Most of My Friends are Boys

“I'm ADD and psychic. I know things ahead of time but lose track of which is which.” 
― S. Kelley Harrell



Living with ADD/ADHD can be a daily struggle for anyone. It's hard to sit through a class, it's hard to know what thoughts are worth saying and what thoughts should be kept to yourself and you usually have a minimum of 10 ideas colliding in your mind at once.
While living with ADHD is tough for anyone who suffers from the illness I want to use this blog post to talk about girls. Being a girl with ADD/ADHD is especially difficult because most of society doesn't expect it from you. I remember sitting in my Ed Psych class my freshman year and being told, "ADHD is usually found in boys, it's actually fairly rare to have a female student with this disability". I remember sitting there after being told this and thinking, "wow... I really must be weird then".

Girls with ADHD suffer from many alienating difficulties specific to their gender. To name a few;
-Acing "lady like" is harder for us. We have trouble sitting still and reading social cues.
-We often have messy handwriting. And believe me, there's nothing more embarrassing than the teacher calling out, "There's a paper with no name on it if somebody wants to claim it, it has messy handwriting so I think it's a boys" and then having to sulk up to the front of the class to claim your paper with "boy handwriting".
-girls are expected to be more still. More preserved. (Which is garbage but that's a blog post for another time) Needless to say girls with ADHD are not that.
-Girls with ADHD are messy. They often times simply forget to clean up after themselves. Which is another trait more often contributed to the male gender (again this is garbage, but a blog post for another time).
-We often have difficulties with fine motor skills as well, which makes doing "girly" things like putting your hair up, doing make up or crafting, very difficult for us.

I can speak from experience when I say growing up as a girl with ADHD often times makes it very hard to fit in, in traditionally feminine spaces. A lot of my close friends growing up were boys because I simply fit in with them more. I had a much better time running around outside than staying inside and playing house. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that!

I wrote this post to let the girls with ADD/ADHD know that they aren't broken. You aren't weird. You're you and that's fantastic!

This is for the girls who have always had to say,  "Most of my friends are boys".
-Ellen