“Hell yeah! I love that you’re so impulsive.” – our realtor, when we bought our first house.
A small portion of me was offended. Mostly because I’d tried my hardest to conceal my impulsivity and trick people into believing I’m a thoughtful, mature woman with the ability to weigh and measure her options carefully. This kind, perfect stranger, who meant no passive-aggressive harm in this statement, accidentally sent a clear message: I’ve got your number. Being identified as our traits we try so desperately to hide, and essentially being caught in a lie, of sorts, is what Tony Soprano refers to as “being had”--- and boy was I had. It certainly hasn’t been the first time my infractions have been snuffed out used as examples; I tend to ask for forgiveness far more than permission, and occasional red-handedness comes with the territory. The result, though, is often the same: a sudden flush of prickly stinging behind my cheeks, the quick uptick in erratic thumps of my heart, an internal pressure building that only wants to lash out, to justify my wrongdoing, to lie to myself. We all sing saccharine BS to ourselves when we’re wrong. Perhaps we’ve tamed this tendency enough to the point that it only happens from time to time, or maybe we’re teetering more on the unhinged end of the spectrum and let that childish streak paint its broad strokes over our image. Either way, it usually does not get easier to be found out.
I’d been found out by someone who had revealed my darkest traits in all of two short house showings.
Was I that bad? Were my proclivities that abundantly obvious to people around me? Maybe I’d mistaken my fervor for extraversion and open-mindedness. I love new things! Novelty doesn’t scare me! I’m entirely open to new perspectives! Same old, same old bores me to tears! All of these things are true, but I do very much have a proneness, a fetish, even, for extremes. I’ve been told by nearly every millennial woman I know that I should be tested for ADHD because of my personality and my preferences. As someone who is in the field of mental and behavioral health, I try to hide my irritation with this suggestion with a chuckle and a redirection. Because, frankly, why does it matter? What would an ADHD diagnosis do for me, other than solidify my attributes, the ones I both love and loathe?
Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This is something I still have a hard time understanding as it relates to the power of diagnoses. Or, I should say, the perceived power in a diagnosis. It’s plausible that diagnoses can resolve some doubts about characteristics we’ve struggled to manage. But then what? Let’s assume I do have ADHD, as is evident by my being easily seduced to take unnecessary risks, or my childhood opposition to playdates and social gatherings, or my seemingly bottomless interest in a hundred different things at once. How does knowing I have ADHD change these things? It doesn’t. It only offers a label to something we’re already aware of. When we teach children to become fixated on the semantics or the brands or the captions instead of developing solutions to the problems themselves, we all but groom them into becoming the millennial adult that uses her diagnosis to evade accountability. I just wasn’t raised that way. Oh, you broke your leg? Good thing God gave you two.
I was somewhat of a shy kid, which is shocking to people who know me as an adult. “YOU?! You didn’t participate in class?!” It was the most common and expected criticism my parents received about me during parent teacher conferences throughout all of elementary through junior high. “She’s such a sweet girl, but she really doesn’t participate”, or “When she does have things to say, it’s always a good idea! Kayla just doesn’t partake much in our group discussions or projects.” I didn’t like a lot of other kids. My Dad is a life-long loner devoid of even mild hunger to socialize with anyone but me and my Mom. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I have a feeling my parents’ lack of affiliation with most any human was transferred to me via modeling. My habit toward solitude wasn’t because I was a tomboy who generally opted for more “boyish” activities than female-oriented hand games and circle time. Being a tomboy was, at the time of my childhood, just as commonplace a status symbol as it was to remodel your kitchen. My resistance to friendship was largely because mine and my family’s lifestyles were too different for me to find anyone very relatable.
Since I was a child, I’ve been an early-riser. And I don’t mean an early riser like those who wake up at 6 and claim they’re positioned to conquer the day while the world lies motionless in bed until sunrise. No. From kindergarten through high school, between 5:00 AM and 5:30 AM were typical wake times for me and my brother. In college, this would become between 4:30 and 5:00, and, for the past decade or so, my husband and I have been waking up between 3:45 and 4:15 in the stillness of the morning. I’d wake up before any other child at a godforsaken sleepover my parents forced me to attend, bored, wanting to go home, fidgeting to develop an escape route. “I wonder what Rachel’s parents would do if I just… left,” I often mused. Perhaps fortunately, we weren’t 9-year-olds with phones or gadgets or technological devices to fill our time. Kids during my school-age years were forced to develop their own strategies for amusing themselves. And boy did I have ample time to bring forth entertainment.
When Rachel’s Mom would wander past the bedroom upon hearing my rustling, she’d say something like, “What are you doing up?” I typically replied with, “I don’t know”, because I suppose I didn’t know exactly why I was awake. More importantly, I couldn’t understand why everyone else was still asleep. “I mean… do you want to like, read a book or something?” This is probably when my love of reading truly ripened. Maybe this was a wonderful, unforeseen consequence of my parents harassing me into a sleepover I didn’t want to go to with a bunch of annoying girls I didn’t even like. I found something to better occupy my time, my mind, and my budding cognition.
Forcing children to do things they don’t like is essential for growth. We frequently hear adages like that of “Do hard things,” or “Growth happens outside of your comfort zone,” but we seem to have forgotten what constitutes as occurring outside of this “comfort zone”. Mental health and behavioral health practitioners have successfully made a mockery of the outside rings of this safety terrain, as the bar gets lower and lower with each new webinar about childhood trauma. Sleepovers increase the chances your child may be exposed to childhood sex trafficking, and your child shouldn’t be forced to do anything they don’t like! While well-intentioned and I’m sure just another, more extreme version of irrational parent worries, this is wildly misguided. It focuses too heavily on the emotions of a child who doesn’t yet have the maturity to make many important decisions for themselves anyway. The fear of our kids’ reactions seems to be driving the notion that they get to decide when, where, how, and why their day will play out, with parents only available as optional guidance counselors. Make no mistake: this is not compassionate, and there is absolutely zero literature on this approach for disabilities, emotional disorders, ADHD, or behavioral problems. There’s not a trace of me that resents my parents for exercising their manpower and encouraging me to endure non-preferred things with non-preferred people. It was the linchpin in my ability to communicate across opinions, attitudes, personalities, ages, and cultures.
In retrospect, I also wish my parents would have been even more forceful as it related to some of my greatest skillsets. I’ve been gifted in drawing since elementary school despite no formal training. In high school I’d receive a full-ride scholarship to an art school in Colorado, who basically offered to purchase all of my art in exchange for an education. At the last moment, I panicked. Would I become the stereotypical starving artist? I also absolutely loved every aspect of exercise, physical therapy, weightlifting, nutrition, and health, and the potpourri of my interests and "passions” seemed to have skewed my judgment. Not only did I reject a full-ride scholarship, I also decided that my experience in treatment for anorexia would make me a wonderful psychotherapist; at a moment’s notice when declaring a major, I scratched out “kinesiology” and instead put “clinical psychology”. It was a horrible mistake.
I don’t mean to make it sound as if my career has permanently damaged my psyche or that it has funneled me into a path destined for misery. There are moments in my career in which I’m able to fully exercise my other passions and my joys and things I’ve mastered to fluency, which forges a sense of competence that is rewarding no matter what the work itself is. But perhaps that’s my most important point: telling children to follow their passions has a high likelihood of resulting in people working their passions into mundane jobs that they eventually end up hating or resenting. And for what? So we can be inspirational and tell our children that work isn’t work and we’ll never work a day in our life if we love what we do? How many people can honestly say that? My parents bitched until they retired at age 72 that they prayed for the day their workplace burned down and the employees were given severance packages as small vacations from tedium of everyday life in the plant. The concept of burnout did not apply to Baby Boomers. This was just what they called “work”.
If I’d learned to apply the focus of art and weightlifting to my ADHD-like traits, I think I’d have been better positioned to make informed decisions about my future. I need not get into the details of formal schooling, as our world is rightfully possessed by the dismantling of the Department of Education and educational/institutional corruption in general. What I will say, though, is that too heavy of an emphasis on how we feel about something, instead of the sense of competence, control, and autonomy we have related to meaningful work, often pans out as a feeling of being stuck. Passions change over time. Our likes and dislikes tend to evolve with age. Passion also doesn’t guarantee mastery or even fluency in skill. And, if I may be frank: wanting to have a dream job you’re passionate about is millennial woo-woo that is unnecessary as it is smug.
My general advice, then? Your child probably doesn’t need a social skills therapist or an ADHD coach or a specialized bullet journal for neurodivergent kids. They probably need a nudge, much like many of us adults need. As Matt Beaudreau of Apogee Schools says beautifully, “You don’t need more resources. You need to learn to be more resourceful.” Whether I have ADHD or not, my decisions are entirely within my control. It’s my responsibility to exercise these, all while taming my impulses, regardless of what you decide to call it.
And how wonderful is that?
Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
