in hell they'll give you lexapro
or: maybe don't tell a 12 year old that she's gonna be locked up in a psych ward if she doesn't stop crying you absolute freaks
This essay is part of my first zine sad, gay, catholic which will come out before the end of the year! I’ll let you know more about it, as soon as the preorder opens <3
I started displaying symptoms of what I now know to be ADHD (and also maybe autism) at the age of 11, a few months after starting middle school. I wasn’t the most organised kid before that -I constantly lost textbooks and hoodies, much to my parents’ annoyance- but the beginning of middle school is when my behaviour became an actual problem. I was getting overwhelmed by everything, and I was crying almost every day for seemingly no reason. I have very vague memories of this part of my life, but I distinctly remember being inconsolable, I remember being overwhelmed by emotions and feeling the crying come up, and the frustration of not being able to fight it. I remember the faces of adults and classmates around me turn from concern to frustration when they asked me why I was crying so much, and I literally could not explain it to them, I couldn’t say anything but “I don’t know!” and I had to watch them get exasperated. I now know that my teachers were calling my parents on a regular basis to complain about my behaviour, and no one knew what to do with me. The question that every adult in my life was asking turned from “how can we help this kid?” to “what is wrong with her?”. This was not ideal.