“Yeah, Wilson played first table on the chess team, Chester used to start crying every time he heard a sad song, Dan can really rock a cocktail dress and six-inch heels, and I wasn’t going to let anyone give them any shit for any of that. So I had to learn to beat up people bigger than me pretty early on.”
This is my new favourite post. Whenever there’s a female character who fights, it’s always because she’s learned from older male relatives. I’m gonna print this post and put it on my wall bc it gave me new hope for humanity.
Part of what separates ADHD-havers from the merely forgetful is that for us, to use DSM parlance, the symptoms “have a significant impact on daily life and functioning.” When I was a kid “significant impact” meant being in perpetual trouble: always being late, never hearing the assignment, enduring depressingly frequent teen-magazine “It Happened to Me”–type moments (I was often surprised by my period’s arrival). Teacher’s pet I wasn’t: “Clearly Rae has not been,” snapped my sixth-grade math teacher, flinging an eraser at my desk, “PAYING ATTENTION, so the whole class will have to wait while I go over this again.”
By high school, I had fully internalized the fact that I was a screwup and began acting the part with teenage gusto. “Fuck you, fail me,” I spat at a particularly hateful teacher, middle fingers aloft. “It’s not my first time.”
Then I’d go home and cry. Repeated failure is destructive. It chips away at your self-confidence and eats at your resolve. It makes you hate yourself.
The thing is, ADHD doesn’t care about your gender. A huge part of the different treatments of people with ADHD is rooted in gender role expectations. Your behaviors as a child are interpreted a certain way depending on the gender you’re assigned.
When I talk to my ADHD friends, we have the same problems, the same difficulties, unrelated to gender.
Girls are less often diagnosed because they are not seen, because girls learn early on to be quiet and hide their faults. While boys get the excuse of ‘being just a wild boy’.
And while the experience of a person who identifies and is read as female with ADHD is valid and exhausting, it is not just because of ADHD, it is because we fail to fill in the role of the perfect women. It is because society is somewhat okay with the forgetful, chaotic man (to a point) but much less forgiving when it comes to what they think a woman should be.
Old-timey dudes doing weird hokey shit is the best thing.
Case in point:
Second guy from the left in the foreground is Tsar Nicholas II Romanov of the Russian Empire i think.
Yeah that’s him. Have some more pics of Nicholas II and his pals having a fun time
I love seeing old-timey pictures of people doing weird things because it reminds me that our generation isn’t the only one doing stupid shit. We’re really all the same 😛
