“I am getting really tired of people telling me that ADHD is not a...”
Your feelings are valid! Honestly, I do try to spread positivity to people who have adhd, but you’re absolutely right. It IS a disability, and it’s really difficult to be a productive member of society when things that work for everyone else, just,,,, DOESN’T work for you. Especially when in a hostile environment that will not, or cannot make things easier for you.
Thanks, that’s nice of you to say!
In that post, I was taking aim mostly at professionals who were supposed to help me, both when I was a kid and now as an adult, or sometimes relatives or employers/co-workers, who would dismiss my struggle as just negative thinking and reassure me that I was just gifted in a different way, not disabled.
This strikes me as very similar to the kind of thinking that a few well-meaning professionals displayed when I was in high school when they actually refused to officially support my diagnosis because they feared that ADHD was a negative “label” that would limit my thinking and drag me down. What it actually did was make it far more difficult for me to get any help from my school.
There were also the school officials who smiled benevolently at me and announced that the testing had shown that I was highly intelligent and therefore did not need any accommodations.
For me, being able to say that I have a disorder, this specific disorder, is empowering. It grants me the knowledge to understand myself, the examples of others to help me, the language to explain myself to people, protections under the law, and the right to ask for assistance where I need it.
I know that sometimes other people with ADHD have had the experience of living with a negative stereotype and enduring bullying or suffering from self-doubt because of their diagnosis. To me, it’s a much different thing when people who have ADHD look for the positives of having a differently-wired brain, as opposed to people who don’t have ADHD trying to tell me that I don’t really have difficulties, I have gifts. The former I applaud, the latter makes me grind my teeth.
