My ADHD is not Cute
I lost my phone the other day while cooking dinner for 15 minutes.
I found it in the fridge.
This is not uncommon for me.
I lost my keys in my hands
My wallet in my pants from 3 days before.
This isn’t something I'm not used to.
My mind has been playing where's Waldo with itself for years,
My body an unwilling participant, hunting itself for every moment I might have missed,
My brain is a maze I struggle to get out of
Not a river but diverging rapids, I never know where I'll end up after all this.
Yet every day I see random assholes on the internet tell me
That ADHD isn't real,
That it is something that was made up for pharmaceutical companies
And to make shitty parents feel less shitty.
And I hate it.
So let me clarify some things for you to understand.
My ADHD doesn't make me write,
However, it does make me sit up at night wondering the math for
“how much sleep I will get if I fall asleep right, now”
Or now
Or now
Until 2 am and I don’t know how I got here
My ADHD is not the reason I'm able to problem solve so quickly.
It is however the reason I wasn't allowed to be in the front or back of the line in 2nd grade
The reason I struggled at talking to people my own age
And the reason I was isolated by teachers for years
My brain a speaker I could never turn down past blasting,
An air raid siren constantly running in the background.
My ADHD doesn't make me more social
It just makes it harder to remember names, dates, birthdays,
And the fact that I was supposed to be doing something more important than writing a poem
Probably donating blood or something, I don’t remember.
I hear assholes tell me how my brain works
And how it is unfair for me to be held down, but all I've wanted was to be helped up.
I'm already down hear counting ceiling tiles and I keep seeing people walk over me
But I’ve never gotten to go anywhere.
I lost my phone the other day and it took 16 years of therapy,
27 years of practice, to not have a mental breakdown
But to instead get up and try to find the damned thing.
Just so that I can finally write this one poem.
Only to remember that I was supposed to be doing something else,
Probably donating blood or something.
