ADHDers End Up Funding the Whole Free World

I'm a psychotherapist with ADHD who also specializes in it and the biggest thing I've discovered by mapping the lives of myself and my clients, is that we fund society. We pay probably 90% of library fees, parking tickets, speeding tickets (maybe more like 95% of those!), cancellation fees, bankruptcy fees, and tax penalties. And the thing is that we pay all of these because we literally cannot help it. Our main symptoms make us fund society right from birth; we're impulsive, forgetful, procrastinators with big ideas. If Happy Potter had a destiny to free the wizarding world, then ADHDers have a destiny to fund capitalism.

So if this is happening, systematically, to our kind, why don't we revolt? Why don't we jump on cars, and stand at podiums, and interrupt people conversations to inform them of this travesty? It's the same reason for why my clients often don't realize this fact when I bring it up. It's the brainwashing that's been getting us right from the beginning. It's one reliable, predictable statement; we deserve it. We didn't forget to pick up our car because our brain was incapable of remembering to without setting an alarm (and also no training in our early life that our life literally depends on the skill of setting alarms). No, we forgot because we're bad, slovenly, inconsiderate people. We didn't put off our taxes because the complexity of the admin work and year long habits of keeping track of our receipts is impossible for 90% of us. We didn't do it because we're just lazy and don't learn from our mistakes. Didn't you know?

Except that a population can't live like this. If people did this about cancer patients or people with amputated limbs people would be up in arms! You were late for your appointment because you didn't run fast enough from chemo Bob. You can't help me move because you just don't care about your friends, Terry, so what if your one arm can't support all the weight on your own. This would be unacceptable! And why? Because we get chemo, we get losing a limb, we get obvious physical issues. But we don't trust each other worth a damn. If you say you're overwhelmed, most people will tell you to buck up and work through it. If you say your phone was broken and so you forgot the appointment, most people will say that you should have just remembered. And that is wrong to the point of being human rights violations. Just like having your arms severed would impact people in different ways (with one person learning to paint with their with their toes and another needing full time care) we need to learn to respect what people tell us when they tell us about their limitations and difficulties. We need to stop saying "But Sally paints amazing paintings with her right pinky, why aren't you?". Because if we don't, we're crippling ourselves as a planet, as we're now just pumping out alcoholics, video game addicts, and people with stress-related illnesses when we could have been pumping out the next Van Gough (who can only paint in a purple room with all his food never touching), Harriet Tubman (who is always late to meetings) or Elon Musk (who needs a personal driver so as not to get distracted and get speeding tickets).

We need to accept these invisible disabilities and start trusting each other on the intensity of our needs and symptoms. And most of all, we need to stop telling an abused people that they just deserve it.

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