I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently. Mostly things I’m researching for my articles, but I’ve also been doing a lot of soul searching and learning about myself.
As a person with ADHD, I find myself distracted from my tasks without end. It’s not an issue for personal projects — I just have to wait it out until the hyper-focus shows up and I’ll get any unfinished tasks completed in a heartbeat.
However, there is never a day where I am not entirely exhausted just by existing.
I don’t mean that in a dark way, to be crystal clear. I love life and I love people and there’s so much I want to do and see and experience. What I mean is that I wake up tired and I go to bed even more tired. It’s a constant state of both mental and physical exhaustion that I’ve never been able to grapple with.
Until recently. I uncovered that, whether or not I realise it, I’m always subconsciously masking, always trying my damndest to appear ‘normal’ but what even is normality? It’s different for each person. This was a new term for me. I’ve heard of masking before, but I’ve never thought that I do it myself. I began to read other accounts of people with ADHD and they all share similar symptoms to myself and it made me realise that I’ve been living my life wrong this entire time.
It all makes sense to me, but it’s also unravelling a lifetime of self-doubts and deep-rooted anxieties. In a sense, I’m having to relearn who I am and how to go about my day-to-day activities. I’m going to try to learn how to slow down because I’m the one going too fast — not the world around me.
It’s daunting to have to rethink your entire life but, honestly, for me, it’s a godsend. There’s a giant, shining light at the end of this tunnel and I know I’ll reach it with patience and perseverence. I can’t tell you how liberating it has been to finally have a name for all the things that made me feel like a freak, like a failure, and to realise that these are merely lies I’ve been telling myself daily. I’m not a freak, nor am I a failure in any sense. In fact, I have a mental condition that comes with boons that others seek. I’ll touch on this later.
Perhaps I don’t actually have a social anxiety — after all, I can hold conversations perfectly fine online, on voice chat, but the moment my camera is on, I clam up. Why? Because I know my constant fidgeting and apparent inattentiveness will be on full display, that my friends will think I find them boring, that I exude an awkward and nervous energy that might be off-putting to neurotypical folks.
It’s textbook masking. The energy I would use to be my real self is used to cover my tracks, to put up my defences and to man the barricades. It’s exhausting, honestly.
It got me thinking back to every group project in university or college or even school. God, I remember back in primary school, I used to write these whacky, outlandish plays and I would cast each class member as a role and we would act them out during our lunch breaks, with me being the director. It’s a cheerful memory for me, but now I wonder if that’s how I’m supposed to be: confident, approachable, able to manage people and delegate tasks with ease.
In each group project, I’ve naturally fallen into the role of leader. I never understood why I accepted this without putting up a fight — for someone so anxious, I sure stepped up to the role with no questions. I was happy to look over workloads, delegate tasks, check in on progress, etc. It was easy for me. Until that cloud of self-doubt washes over me and I beat myself up, terrified of how I’m coming across to the other team members.
Well, it can’t have all been bad because I always got glowing peer reviews. How? I have no idea but I’ll take it.
I’ve always played off this confident, cool version of myself as the mask. I’ve often thought of it as my ‘autopilot’. Maybe it’s the other way around? What if that version of me is the real me and my constant introversion is my mask? It would make sense — I was a confident and flamboyant child. I was the one who would make sure everyone was included, whether they were my friends or not. I had no qualms about walking up to someone and striking up a conversation.
As I got older, I shrank away from all of that to hide myself. I’ve always wanted to be a ghost — just there, acknowledged, but never centre stage. I never feel like I deserve praise for hard work or that I deserve any of the appreciation my peers on group projects have expressed. I’m the type of person who will spend weeks on a piece of art, only to immediately feel bad about it and critique myself so badly I’ll be afraid of sharing it online. Meanwhile, my friends could draw a stick man and I’ll be their cheerleader, singing their praises and how I love the line work.
It’s almost as though I have to keep myself in my own little box under the stairs, shying away from everyone. What am I so afraid of? Judgement that never comes? I’ve been letting my Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria control my life.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like a freak and an abject failure in every aspect of my life. None of this is true.
So why do I feel so alienated? I’m not sure quite how to explain it, but it feels like my brain is going too fast. That’s not a humble brag, or even a good thing — it results in me often blurting things out at inappropriate moments or making witty, sarcastic comments that aren’t always well received.
I’ve had moments where I’ve been told off because, and I quote, “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”. Now, I genuinely don’t know if these moments where my mask slipped has made people uncomfortable — after all, when a small, quiet mouse suddenly makes a bold statement, the room goes quiet. People don’t expect it from you. When my suggestions don’t come with ‘oh, only if you think it’s okay and if it’s alright to even suggest it’, people don’t like it. They’re too used to the mask.
And that’s okay. I can’t be annoyed with people for that. I should have been my true self with them from the beginning, but I can’t. This masking behaviour is deeply ingrained in me and it’s going to take a lot of work to undo it. Yet, I want to undo it. I want to be myself freely and truly, to love who I am as a person, to celebrate my positives and work on my negatives. As long as I keep pretending I’m someone I’m not, I’ll never find that inner peace amongst my own chaos.
I’m slowly coming to realise that my entire worldview is skewed. It’s not that I can’t keep up with the world; it’s that I’m simply going too fast for a normal paced world. That realisation alone was emotional for me.
I’ve said often that I feel as though I’m sprinting through life at 100mph. It’s terrifying because I feel if I ever slow down I’m going to crash into a brick wall or that the floor underneath me is going to give way. I’m always stressing about how there’s never enough hours in the day and telling myself I have no time to breathe. I have to keep going on and on and on. The faster, the better.
Until now, as I’ve been learning about myself and my ADHD, I’ve focused on the negatives and tried to work out how I can combat them, but I’m realising that ADHD comes with a lot of superpowers that people wish they had. My creativity, my off-the-wall thinking, my seemingly carefree and whimsical nature, for example. The irony is, I wish I had their normality. I want to do chores without burning out, or organise my daily tasks or even be able to leave the house without racing around panicking about misplaced items.
Professors and teachers alike have often praised me for my ability to think well outside the box. I’ve always been able to bend the rules of an assignment, taking it well off the beaten path, to create an end-product that’s wild, but somehow still fits the restrictions of the brief. I’ve always been like that, even since primary school. I will bend the rules happily, but I will never break them.
I used to be called a bit of a rebel at high school — teachers thought I was just pushing the boundaries to see what I could get away with. It wasn’t so much that as it was just me trying to see how far I could take a mundane idea and come up with a solution that none of my peers would.
I’ll be going into office work soon and although I’m terrified, friends and family have told me that this way of thinking will most likely be an asset to my employer, that I shouldn’t stay quiet during meetings where solutions are needed and that I should embrace my quirkiness. Thing is, I’ve never actually been called a weirdo by anyone — that’s all in my head. I’ve been called quirky, sure, but that’s a compliment to me.
Besides, what creative person doesn’t want to wear the ‘quirky’ label as a badge of honour?
Perfectly put Holly xx