#and cool noncontact handshakes to the touch averse ones

[adhd-mode-activate]

Sorry for the very long post :)))) I just have many Thoughts today and want to type them out

Sometimes I forget that other people didn't grow up in a neurodivergent house

Genuinely. I know some people had good homes and some had terrible ones growing up, and some were in between and you still don't know what to do about it. And I remember that and I do my best not to assume and when I hear of some of the things others had to go through growing up I want to envelop them in a hug and invite them into my own home.

but I forget that not everyone has the privilege (or chaos) of a neurodivergent home. While I'm the first in my family to get diagnosed with anything, no one in my family is neurotypical and we know that

my growing up years didn't consist of "well you can't have ADHD" or "You can't have learning disabilities," it was my mother's orderly, potentially OCD personality trying to learn how to raise a highly creative ADHD bundle of chaos. Sometimes we had really bad days. Or even weeks. Elementary math for a little while consisted of me crying as we spent three hours trying to work through flashcards, and I don't remember what we finally ended up doing to teach me math. But I do remember my father teaching me how to work with negative integers using Uno cards. And spelling for a while was a combination of pain, confusion, and rote memory, but my mom slowly learned that I don't read words as individual letters but groups of letters bunched together in no particular order, and taught me how to make sense of those little groupings and break them down. Now I can break down the names of all the chemicals in vitamins and I have better spelling skills than most other people in my field of study. But there were delightful days too. There were days when my siblings and I spontaneously grabbed the camping tent from the garage and set it up in the back yard and did all our school work outside. Some days when my parents looked at me and my siblings and went "yeah no there's no way you're learning anything from a textbook today" and my mom would reorganize her carefully created schedules so we didn't have to do anything. And then sometimes we'd pile into the car on a random Tuesday and go to the zoo or to a museum or even to the library and we'd wander around and laugh and whisper and exclaim and learn in a different way

Going to college made me realize how ADHD friendly my childhood was. In college you don't get a day when you feel like you're about to combust, you don't get to move your assignments around so that you speed through the topics you find easy and spend more time on the topics you find difficult and spread out your finals and final assignments over a couple of weeks to a month. I can't just ask my professors if I can write a poem instead of an essay as long as I get the gist of the assignment like I could sometimes with my mom. And I miss it. I miss it so much. I go home sometimes, but I've outgrown the daily rhythms of my family, and sometimes I desperately miss it. (a big part of my decision to get diagnosed, and my parents' support of it, was because we discussed the fact that I no longer have a world built to accommodate me, so I have to fight for that myself, and a diagnosis would help get me into a position where I could do that)

But I forget how rare a family like mine really is. Half my family has ADHD like me and the other half has their own way of viewing the world that I don't fully understand. We've all got varying degrees of social anxiety. We sometimes feed each other's anxiety and we sometimes help it. Sometimes we sound like we're speaking another languages because we've combined phrases from TV shows, movies, books, and words from other languages we know all together into our vocabulary. Sometimes we accidentally hurt each other, and sometimes we don't understand each other, but we all understand that we're different from each other and that's okay, and we are determined to break past cycles of extended family and communicate with each other and continue to build strong relationships with each other into adulthood.

And I know now not everyone gets that. And it just made me really sad thinking about that, remembering that as I was driving yesterday. So, I guess, all of that rambling and chaos and confusing semi-out-of-context explanation of my childhood to say...if you didn't have a home that taught you what it's like to be not only accepted for who you are, but truly welcomed for it, you can have mine. My mom and sister will gladly bake treats for you and probably embarrass me and make sure you're spoiled as you deserve.

And if you're neurodivergent and want to start a family of your own worried about how well you'll be able to raise a kid when taking care of yourself is hard enough....well, it's chaos. but it's a fun kind of chaos, and you'll be incredible.

#no filter #everyone is a fae until proven otherwise and don't trust them with anything especially personal information #sorry for this very long post #I had lots of Thoughts and didn't entirely know where to put them #i'm still not sure about putting them on tumblr but #oh well? #congratulations you get the weirdest combination of that I'll probably ever have #which means that soon I will be back to my usual self #aka #and I may be mortified over the existence of this post #but I think it's important so I probably won't delete it #hugs to all of you beans #and cool noncontact handshakes to the touch averse ones #long post #adhd #adhd life #neurodivergent #neurdivergence #autism #I am shamefully short on research into varieties of neurodivergence that aren't ADHD or autism so I cannot tag them #but if you want to reblog with others please do #my post #adhd mode activate