The struggle of being twice exceptional
As an intellectually gifted individual with ADHD (along with major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, complex PTSD, and an eating disorder), it is often deeply painful and frustrating to navigate academic / work environments. As a whole, our world fails to understand neurodivergence, and this only worsens when you add a seemingly conflicting combination of traits into the mix. The thing is, giftedness and disability don’t cancel out. In fact, this combination brings about a unique set of obstacles that the average person - for whatever reason - cannot fathom. You’re one or the other; you’re “lucky” or “unlucky” in the neurological world. People are so quick to judge. Most days, you struggle to get anything done, but knowing your potential to accomplish several days’, even weeks’ worth of work in a day, people easily project upon you this idea that you’re weak-willed, ungrateful / privileged, directionless, even immature. Your initiative goes unnoticed, because the efforts and difficulty of trying (but often failing) to simply start work is seen as less valid than conventional efforts, such as actively working for hours but nonetheless accomplishing little. That, or your initiative is noticed but you’re scorned for struggling to follow through. So basically, whether you fail or succeed, neither is given the same sympathy or respect that a neurotypical person would receive. When you fail, people will often either over-emphasize and harshly criticize the weaknesses of the disability (dismissing giftedness) or, on the other hand, forget it altogether and attribute it to character defects given the gifted traits (dismissing disability). When you succeed, people will often hate you for being able to accomplish great things with seemingly little effort (dismissing disability) or, more rarely, actually see your attempts to at least start working and then attribute it to mere attentiveness rather than genuine talent (dismissing intelligence). It’s annoying as hell. Wake the fuck up, people. How many times do we have to beat to death the idea that we don’t live in a purely black-and-white world?