At 22 you still have most of your life to live. Be glad you found out now and not at 44. Diagnosed this summer and it’s good to know, but at the same time all those years of flailing kind of make me sad. All I can do though is move on from here and I hope you can do the same.
I found out at 36. I feel like half my life’s been set to hard mode and I only just now found the difficulty slider.
I was diagnosed at 32. And tbh it made it easier to forgive myself for all the things that are very clearly signs of ADHD. eg. forgetting peoples’ names, only absorbing maybe half of what I was verbally told, procrastination, fidgeting, impulsivity etc. For all those years I was treated badly by other people because of it and now I know I wasn’t a bad person like people intentionally or unintentionally lead me to believe. I did the best that I could with what I had.
In what way are you stupid? You don’t know what you don’t know. When I was a young bloke, I was just “That weird kid…” ADHD was only just starting to be known and ASD was basically unheard of. You were either “normal” or “not normal”.
People figured we were broken, but not in which way…
The hard part is when you know you are “broken” and there’s nothing you can do about it…
As I say to my co-workers…
“You think you’re frustrated with me? I have to live with this cunt in here!”
Don’t worry about it. Have fun with it and keep the cunts guessing…
I know what you’re going through OP. It sucks but you’re relatively young. Hopefully you can start forgiving yourself.
You were built to thrive in a way that your environment was not designed for. It really is understandable to not know why. Now you get to thrive.
