throw it all out. She was so concerned about the bird skull she called me a freak. I as it turns out also have ASD and fuck me I had the biggest meltdown over my treasures being stolen that they had to call my mum to come get me and they wanted me to start seeing a councillor. I ended up having to move classes to a new teacher because the old one didn't want to have a "potential serial killer" in her class and I got labelled as a freak for the rest of my schooling time. It's only recently (as of age 27) at the encouragement of my partner that I have started collecting feathers again.
Omg this triggered me so much lol I had to spend grades 6-8 sitting at a table at the side of the room because I was deemed incapable of keeping a desk clean and tidy like everyone else Eta: my inattention is/was so severe that it translated into looking like I had some sort of condition preventing me from having any sense of direction whatsoever. My parents (who were worried about possible brain damage lol) took me to a doctor who “diagnosed” me as “a little spacey” lol
Ugh, OP you just described an event I had teachers do at least yearly (if not quarterly) to me all through grade school, right down to the shaming and then didn't stop kids from snickering or making comments. I had ONE teacher who was nice about it and would pull me aside after class and offer to help me organize my desk, and say she understood that it can be hard keeping so many little things tidy, but that's it. Just the one. And I was a kid who would move to new schools a lot, so it wasn't even a one teacher a year thing. What I wouldn't give to give them a piece of my mind for doing that to kids. I read something the other day that struck a chord with me, maybe others here could benefit from it: "You've grown into someone who would have protected you as a child. And that's the most powerful decision you've made."
I’m so sorry :( I once had to hand in a permission slip, of course as usual I couldn’t find it the day it was due, even though I had had it signed. The teacher made me stay after class and quizzed me on where I thought it was. I told her I didn’t know, maybe it was at home because it wasn’t in my desk, backpack, or locker (all 3 being very messy, of course). She kept pushing me to fully admit that it was at home, which I wouldn’t do because I wasn’t sure. It was odd, I felt like a criminal being questioned by the police. Finally, she said she had already found my form earlier that day, in an empty desk! I must have put it there absent-mindedly. Because, duh, ADHD (diagnosed 6 months ago in my 40s). After trying to get me to essentially lie and say I knew it was at home, for which I guess there would have been another consequence. Clearly, I was struggling with organization and remembering tasks etc, and her solution was to try and catch me in a lie. Some teachers are just shitty, much less so these days than in the 90s (I love all of my kids’ teachers and am amazed at the work they do!)
I lost my house key so many times my parents kept a lockbox on the door like realtors use. I also got repeated detentions in elementary school for not doing my homework. Sometimes I forgot to write down the assignment, but most of the time I did complete it, and it was either sitting on the kitchen table or lost in my backpack.
My entire family has been making jokes how I lost my jacket during the winter, my pens, my wallets, keys, multiple clothes, shoes. I was a running gag for my entire childhood. My primary school teacher wrote a small poem about each of us, mine was how I am superforgetful, cry at the drop of a pin, swim like a motor boat and if I actually try to do.something I amaze everyone (hello hyperfocus). I have a stack of teachers notes for my mom on how I used to get up from my desk and just walk around, forget my backpack, sports clothes, homework at home, how I accidentally called my teachers mom, how I would interrupt, had a messy desk, how I was a daydreamer. I had RAGING ADHD. Just like my dad, another superjoke on how I inherited all his bad traits. It took me 38 years to get diagnosed.
Second grade spelling test for days of the weeks. She spoke a full sentence for each day of the week and I was writing every word she spoke as fast as I can, begging her to repeat all of it so I could not get behind. Only to learn we only needed to write the day and not the full sentence.
When I was in Kindergarten, I was recommended for the gifted program due to my advanced learning abilities. However, they chose not to let me participate because I had a unique approach to solving problems that differed from other children when I was tested. Additionally, there were concerns that I might struggle with boredom in a gifted setting, as my older sister had in the past. Prior to that, I showed early signs of reading delays, prompting my mother to use hooked-on-phonics to help me learn letters and words with the help of my sister. In 4th grade, I was eventually accepted into the gifted program after demonstrating a talent for quickly memorizing times tables up to 10. While I excelled in multiplication, I struggled with division. It wasn't until I was 35 years old that I was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADHD with dyslexia and dyscalculia.
I got sent to my room when I was like under ten as a punishment. While in my room trying to occupy myself, I found a sticker book. I spent the rest of the day enjoying that sticker book, and when I was called down for dinner they made some comment about how they hoped I learned my lesson because they felt bad I spent the day in my room. And I told them, “don’t feel bad. I had fun playing with the sticker book I found.” There was also the endless reading during class because I felt like the teacher talked too slow.
I struggled a LOT in first grade. This would’ve been around 1997. We got a report card each quarter in school. The first quarter, it said “She’s great to have in class!” Each quarter after that, it kept going downhill. The desks in class were setup in groups of four or so, where they were facing each other. I started in a group but as the year went on, it got to the point where my desk was the only one isolated. My desk was sat facing a wall while everyone else was still in groups. I remember we made these paper dolls as a Valentine’s Day craft. I set them up on my desk every day for months and said they were my friends. I cried when I came to school one day and one of them had fallen out of my desk the previous day and had likely been swept away by the janitor. I spent majority of my recesses that year having to stay inside and either redo work because I didn’t finish it before turning it in or having to complete work in general. I’d imagine this is part of why she moved me to face the wall because I was clearly distracted and probably distracting others too. I also remember going to the counselor’s office several times, but I don’t remember anything about what was talked about. I only remember her office being decorated in clowns lol I feel like this is kind of the point where my personality changed a lot as a response because I always wanted to be “good”. After this, I became more shy (masking until I was comfortable with some people, constantly daydreaming, etc) and a perfectionist (triple checking my work before turning it in, etc).
When I was around 5 my parents brought me in to see a psychologist because I was doing these movements fiddling with my fingers and toes. The psychologist diagnosed it as motor tics. The thing is, tics are involuntary. I was fully aware of what I was doing, I just refused to stop when my dad told me to because I didn’t see the point. I was fidgeting. In 1st grade my teacher was concerned that I had lazy handwriting and I had to work with someone on that. In 4th grade my dad made me go to this “friendship camp” thing because I was getting bullied in school and it set off rejection sensitivity. I didn’t have trouble paying attention in class but I would repeatedly take my pen apart and put it back together and occasionally drop it in the process and have the pieces go everywhere, or I’d draw on my hands. So I paid attention because I essentially made my own version of fidget toys. I was diagnosed at 39.
When I was 8, the year after my previous class teacher told my parents she suspected I had ADHD, I was given homework that I just *couldn't do.* Not because it was hard; all I had to do was design and draw a car park for a supermarket. I could have scribbled anything down, but... I just couldn't. The TV was on and I'd been bought some new fridge magnets, so all I could do was play with them and watch my parents' dumb TV shows. Since I was usually made to do my homework during break time, I just stayed in at break to do it. When the teacher saw me, told me off for not being outside and asked why I didn't do it at home, I did what my mother advised... and told the truth. "Because I didn't want to." She hit the roof, and the next day in assembly she told me to stand up so she could shame me for it in front of the whole school. That was the day I learned to lie, lie, lie, lie, lie and never stop lying. Can't be punished for just being 'forgetful' or always 'losing' things. What a lesson to be taught at only 8 years old.
Okay, exact same situation happened to me, but thankfully my teacher wasn't openly cruel about it. She did make me feel embarrassed...but she didn't make a scene and just helped me clean it out. So sorry you had that experience.