Meeting other ADHD folk out in the wild.

As we all know living with ADHD sucks. We live in a society that actively works in a way that is difficult for us, and get made to feel like the weird ones when trying to explain our point of view, I gave up even trying around a year ago because it was just exhausting and a waste of energy.

Now I really dislike the whole “ADHD is my superpower” trope, I get the people using it don’t mean any harm and are trying to spread positivity, but also gets taken the wrong way by people who don’t understand, and it comes across as quirky or something we can control. There is part of me that agrees though and why despite the struggles, I wouldn’t want to change, and that is the way some of our minds work.

What got me thinking about this, was a few weeks ago I met a guy in the pub and we ended up chatting for several hours about loads of random stuff, the conversation just move so effortlessly without all the boring bits in between. I couldn’t help thinking that if I was having the same conversation with a “neurotypical” person, we would have covered less than half the subjects, I wouldn’t have learned loads of extra interesting stuff, and we would have had to keep pausing to make sure the other understood the context of why we were bringing something unrelated up. Without wanting to sound too cheesy it’s like our minds were working in sync, to an outside observer we just switched from the mathematics of quasicrystals to the social dynamics of crows (random made up example) without skipping a beat or questioning it. Just from very little cues or something that was mentioned earlier. The topic of ADHD diddnt come up until an hour in and it was basically just skipped over because we both figured it out already

I’m definitely not suggesting this is something only ADHD people can do, but they are the people who I notice this the most from, the example I just gave being the most interesting and extreme example I’ve come across. I also find I same having to give people extremely detailed breakdowns of how I arrived at an unrelated (to them) conclusion, like they don’t have the ability to read between the lines, which I hate, because it does my head in when people do it to me. I figure out what they are going to say in the first couple of sentences, but because I don’t want to be rude or tell them to get to the point I end up switching off. I obviously don’t know exactly what they are going to say and inevitably there are misunderstandings or mistakes occur, but it wasn’t until I started meds that I could actually listen contentedly to their 20 minute ramble that could have been condensed into a few sentences.

Hope this doesn’t come across as arrogant as some of it sounded in my head, it’s just the bluntest way I can describe it. I don’t think less of people who’s minds don’t work that way, it’s just a different way of thinking, but it is something I actually like about having a hyperactive mind, even though I wish it would give me a break sometimes