Unlearning a Lifetime of Expectations

I'm 41 years old. While ADHD was a 'thing' when I was growing up and, unlike a lot of girls, I was tentatively diagnosed with it, I only took medication for 6 mo and as I grew, I never considered myself ADHD.

The result was that, a lot of thing that were difficult for me, I understood as personal flaws. This was the case whether other people framed it that way or not--I didn't need to be told that my issues were strange because I could very easily look at the world and see that they were.

So I internalized it. I learned how to rehearse conversations at home so that, when I had them, I would say the 'correct' thing. I learned to remove myself from situations silently rather than discuss my needs--because to me, they weren't 'needs', they were failings. I learned to be uncomfortable in order to receive friendship and validation, and to just take more and more time to recover.

Now, after being diagnosed, it's still hard not to immediately judge myself for not being 'normal'. To accept that I never was and will never be 'normal' in the way I always conceptualized it. To look at the environment around me and try to envision how to interact with it in new ways that work, rather than contort myself to fit into the 'normal' ways.

But I'm trying, and I wanted to share this introspection in case it resonated with other people who grew up assuming the were a defective version of the standard, rather than being a different version entirely.