"You have such potential if you'd just stop squandering it."
"If I had just a fraction of your talent..."
"The problem is that you never take anything seriously."
The steady drumbeat of some statements leave stains on our souls that we'll spend our lives trying to wash away through punishment.
The super frustrating thing is seeing your classmates who apparently have “less potential” turn in lesser work and get better grades because the teacher expects more and thinks a B will motivate you. It drove me to math and computers because they couldn’t argue with the provably correct answers.
Yeeeep, I think there's a whole generation of STEM kids who gave up on humanities because no answer was good enough when their worth as students was what the teacher was really grading.
Seriously. In a vacuum, sure, give me a ‘B’ and celebrate it like an ‘A’, but in a world with GPAs that affect things like keeping your scholarship or qualifying for an internship, this just means this instructor doesn’t understand how academia works and nobody should take their course.
The craziest part is that these "encouragements" wouldn't help a neurotypical person either. They can only be interpreted as malicious. The way to encourage someone properly is to praise effort, because praising output actually leads to worse results in general.
They're a societally approved way of venting frustration on others for failing to achieve what the speaker thinks they should have. It's sanctioned abuse under the guise of tough love because it offers no empathy, no aid, and no meaningful attempt at dialogue.
Someone one told me diamonds are forged under pressure and someone else chimed in 'and bread rises when you let it rest, whats your point?'
I think about that often with my own ADHD.
"Don't you have any filters?"
"Why can't you just sit still and pay attention?"
"Show your work. There's no way you could get the answer just looking at the problem. You must have cheated."
Oh I’d forgotten that last one.
Can’t just be smart enough to be right, have to prove you’re right in the way the stupid people believe.
And then they wonder why I’m argumentative when they ask me to do some illogical shit.
So many with ADHD are smart AF. It's almost like being hyper smart just goes with being hyper in general. When we skip steps because it's not worth our time and just jump to the obvious f*ing conclusion it baffles them every time.
No joke, my consolation as a teen was 'I have a superpower.'
Trying to explain to a teacher that me knowing the answer is 27 is as intuitive as them knowing that 1 is followed by 2 is followed by 3. It’s not that the steps in the middle are not worth my time, it’s that I don’t consciously think them, the answer is just there.
So instead I have to learn how to be less smart, how to work slower, or I fail for getting the right answer too fast and too easily.
As an adult I found I could get praised for my work as long as nobody figured out I’d left it until the last minute and done it in ‘too short’ a time.
So much THIS. It was a particularly acute problem with the STEM courses but also had a similar challenge in Econ, Stats, geography, etc. But in later life, our family's lives literally depended on this skill to get us safely across the Pacific for weather routing. It's handy, not a party trick.
I love this for you Matt while simultaneously hate what it must have caused you to experience. All I can say is that now my ability to put those seemingly unrelated facts together into a coherent narrative quickly and on the fly is without question why I get paid the reasonably good bucks.
I find some meetings so frustrating at work. We sit down, the problem is announced, I figure out the solution, say the solution and then get to wait for 2 hours while the others catch up, arrive at the same solution I gave at the start of the meeting, and pat themselves on the back for solving it
I had 50% attendance at school, got no degree, and was CEO of a non profit before I was 40.
It makes me happy seeing young people today rejecting traditional ideas of the successful career path. I wish I’d had the (self) knowledge and visibility of alternatives to the thing I was told I was failing.
Child ADHD here, I still imagine what life might have been like if I was a Good Kid, that didn’t need their bodily autonomy taken away and sense of self fucked with by ritalin
How fucked to tell a CHILD that their personality was wrong and needed to be modified for public consumption
