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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.

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.

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

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 working on a personal project when a friend visited. I went through a quick series of successes and failures with my project and openly emoted at each, afterward he said to me “I’ve never seen anyone go through so many emotions in such a short amount of time.”

…not until now…

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 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.

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I am learning an instrument as an adult and my instructor commented “You’re so good at recognizing patterns.” That comment hit way harder than it had any right to.

I’ve never been diagnosed with anything, but I’m not good with people/the public, I can shake if it’s really bad, and I’m not good with eye contact. I was forced to go to a work meeting and I just could not look at anyone. They started talking to me “soft” and saying that I “speak so well” and that I was a good representation for that “community” of workers. They also told me to speak to my manager if I needed any accommodations.

I didn’t get converted to a permanent position after a whole year at my job. The only negative feedback (among otherwise great remarks) I had was six months in:

1. Be more organized and send 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.

* It’s ADHD.

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.

How would I know if something is wrong with me?