When I was in third grade, I made my first best friend. I don’t remember how we started talking, but I do remember that she approached me. After a few months of being friends she told me that when she approached me that day, she was nervous. I asked her why in the world she would be nervous to talk to me of all people? I was the nice, quiet, shy one. She told me that she was nervous that day because everyone in the class thought that I was mean because I kept to myself and generally didn’t talk much. These were things that I had never considered before. When people talked to me, I was nice to them, but she was correct in that I rarely sought people out. Not only was I painfully shy and awkward, which I still am, thank you, but my inattentive ADHD made for a rich internal world. I always had casts of characters and stories playing through my head. I realize now that that’s not a normal thing, but I was content with my inner world. Still, her words made me realize, for the first time, what we’re perceived by others based on what they can see. People see how you look, what you wear, your behaviors, and your demeanor and they draw conclusions about you. I’m not saying that’s fair, or that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s how it is. I can’t say that I haven’t been guilty of the same over the years, but as I’ve gotten older, I try to make a concerted effort not to do that. Mostly because I remember what it was like to have that done to me, but also, I’m now at a point in my life where I have met all kinds of people. I’ve met people who are covered in tattoos who are youth pastors. I’ve met guys who share eyeliner and nail polish with their girlfriends. I’ve met people who are loud and proud members of the LGBTQ+ community and others who still refer to their life partners as their “friends”. I have met all sorts of people who surprise me, and I’ve valued getting to know each one of them. We all deserve a chance to show people who we really are.
Growing up, there was nowhere that I felt more myself than at the ice rink. I started figure skating when I was 10 and I was slightly less socially awkward at the rink. Skating was, hands down, my first love and it gave me something to connect with people over. For the first time, I had friends who loved the same thing that I did. Friends who loved talking about skating, practicing skating, and, eventually, teaching skating as much as I did. While skating will always have a place in my heart, it is a judgmental environment at times. People are likely familiar with girls developing eating disorders from sports like skating, dance, and gymnastics, and yes, you were heavily judged for your appearance. I’d like to believe that this doesn’t happen as frequently now, that strength and health are more valued than aesthetics, but I can’t say for sure. Whether it was the make-up you wore (or didn’t wear) during a competition, what your costumes and practice clothes looked like, or what type of skates you had, you knew if you were “other”. It was obvious to the upper echelon of girls that I skated with that my family didn’t have an extra $10-20,000 a year to spend on my hobby. I wore the same skates and costumes for years. While my friends hopped all around the eastern seaboard competing, I only did one or two local competitions a year. And while my friends often sported that latest skating apparel or name brands like Adidas and Nike, my practice clothes were either thrifted, hand-me-downs, or purchased at a big box store. Honestly, I knew that I was different from the other skaters. My parents were very good at explaining to me the cost of ice time, competitions, club dues, skates, etc. I knew that I would be skating within their means, but as long as I was skating, I really didn’t care. When I was skating, I was totally in the present moment. I didn’t daydream on the ice like I did in other places. My mind and my body were working together for a common goal and that feeling was addictive. Despite feeling at home on the ice, the rink will be forever tired to some of my most embarrassing adolescent moments.
I remember one time when my car was pulling into the parking lot of the ice rink, and I saw one of my classmates throwing a football with some of his hockey teammates. Since I’d known this kid since kindergarten, my first instinct was to wave. I knew that he played hockey, and he knew that I skated, but we had never run into each other before. I saw something weird flash across his face, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Years later, I realized that look was embarrassment. Not only had a girl waved to him, but I wasn’t a particularly cute or fancy girl. I’m sure his teammates made fun of him, especially as they all watched as I got out of the car and made my way into the rink. I mean, realistically, he could have just said that we’d gone to school together forever and that our relationship was more like distant cousins who tolerated being around each other at family functions, but not all 10-year-olds are that savvy in the face of being teased. I’m not sure what he said or what his teammates said to him, but for the first time, I felt judged for my appearance and I felt bad about being me.
In my mid to later teenage years, I fell into a solid crowd of hockey players, casual skaters, and figure skaters who attended public skating sessions on Friday and Saturday nights. A friend of mine from my skating club actually pulled me into this routine and it made me feel special to have a group of friends who liked the same things I did. We attended these skates almost every Friday and Saturday night for three years. I was at least 15 before I realized that my friend was only using me as her wing woman, well whatever the middle school version of a wing woman is. Growing up with two brothers, a ton of male cousins, and a bunch of boys in my neighborhood, I generally got along well with boys. I didn’t mind talking about sports or cars, or whatever, and I wasn’t a fussy girl. I really didn’t give two hoots about make-up or “cool” clothes until I was solidly into my mid to late teens. That made me perfect—I would make friends and chat with the guys, I would patiently listen to my friend’s boy drama offering encouragement and advice, but I was never a threat to her. She desperately needed the male attention. Needed to be fawned over. I only realized what was happening when, one Saturday night, I was skating around doing my thing and a guy approached her asking about me. While she didn’t outright say that she was mortified, she did come up to me flustered, confused, and a little angry. Her reaction threw me—it was like she expected me to be just as confused as she was. Instead of being happy for me or encouraging, she was clearly mad that he didn’t have any interest in her. My heart sunk because a real friend wouldn’t act like that. Our friendship didn’t last a whole lot longer.
In high school, I had an amazing group of friends, and I was generally comfortable with myself. Not confident, still awkward and clumsy, but I had friends who loved me, so I got through it. I did go to school with a few of the hockey guys that I spent Fridays and Saturdays with at the rink. When some of us turned sixteen and needed jobs, a few of us started working there, as well. I passed one of these guys in the hallway at school while changing classes one day. I put on a big smile and said “hi” and I saw the same emotion flash over his face that I saw in classmate from years prior. He was embarrassed by me. That one particularly hurt because I considered him a good friend. We had spent countless hours shooting the breeze at the ice rink over the years, so it didn’t occur to me that I would be embarrassing to him outside of that environment. Realizing that I was didn’t feel very good.
Sometimes when you have ADHD, you have a thing called rejection sensitivity. You tend to feel minor things, like the flash of embarrassment on someone’s face, like you’ve been punched in the gut. You ruminate over them. Did I say something wrong? Did I have something on my face? Were they embarrassed because I was chubby and plain? Just a sea of endless questions rolls through your mind and it’s tough to let it go. Case and point, these events are long in my past, but when I think of them, I can remember exactly how I felt in the moment. For me, rejection sensitivity also made my reactions to things more emotional. I’m the person who cries when sad, but also when angry. If I ever got yelled at by one of my parents growing up, or if I got in trouble with any authority figure, my instinct was to cry and then punish myself by reviewing what I had done wrong and what I should have done instead until I was too tired to think anymore. As I got older and learned how to control my emotional reactions better, my reaction to rejection sensitivity was to withdrawal more from social interactions. I would be quieter than usual around those people. I would observe more than I’d engage. In essence, I would draw back my personality like it was on a dimmer switch. I can’t say it served me in terms of learning how to face adversity, stand up for myself, or handle conflict resolution. What it did do was serve a protective purpose for my psyche, so I guess I can’t fault it for that.
College was an entirely different adventure because now, not only did I have to navigate my social awkwardness, but my ADHD was in full swing, and I had to learn quickly how to make it work in the collegiate setting. Freshman year, I developed clinical depression that has been a part of my life in one way or another ever since. In short, my battery always felt like it was empty and there was no charger that could make up the difference. I worked to put myself through college, I had to navigate how to learn at a collegiate level with ADHD, and I commuted to and from campus. I felt like there was very little left over. I would occasionally go out with my boyfriend and a group of our friends or something like that, but it was rare. It’s not that those events wouldn’t be fun—I would enjoy myself, but they wore me out. I felt like I had to mask my depression and my social anxiety, so subconsciously, I would put on the facade of a nice, quiet, but happy girl. I also had a solid complex that I was not as intellectually gifted as the people around me, so it made for an extra layer of insecurity. Masking wasn’t something that I consciously thought about doing, it was just knowing that no 20-something wants to hang out with someone who’s always a downer. There is also a healthy dose of self-preservation in masking. Without your vulnerability on display, you can easily pretend for a few hours, at least, that you’re a normal, functional, person.
Masking, while it serves a purpose in making you look more socially competent than you really are, can also be dangerous. Think about celebrities or people that you know who have taken their own lives. Most of time, family and friends will report that they never suspected anything was wrong. They had no idea how deeply that individual was struggling, or that he/she was depressed at all. The reason they weren’t aware of those things is because the person in question was a master at masking. I can say from my experience that masking became second nature to me. There was the Lorie that existed in private and there was the Lorie that existed in social situations. Eventually, I could switch between the two so seamlessly that even I bought it! I was totally fine! It was just school stress, test anxiety, or financial pressures that threw me off. Otherwise, I was the happy-go-lucky kid that I always was. Right? It took me a few decades before I would even learn what masking was, let alone the fact that I utilized it constantly. That’s taken a lot of work to unravel through therapeutic intervention, and I’m still working on it. One positive thing about that work, though, is that I no longer feel the pressing need to be happy, friendly, and engaged with everyone around me at all times. If I want to be quiet, then I’ll be quiet. If I have more social energy to burn, I might be more talkative or outgoing, but it’s my choice either way. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be downright rude. I’ll smile and wave, chat, etc. The difference is that I don’t feel an internal push to do more than that and it’s a liberating feeling.
I realize that with a reduction in my masking, people likely perceive me as stand-offish or weird. I see the sideways looks or hear the hush in conversation as I walk by a group of people sometimes. Yeah, it kind of sucks to know that grown-ass adults still fall into patterns of judgement and unsubstantiated gossip, but we’re all human. It happens. I know that I’m saving my battery so that I can be more engaged with my kids, so that I can spend quality time with my husband without falling asleep as soon as I sit down, or even just spend some time taking care of myself. I’ve spent most of my life being a people pleaser, being someone who conformed to everyone else’s energy so that I could be accepted, liked. Now, I’d like to be present in my own energy and allow that to dictate what I want, not who I think I need to be for other people. Unhooking from that narrative has not been an easy process. It had to learn how to be comfortable with myself, how to like myself, and how to love myself—social awkwardness, nerdiness, and all. I had to accept that without an over-eager approach to pursuing friendships, I might not have many. What I lack in volume, I make up for in quality, so it’s ok. I can’t say that I’ve found the secret sauce that makes self-love or self-acceptance possible. It’s a concept that I still work on daily, but I have learned that I’m deserving of those things. It’s nice to be liked by everyone, but what good does that do if you don’t like yourself? When you’re constantly pushing aside who you are so that you can be whatever someone else needs you to be, you start to lose sight of who you are.
I can’t say that the skill of making myself a human chameleon hasn’t been beneficial. In my career as an occupational therapist (OT), I could walk into a patient’s room and quickly get a sense about what they needed. Was this a person who appreciated the “tough love” approach, or did they need gentle encouragement? Did they want a thorough outline of everything that we were going to do and why we were doing it, or did they just want to get through it so they could move on with their day? I would pick up on that vibe and adjust my attitude accordingly. As therapists we enter each room with an agenda. Typically, this agenda is driven by what insurance companies expect us to produce, but it’s an agenda, nonetheless. Very rarely does our agenda line up with the patient’s agenda, especially as an OT. Everyone thinks they come to short-term rehab for physical therapy. In actuality, it has been determined somewhere along the line that you can’t care for yourself at home in your current condition. So, the reason you’re there is so OT can help you reach a maximal level of independence so you can go back home. Most patients, though, just see OT as a means to an end in getting the intense PT they wanted. However, when you can quickly bridge the gap between what the patient wants and the agenda that you have, miracles can happen. I have walked into rooms where the patient has immediately started yelling at me and by the time I left, we were laughing and exchanging pleasantries. Naturally, it doesn’t work that way every time, but it worked often enough for me to keep doing it day after day, year after year.
Ironically, a lot of individuals with ADHD find themselves in careers that require high amounts of socialization and/or high amounts of executive function. That means at least eight hours a day with all our cylinders firing at max capacity. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise when these people get home and there’s just not much left over. They’re mentally, physically, and emotionally depleted. Most of us will slide our masks into place as we cross the threshold into our homes. Now, instead of being exhausted healthcare providers, we’re moms who are so excited to hear all about everyone else’s days while making dinner and packing lunches for the next day. When I realized that my mask was no longer slipping easily into place after I got home from work, I knew that it was time to make a change. That’s part of the reason I left sub-acute rehab for school-based OT. While that’s a story in and of itself, the change did help refresh my spirit.
At this point in the article, you may be wondering why I sat down to write this. Well, the answer to that is this: we hear about people being neurodivergent, but no one ever really spells out what that looks like, or what it feels like. You might read this and think about looking into therapy for yourself because you relate to it all-to-well. Or, you might have a child with ADHD in your home and find it challenging to parent them because you don’t really understand the way they think. For example, my life might have been very different if at seven years old I had been able to say something like, “Oh, I know that I zone out during math class. It’s not interesting to me and I’d rather spend time with the characters and scenarios in my head.” Unfortunately, in the 80’s and 90’s, my ADHD diagnosis likely would have still been missed, but people around me may have understood me better. That’s what this is about. Kids don’t have the knowledge or the words to explain what it’s like to be them, but I remember it, and now I do have the words and the perspective to share. If someone reading this begins to understand why their child is “so sensitive” or why they chose to be by themselves so often, then I consider it a success. We can learn so much from each other if we’re brave enough to share our stories. That’s why I’m sharing mine and I hope that it encourages you to share yours, as well. All the best–Lorie
ADHD: Masking, Coping, Rejection Sensitivity, and Being Socially Awkward
When I was in third grade, I made my first best friend. I don’t remember how we started talking, but I do remember that she approached me. After a few months of being friends she told me that when she approached me that day, she was nervous. I asked her why in the world she would be nervous to talk to me of all people? I was the nice, quiet, shy one. She told me that she was nervous that day because everyone in the class thought that I was mean because I kept to myself and generally didn’t talk much. These were things that I had never considered before. When people talked to me, I was nice to them, but she was correct in that I rarely sought people out. Not only was I painfully shy and awkward, which I still am, thank you, but my inattentive ADHD made for a rich internal world. I always had casts of characters and stories playing through my head. I realize now that that’s not a normal thing, but I was content with my inner world. Still, her words made me realize, for the first time, what we’re perceived by others based on what they can see. People see how you look, what you wear, your behaviors, and your demeanor and they draw conclusions about you. I’m not saying that’s fair, or that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s how it is. I can’t say that I haven’t been guilty of the same over the years, but as I’ve gotten older, I try to make a concerted effort not to do that. Mostly because I remember what it was like to have that done to me, but also, I’m now at a point in my life where I have met all kinds of people. I’ve met people who are covered in tattoos who are youth pastors. I’ve met guys who share eyeliner and nail polish with their girlfriends. I’ve met people who are loud and proud members of the LGBTQ+ community and others who still refer to their life partners as their “friends”. I have met all sorts of people who surprise me, and I’ve valued getting to know each one of them. We all deserve a chance to show people who we really are.
Growing up, there was nowhere that I felt more myself than at the ice rink. I started figure skating when I was 10 and I was slightly less socially awkward at the rink. Skating was, hands down, my first love and it gave me something to connect with people over. For the first time, I had friends who loved the same thing that I did. Friends who loved talking about skating, practicing skating, and, eventually, teaching skating as much as I did. While skating will always have a place in my heart, it is a judgmental environment at times. People are likely familiar with girls developing eating disorders from sports like skating, dance, and gymnastics, and yes, you were heavily judged for your appearance. I’d like to believe that this doesn’t happen as frequently now, that strength and health are more valued than aesthetics, but I can’t say for sure. Whether it was the make-up you wore (or didn’t wear) during a competition, what your costumes and practice clothes looked like, or what type of skates you had, you knew if you were “other”. It was obvious to the upper echelon of girls that I skated with that my family didn’t have an extra $10-20,000 a year to spend on my hobby. I wore the same skates and costumes for years. While my friends hopped all around the eastern seaboard competing, I only did one or two local competitions a year. And while my friends often sported that latest skating apparel or name brands like Adidas and Nike, my practice clothes were either thrifted, hand-me-downs, or purchased at a big box store. Honestly, I knew that I was different from the other skaters. My parents were very good at explaining to me the cost of ice time, competitions, club dues, skates, etc. I knew that I would be skating within their means, but as long as I was skating, I really didn’t care. When I was skating, I was totally in the present moment. I didn’t daydream on the ice like I did in other places. My mind and my body were working together for a common goal and that feeling was addictive. Despite feeling at home on the ice, the rink will be forever tired to some of my most embarrassing adolescent moments.
I remember one time when my car was pulling into the parking lot of the ice rink, and I saw one of my classmates throwing a football with some of his hockey teammates. Since I’d known this kid since kindergarten, my first instinct was to wave. I knew that he played hockey, and he knew that I skated, but we had never run into each other before. I saw something weird flash across his face, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Years later, I realized that look was embarrassment. Not only had a girl waved to him, but I wasn’t a particularly cute or fancy girl. I’m sure his teammates made fun of him, especially as they all watched as I got out of the car and made my way into the rink. I mean, realistically, he could have just said that we’d gone to school together forever and that our relationship was more like distant cousins who tolerated being around each other at family functions, but not all 10-year-olds are that savvy in the face of being teased. I’m not sure what he said or what his teammates said to him, but for the first time, I felt judged for my appearance and I felt bad about being me.
In my mid to later teenage years, I fell into a solid crowd of hockey players, casual skaters, and figure skaters who attended public skating sessions on Friday and Saturday nights. A friend of mine from my skating club actually pulled me into this routine and it made me feel special to have a group of friends who liked the same things I did. We attended these skates almost every Friday and Saturday night for three years. I was at least 15 before I realized that my friend was only using me as her wing woman, well whatever the middle school version of a wing woman is. Growing up with two brothers, a ton of male cousins, and a bunch of boys in my neighborhood, I generally got along well with boys. I didn’t mind talking about sports or cars, or whatever, and I wasn’t a fussy girl. I really didn’t give two hoots about make-up or “cool” clothes until I was solidly into my mid to late teens. That made me perfect—I would make friends and chat with the guys, I would patiently listen to my friend’s boy drama offering encouragement and advice, but I was never a threat to her. She desperately needed the male attention. Needed to be fawned over. I only realized what was happening when, one Saturday night, I was skating around doing my thing and a guy approached her asking about me. While she didn’t outright say that she was mortified, she did come up to me flustered, confused, and a little angry. Her reaction threw me—it was like she expected me to be just as confused as she was. Instead of being happy for me or encouraging, she was clearly mad that he didn’t have any interest in her. My heart sunk because a real friend wouldn’t act like that. Our friendship didn’t last a whole lot longer.
In high school, I had an amazing group of friends, and I was generally comfortable with myself. Not confident, still awkward and clumsy, but I had friends who loved me, so I got through it. I did go to school with a few of the hockey guys that I spent Fridays and Saturdays with at the rink. When some of us turned sixteen and needed jobs, a few of us started working there, as well. I passed one of these guys in the hallway at school while changing classes one day. I put on a big smile and said “hi” and I saw the same emotion flash over his face that I saw in classmate from years prior. He was embarrassed by me. That one particularly hurt because I considered him a good friend. We had spent countless hours shooting the breeze at the ice rink over the years, so it didn’t occur to me that I would be embarrassing to him outside of that environment. Realizing that I was didn’t feel very good.
Sometimes when you have ADHD, you have a thing called rejection sensitivity. You tend to feel minor things, like the flash of embarrassment on someone’s face, like you’ve been punched in the gut. You ruminate over them. Did I say something wrong? Did I have something on my face? Were they embarrassed because I was chubby and plain? Just a sea of endless questions rolls through your mind and it’s tough to let it go. Case and point, these events are long in my past, but when I think of them, I can remember exactly how I felt in the moment. For me, rejection sensitivity also made my reactions to things more emotional. I’m the person who cries when sad, but also when angry. If I ever got yelled at by one of my parents growing up, or if I got in trouble with any authority figure, my instinct was to cry and then punish myself by reviewing what I had done wrong and what I should have done instead until I was too tired to think anymore. As I got older and learned how to control my emotional reactions better, my reaction to rejection sensitivity was to withdrawal more from social interactions. I would be quieter than usual around those people. I would observe more than I’d engage. In essence, I would draw back my personality like it was on a dimmer switch. I can’t say it served me in terms of learning how to face adversity, stand up for myself, or handle conflict resolution. What it did do was serve a protective purpose for my psyche, so I guess I can’t fault it for that.
College was an entirely different adventure because now, not only did I have to navigate my social awkwardness, but my ADHD was in full swing, and I had to learn quickly how to make it work in the collegiate setting. Freshman year, I developed clinical depression that has been a part of my life in one way or another ever since. In short, my battery always felt like it was empty and there was no charger that could make up the difference. I worked to put myself through college, I had to navigate how to learn at a collegiate level with ADHD, and I commuted to and from campus. I felt like there was very little left over. I would occasionally go out with my boyfriend and a group of our friends or something like that, but it was rare. It’s not that those events wouldn’t be fun—I would enjoy myself, but they wore me out. I felt like I had to mask my depression and my social anxiety, so subconsciously, I would put on the facade of a nice, quiet, but happy girl. I also had a solid complex that I was not as intellectually gifted as the people around me, so it made for an extra layer of insecurity. Masking wasn’t something that I consciously thought about doing, it was just knowing that no 20-something wants to hang out with someone who’s always a downer. There is also a healthy dose of self-preservation in masking. Without your vulnerability on display, you can easily pretend for a few hours, at least, that you’re a normal, functional, person.
Masking, while it serves a purpose in making you look more socially competent than you really are, can also be dangerous. Think about celebrities or people that you know who have taken their own lives. Most of time, family and friends will report that they never suspected anything was wrong. They had no idea how deeply that individual was struggling, or that he/she was depressed at all. The reason they weren’t aware of those things is because the person in question was a master at masking. I can say from my experience that masking became second nature to me. There was the Lorie that existed in private and there was the Lorie that existed in social situations. Eventually, I could switch between the two so seamlessly that even I bought it! I was totally fine! It was just school stress, test anxiety, or financial pressures that threw me off. Otherwise, I was the happy-go-lucky kid that I always was. Right? It took me a few decades before I would even learn what masking was, let alone the fact that I utilized it constantly. That’s taken a lot of work to unravel through therapeutic intervention, and I’m still working on it. One positive thing about that work, though, is that I no longer feel the pressing need to be happy, friendly, and engaged with everyone around me at all times. If I want to be quiet, then I’ll be quiet. If I have more social energy to burn, I might be more talkative or outgoing, but it’s my choice either way. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be downright rude. I’ll smile and wave, chat, etc. The difference is that I don’t feel an internal push to do more than that and it’s a liberating feeling.
I realize that with a reduction in my masking, people likely perceive me as stand-offish or weird. I see the sideways looks or hear the hush in conversation as I walk by a group of people sometimes. Yeah, it kind of sucks to know that grown-ass adults still fall into patterns of judgement and unsubstantiated gossip, but we’re all human. It happens. I know that I’m saving my battery so that I can be more engaged with my kids, so that I can spend quality time with my husband without falling asleep as soon as I sit down, or even just spend some time taking care of myself. I’ve spent most of my life being a people pleaser, being someone who conformed to everyone else’s energy so that I could be accepted, liked. Now, I’d like to be present in my own energy and allow that to dictate what I want, not who I think I need to be for other people. Unhooking from that narrative has not been an easy process. It had to learn how to be comfortable with myself, how to like myself, and how to love myself—social awkwardness, nerdiness, and all. I had to accept that without an over-eager approach to pursuing friendships, I might not have many. What I lack in volume, I make up for in quality, so it’s ok. I can’t say that I’ve found the secret sauce that makes self-love or self-acceptance possible. It’s a concept that I still work on daily, but I have learned that I’m deserving of those things. It’s nice to be liked by everyone, but what good does that do if you don’t like yourself? When you’re constantly pushing aside who you are so that you can be whatever someone else needs you to be, you start to lose sight of who you are.
I can’t say that the skill of making myself a human chameleon hasn’t been beneficial. In my career as an occupational therapist (OT), I could walk into a patient’s room and quickly get a sense about what they needed. Was this a person who appreciated the “tough love” approach, or did they need gentle encouragement? Did they want a thorough outline of everything that we were going to do and why we were doing it, or did they just want to get through it so they could move on with their day? I would pick up on that vibe and adjust my attitude accordingly. As therapists we enter each room with an agenda. Typically, this agenda is driven by what insurance companies expect us to produce, but it’s an agenda, nonetheless. Very rarely does our agenda line up with the patient’s agenda, especially as an OT. Everyone thinks they come to short-term rehab for physical therapy. In actuality, it has been determined somewhere along the line that you can’t care for yourself at home in your current condition. So, the reason you’re there is so OT can help you reach a maximal level of independence so you can go back home. Most patients, though, just see OT as a means to an end in getting the intense PT they wanted. However, when you can quickly bridge the gap between what the patient wants and the agenda that you have, miracles can happen. I have walked into rooms where the patient has immediately started yelling at me and by the time I left, we were laughing and exchanging pleasantries. Naturally, it doesn’t work that way every time, but it worked often enough for me to keep doing it day after day, year after year.
Ironically, a lot of individuals with ADHD find themselves in careers that require high amounts of socialization and/or high amounts of executive function. That means at least eight hours a day with all our cylinders firing at max capacity. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise when these people get home and there’s just not much left over. They’re mentally, physically, and emotionally depleted. Most of us will slide our masks into place as we cross the threshold into our homes. Now, instead of being exhausted healthcare providers, we’re moms who are so excited to hear all about everyone else’s days while making dinner and packing lunches for the next day. When I realized that my mask was no longer slipping easily into place after I got home from work, I knew that it was time to make a change. That’s part of the reason I left sub-acute rehab for school-based OT. While that’s a story in and of itself, the change did help refresh my spirit.
At this point in the article, you may be wondering why I sat down to write this. Well, the answer to that is this: we hear about people being neurodivergent, but no one ever really spells out what that looks like, or what it feels like. You might read this and think about looking into therapy for yourself because you relate to it all-to-well. Or, you might have a child with ADHD in your home and find it challenging to parent them because you don’t really understand the way they think. For example, my life might have been very different if at seven years old I had been able to say something like, “Oh, I know that I zone out during math class. It’s not interesting to me and I’d rather spend time with the characters and scenarios in my head.” Unfortunately, in the 80’s and 90’s, my ADHD diagnosis likely would have still been missed, but people around me may have understood me better. That’s what this is about. Kids don’t have the knowledge or the words to explain what it’s like to be them, but I remember it, and now I do have the words and the perspective to share. If someone reading this begins to understand why their child is “so sensitive” or why they chose to be by themselves so often, then I consider it a success. We can learn so much from each other if we’re brave enough to share our stories. That’s why I’m sharing mine and I hope that it encourages you to share yours, as well. All the best–Lorie