A friend recently commented “Of course you have ADHD! Just look at your apartment! Spots that are important for your hobbies are designed with surgical precision and everything else slowly sinks into chaos.”

He might be right.

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I dated a girl who worked with elderly neurodivergent people. She was at my place and i heard the dryer was done with it’s cycle. I said i’ll have to go and make my bed, because you know how it is, if you don’t do it right away, you’re not doing it for two weeks.

She laughed and said: but you know why “we” have to do that, right? I was like: what? No. And she said, because we have adhd.

I just laughed and thought: YOU have adhd, i do… Oooooooooooh

Everybody every day. It’s not glamorous the way you all sell it.

Some person I just met at a party asked me if I have Asperger’s. He explained he has Asperger’s himself and just wondered.

I thought it was a rude remark of him. Especially since we barely know each other. I certainly don’t have Asperger’s.

This was some years ago.

Either way, I just got diagnosed.

No one person specifically, but it was all the ADHD memes that had me actually go and get checked. Ended up diagnosed with ADHD, Asperger’s, and BPD. I didn’t even know about BPD until I was told I had it.

I got a weird one. Multiple friends, including one who is diagnosed with autism and one who is diagnosed with ADHD and family members have asked me if I thought I had some form of neurodivergence. The autist friend thinks probably autism, the ADHD friend thinks maybe ADHD. The others, who don’t know much, mostly asked about autism or aspergers. But I don’t see ASD as fitting at all.

I’m quite introverted and don’t do well in big social situations, sure. I also don’t deal well with conflict even if I’m not directly involved. But I have no issue with faces, or eye contact, or body language, or reading emotions, or sarcasm.

I’m quite analytical in my thinking, but not overly so, I would say. Sometimes I get episodes of hyper-focus where I stay on a task for unnaturally long, not managing to take a break to eat and such. That one is a bit suspicious, but it’s also a pretty rare occurrence.

Didn’t get converted to a permanent position after a whole year. The only negative feedback (among great remarks) I had was:

1. Be more organized. Send more updates more often.
2. Speak without tangents or sounding scattered.
3. Improve prediction of how long tasks will take and completion dates when considering other priorities.

Does anyone want to guess my diagnosis? Lol

The maddening thing is that I didn’t get any follow-up after those comments until five months later, when I got the surprising news that they would not be continuing with me. If I had thought my subsequent med change and work strategies were not, in fact, improving my performance, I would have pursued accommodations.

I have often been asked if I have autism. They often seem ready to wonder this if it seems like a situation is approaching where I can’t, in their eyes and their words, “read the room”. The very concept “of reading the room”, they then have to be told, plays out differently even on a cultural level. I am not of a common cultural background, and this is said to demonstrate itself in, say, seeing someone’s arms crossed. I see crossed arms and, if anything, I’m going to assume “decision maker mode”. They then ask “don’t you see I’m angry”.

For our sake, I’d be lying to say I don’t operate based on “tell, don’t show”, which is the opposite of what others often say, which is supposed to be beneficial yet often gives off the opposite impression because people want to cling to the idea that assumptions are inherent. People often also complain about how complex yet semantically loose (owing to “culture”, but at the same time I wonder why people, again, use their own expectations of verbal norms to assume what something must mean, instead of acknowledging dictionary-described words and sentences are just the word equivalent of mathematical equations) my communication is. Relevantly, that can be combined with my experiences with, ironically, people bashing me for not living up to their “unspoken directives” rather than gentility inspired by how I would say I expect logic to work, to produce the impression in me that maybe neurodivergent people are onto something with their sense of clockwork, placing me in what could be called autistic culture by nurture rather than nature, as is my calling when I’m told I’m only destined to rattle around in the realm of normal people. The neurotypical practice of succumbing to bias based on trained taboo and the infallibility of their dear ones (relevant among the gossipers) has done nothing except disillusion me in the presence of all who willingly exist without a striving for protocol clockwork, and if I had an ark, I would fill it with these neurodivergent people they say they fear.

It’s not a specific person and not directly confronting me but the thing that really helped open my eyes was all the people out there that have at most 1 or 2 hobbies. Like, I talk about all the things I want to learn and do all the time but everyone else always has this one particular thing. How do people only have 2 things they do ever, for years. I didn’t get it. I’m in the process of approaching testing with my counselors now.

I was at a party just yesterday (very unlike me) that was mostly people I don’t know and within the first hour someone asked me if I was on ADHD medication.

I mean I’m not on medication which is probably how I got pinned so quickly but I still found it funny that in a crowd of people that has never met me I apparently still scream TISM.

My boss has got very high EQ, but tends to have fraught, tense relationships with our female coworkers (I described it to my husband as working with a mother and daughter who don’t get along- they say a bunch of things that seem nice and also seem to hurt each other a lot and I don’t know why).

She sometimes says passive aggressive things to me, but it always takes me too long to parse passive aggression in person, so I respond completely earnestly. This seems to confuse her without being rude, and she’s just vexed by me.

Actually, passive aggression in general makes me feel very neurodivergent.

Does my doctor who stopped in the middle of an appointment, looked at me, and said “you know you’re neurodivergent, right?” count?

I was hospitalized for a seizure recently and the nurse ended up going and grabbing me a little silicon bubble fidget thing because I just couldn’t stop messing with shit.

Edit: exact phrasing was “let me go grab you something to play with”