This is gonna be a thread about how dumb it was trying to get diagnosed when I was a kid and how i advocated for myself and my mom advocated for me and i was told i DIDN'T have a disorder i now know that I do have. send faves cuz i love attention

All through k-12 I thought I had adhd. I couldn't sit still, couldn't stop talking, had many talks with my teachers about "distracting others," was sent into the hall during class, got detentions (hello morning detention where i stole robotics club oj and bagels)

I was so smart (key info not a brag) that my homework/studies/grades weren't affected. When I became an adult and life happened and time passed adhd was the last thing on my mind and I had completely forgotten i ever thought i had it.

A couple months ago I saw this graphic about all these symptoms and things people do to hide them and/or cope. And man I had almost Every Single One on the list. Not like "eh I guess that's me maybe" but "omg this is all stuff I berate myself over every day of my life."

Everything about how I was convinced I had it when I was a kid came trickling back. After talking to my therapist and taking the test thing last week I was angry because I swore to my mom I had it and she never helped me. The adult in my life didn't help me, right? WRONG.

I called my mom to tell her and maybe....confront...but she said I was tested when I was young." WHAT????? I had just spent time feeling upset that I advocated and advocated for myself as a kid and my mom never helped me. It turns out I did not at all remember correctly.

But when my mom told me "You probably don't remember, you had to take all these forms to all your teachers in middle school," the memory came back. I ~was~ tested. My mom advocated for me. I took a test myself but also had to have teachers fill out the forms. Well, remember I

said I'm smart? That info is integral to the mis/non diagnosis. I was in gifted since kindergarten. I went up a grade for math, reading, writing/"spelling" (until i cried bc i missed my friends & was scared of the big kids so they stopped making me leave for math)

My grades never suffered because everything was so so so easy. So when the teachers had to fill out the forms with their "observations" of course it looked like I was maybe hyperactive but overall had no issues. So my "test" for adhd came back negative.

All because this whack ass way of testing kids required getting other people involved instead of listening. So I was instead diagnosed with,,, drumroll please,,, oppositional defiant disorder. The lengths this psychologist went to to avoid diagnosing me with adhd. For years I was

treated as though I had ODD. My feelings weren't taken seriously (by parents, psychologists, psychiatrists) because it always came back to "ODD: can't obey authority," a disorder I likely never had. Behaviors that fell under "being a distraction" were cast aside as part of ODD

So I just finished my first year in a phd program and this last year has been ROUGH y'all. I heard so much from other students about how difficult it was, how your mental health will tank, you have to work long hours, etc so I thought my struggles were normal grad student things.

Turns out the stuff I've been experiencing and struggling with and having meltdowns over the entire year is not normal grad student stuff. I will spend three hours reading a journal article and suddenly three hours pass & I'm not even halfway done. I browse twitter for 5 minutes

while something loads but really it's been an hour. I have to have a bag of goldfish sitting next to me so that I can reward myself with two for every section I read. I lose literally hours, hours!!!!!!, at a time and cant account for what I was doing because my work isn't done

but I wasn't on my phone or browsing twitter or watching tv. I have to turn off my phone and use a website blocker on my computer to get anything accomplished. I skip lunch every day because I cant be interrupted in the middle of my work.

Many weeks I ended up working literally waking to sleeping for 7 days a week to make up for the time i kept losing. And the stuff i do in conversations y'all, it makes me hate myself. It's stuff that I am so embarrassed over that I will literally cry after social interactions

and im not even gonna list them because I'm so embarrassed but I'm finding out that these aren't personality traits, these are all SYMPTOMS!!!! So this whole time I've been struggling and hating myself and wondering why even with the best intentions i cant do better

And it turns out since CHILDHOOD, I have had a misdiagnosis/incorrect negative diagnosis of a disorder I maybe had my whole life all because of testing via "observations" by people who don't know me. I wonder how many other people have the exact same story. FUCK that