My sophomore English teacher knew before I did. The exact details of the conversation are lost to me, but I’m sure we were discussing why a paper of mine was late. When I told him that my need to be multitasking at all times made it seem like I had ADHD or something, I thought it was a joke. I’d never been tested for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and I had diagnosed myself as smart but lazy, squandering the potential reflected in my test scores. But my teacher did something I didn’t expect, which most likely altered the course of my life: He took me seriously.
He saw what I couldn’t at the time: My struggles with executive function fit with an ADHD diagnosis. Though I wasn’t formally diagnosed at the time, he and his co-teacher, who taught history, would give me extra time to turn in papers both that year and when I had them again my senior year. They believed me when I said they would get done eventually and graded them as though they were on time. It was the best they could do, seeing my struggles and not wanting to fault me for something they recognized as outside my control.
For over half a year now, patients around the country have struggled to fill their Adderall prescriptions, threatening to topple the structures ADHD patients have built up to support themselves.
It has been four years since I received my ADHD diagnosis from a psychiatrist. Only when I announced it on Facebook did my former teacher relay his side of that story to me. In the years since, I’ve taken Adderall, or its generic version, almost every day at varying dosages to help me function in a society in which any lack of productivity is seen as a moral failing. Before then, I’d been decent enough at most of the jobs I’d held, terrible at others. After I began treatment, I could actually remember what I was in the middle of doing as I was doing it. I didn’t feel the need to get up to wander the office every few minutes. I could motivate myself to start projects…
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