Dear _______________,
You’ll be interrupted. Sometimes it’s tough to hold onto thoughts before they float away like balloons. I want to tell you something, so right when it comes to me I’ll be blurting it out, half-constructed.
I might insult you a little every once in a while. Like I said, thoughts jump off my tongue as I think them, half-baked. But we only interrupt you if we really like talking to you – you make us think, you give us tons we want to tell you. It’s really a compliment.
I might be the best listener you’ve ever met. Or, you might find yourself talking to an empty house; lights on, no one’s home. Sometimes my thoughts pull me inside my own head. No offense, it’s not that you’re boring (well, maybe you are), it’s just that my thoughts are incredibly loud, fast, and colourful. My internal dialogue has more voices than most and they whiz by like neon race cars.
Nnnnnyooooom!
I can text and listen at the same time. Sometimes it’s easier for me to split my attention like this. So when my phone’s in front of my face, I’m still listening.
We’re very intuitive. If you’re upset, odds are I already know. We’re very sensitive to moods, and they affect us. If you’ve got a black cloud hanging over your head, we’re the only ones in the room who can see it. And we’re likely to get rained on, too. The moods of others have a way of seeping under our skin and chilling us to the core. Likewise, our moods are sensitive to our environment. If I’m nervous for a test, the classroom can sound as loud as a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert.
When we like something, we really, really like it. I mean learn-all-about-it, read-all-the-wiki-pages, watch-all-the-Youtube-interviews, read-all-the-books (twice) kind of like. This goes for the people in our lives, too. We are your ride or die friends. We are an intensely passionate people, and once rattled, it takes the bars of our cages a very long time to stop vibrating. So, if I don’t respond to your text or call for a while, sorry, I got stuck on something. We have trouble regulating attention, so either I’m jumping from task to task or I’m completely absorbed in something, be that my homework (unlikely) or Netflix (much more probable).
We may be tough to warm up to (sorry, we seriously can’t stop interrupting you), but once you do, I promise, we’ve got your back.
Love,
Your friend with ADHD.
By: Samantha Seon
Edited by: Alisia Bonnick
Image by: Jenny Soriano
