While I have empathy, the reason we're in the state of recognising and intervening with neurodiversity is the work that educators, parents and researchers have done over the past sixty years. Pleae recognise this for the progress it represents.
People do the best with what they have and what they know. No it's not your fault. Neither is it your parents or teachers when they don't have the knowledge or tools to help them. There is a solid chance that they were as lost, frustrated and confused as you. Or they're simply shitty people..
In 50 years time there will be another condition that we don't know about now, for which we are not providing accommodation, which causes kids harm, that your kids will look back on and be absolutely shocked, like why the fuck was this ever tolerated and how could we not know. Obesity? Usage of social media? Assessment?
It took me ages to realise this. People with ADHD are always portrayed as lazy but they don’t struggle with hard work, they struggle with boring work. Before I knew I had ADHD I always found I was getting in trouble for not finishing boring work so I always used to prioritise tasks by how much fun they were and start with the most boring. I just ended up getting nothing done.
Keep it up with these posts, if I share enough of them with my clearly very painfully obviously super adhd girlfriend I might eventually convince her to go see a therapist and seek a diagnosis someday
Add the extra layer of my mother not appreciating my interests and thinking what I now do for a living was a waste of time... And a dash of expecting me to somehow just be able to perfectly do chores they never taught me how to do when I was young. Yes, this is the first time I've ever mopped a floor at 17 years old. How the fuck is that my fault?
I'm getting a sort of buffer underrun when doing routine so I'll always try and make trivial tasks or busywork faster, more efficient, or superfluous through process design. When I cannot do that, I'll listen to music or podcasts, that helps somewhat.
The main drawback of this condition is that many employers think I simply "like to work" and bury me in even more busywork.
What hurts is guessing wrong what people around you care about and then realizing that what they care about is the thing you cared about before you realized that they actually just didn't understand what you were actually worried about. It starts to feel like the matrix but you aren't NEO you're just the cat.
I did the opposite for the last part. I just went the "lazy" path of just doing hard things. As they were easy for me and rewarded more. If the hard things were rewarded less, why bother in the first place?
So I got based by teachers as "not precise enough" because they could clearly see I totally understood what the exercise wanted me to do, I just didn't do "the easy part" of writing it properly.
There are lots of boring un stimulating tasks that are super important that’s the issue. I have adhd and I cope with my issues to be able to be a functional adult. Things like the dishes and the laundry and cleaning need to be done. Some task that seem repetitive for forcing a basic understanding of the subject. I’ve met so many people in my field who are adhd and say they are super productive on complex tasks but lack basic understanding on fundamental subjects in the field because they skip all the “boring stuff”. Life is not always exciting or stimulating sometimes you have to force yourself to do something. Neurotypicals do the same thing.
having grown up with ADD and ADHD being huge in schools and then reading countless studies over the past few decades about how inaccurate diagnoses and the understanding of ADD and ADHD are, I will be very cautious in administering any medication to my children for popular syndromes.