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

Life is What Happens

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

John Lennon

Today I threw away my plans. No I don't think you understand... I literally threw away a piece of paper I have kept for over a year now that had my plans for my life outlined, point by point. I had kept it tucked away in my pencil holder at my desk in my cubicle at my summer job. Whenever I would start to feel down I would pick it up, unfold the piece of paper, and remind myself to keep my eyes on the prize. Scribbled at the bottom was the quote, "Tell me, are your afflictions dear to you?", providing a constant reminder that if I allow myself to become resigned to a situation I don't like, I am essentially holding that situation near and dear to my heart. Laziness is the enemy of happiness and contentedness. 

But today. Today I threw that paper away. 

"But Ellen, Why would you throw something so important away? Nothing is wrong about making goals!"

You're absolutely right! There is nothing wrong with keeping an end goal in mind whilst going about your everyday life. The issue lies in the plan. This wasn't simply a piece of paper that said "someday I'm going to do____". This paper had bullet points. This paper had a detailed timeline. And most importantly, this paper had A LOT of scribbled out words. 

-"Get a teaching job!" became "get a good starter job in marketing!"

-"Either don't get married or wait until you have a career!" became "eehhhhhh I guess you can get married and still have a career"

- "Learn how to make a new kind of guacamole recipe!" became "DO NOT DO THIS YOU ARE VERY ALLERGIC TO GUACAMOLE"   

Well... maybe that last one was an exaggeration... I am allergic to guacamole though... 

The point is... my plan kept changing. 

And that's okay! That means I'm growing and becoming more of the person I'm meant to become. But that also means I can't be keeping around pieces of paper with my entire life planned out in blue ink. It's unreasonable to think you can plan everything out with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad. Life is far too complicated and magnificently bizarre to ever be reduced to that sort of thing. However life is also filled with way too many amazing opportunities and adventures to simply throw up a white flag and say, "well. I guess this is something". Keep you goals tattooed on your heart, not on a spreadsheet. 

Today. I threw my plans away. But let me ask you, are your afflictions dear to you?

-Ellen