It’s always ‘man I wish I was at home’ until you actually have a reason to stay home because you feel bad and then it’s ‘man I wish I was at work because that would mean I didn’t feel awful’

Don’t be shy~ mess with your algorithm~ give different headcannons for like Sk8 or Luca~ /lh /j

This is not what I do here, but for you my love, sure~

SK8 THE INFINITY HEADCANON DRABBLES!

- Reki and Langa are PEAK undiagnosed adhd x undiagnosed autism couple, they go around thinking they're the hottest bitches in the McDonald's but like,,, they're just ranting way too loud about skateboarding and happy stimming-

- Reki's mum caters to Langa's cracked fucking appetite, she now makes dinner for like 9 people because no matter how much Langa objects she refuses to let him go hungry (even though he won't but shh she's doing her best-)

- Cherry has permanent hearing loss in his left ear because of the Smack, he is not above using that against Joe in arguments.

- When Miya is in highschool and Reki and Langa are in college, he moves in with them. As soon as Miya is moved in, Reki starts introducing himself as Miya's brother to every single guest Miya brings.

- Joe gives the best Christmas presents, I can't elaborate on this one but I imagine he puts a lot of thought and feeling into them and they're always perfect.

- Shadow does in fact get ready in his car. He does his makeup in the rearview mirror and he's allowed to look shit because it goes with his energy.

- Miya goes through a phase of showing up to S with whisker makeup on. It lasts for like a year and no nobody will let him live it down.

- Langa's a natural brunet like his mum but he's always wanted blue hair since he was a kid so she would use child-friendly hair dye from since he was like 5 and he just. Never wanted to change it-

- Reki cannot handle the cold but by god if he didn't jump at the opportunity to visit Canada with Langa and learn snowboarding (spoiler alert, he sucks)

- Langa actually had a pretty close friend group back in Canada which he still keeps in touch with and he was actually the Designated Straight because this kid just. Never knew what demisexual was (mlm demisexual Langa fight me.). Reki was really jealous when he found this out but then Langa introduced him to them and he found out that Langa talks about him like literally nonstop so he's fine now-

- Reki is a collector, he has a massive collection of old nuts and bolts that he finds on the ground that he wouldn't use in an actual board so he keeps in jars on his shelf. He also collects fridge magnets, allen keys, rocks and keychains.

- Cherry has his own table at Joe's restaurant, they never talked about it or confirmed it but it's always reserved for him. Does this mean that Joe actually serves him properly? No not at all, he makes Cherry wait like 45 minutes before taking his stupid order.

- Langa teams up with Shadow to give Reki a good bouquet only to find out that Reki has really bad allergies-

- Reki and Miya? Traumatized. As soon as Reki finally tells him mother what happens she sends his ass to therapy which is good. Miya's parents don't take it seriously at all and Cherry has a stern phone call with Miya's father.

- Reki and Langa don't actually kiss on the lips much, they just don't really like it. Prefer other forms of intimacy and skinship ✨✨✨

I was cleaning out my drafts and remembered this it's like a year old I'm so sorry-

hi sarah, if this is too personal you can just ignore it but i was wondering what you major in and how you decided on your major. im 17 right now and coming up on my senior year and my family is pressuring me to go to college and get a well paying job but i just don’t really know what my path is in life and if im being honest i really don’t think i want to go to college, since high school was rough for me in a lot of ways. im trying to see as many povs as possible so i know what i want to do but it’s just confusing to me right now.. and if u have any advice it’s vry appreciated <3 thank u in advance

hi!

i double majored in english and communications at a small liberal arts college and graduated in may.

i chose my major because english/language arts was always my strongest subject and i enjoyed it a lot. i had to take communications classes for gen eds and i really enjoyed them, was good at them, and loved one of my professors, so i decided to add a second major my sophomore year.

im not going to lie, there are financial advantages to attending college immediately out of high school, especially if you do not qualify for need-based financial aid. this is because the majority of "merit" scholarships are reserved for immediate high school graduates. however, talk to your guidance counselor and parents about this. scholarships are very complicated.

college is very, very different than high school. instead of being in class from 8-3 every day M-F, you're only in class for 1-3 hours a day, and maybe not even every day. the rest of your time is on independent work like studying and writing essays. this can vary from school to school, but you also have much more freedom over your schedule. im a night owl so i didnt take any classes that started earlier than 11am all four years of college.

additionally, there is much less structure to college. im a very shy person and (by my own volition) i pretty much just went to class and ate in my room and never spoke to anyone outside of work and class. i was mostly pretty happy to live this way. a lot of people were very friendly and would invite me places and i went sometimes, but i mostly am kind of a loner. by contrast, in high school you basically HAVE to have people to eat with and be in extracurriculars, etc.

there is also almost no drama or bullying as long as you choose not to be involved. if you join a sorority/fraternity or certain clubs there can be drama, but it is nothing like high school. everyone just minds their own business. im sure bad things happen everywhere, but there is way less drama/bullying in college.

i really liked college, but ive always liked school. if you think you may struggle in school due to undiagnosed ADHD or something similar, you might want to look into getting evaluated.

however, if youre leaning towards a liberal arts degree, there is not a ton of money there. BUT, i also know a lot of people who went along with their parents' ideas of med school or engineering even though they didnt want to, and none of them ended up finishing and were very unhappy. of course i know people who wanted to go to med school or be engineers who dont regret it, too. so basically do what feels right.

there are other options like community college, technical school, trade school, and cosmetology school. these come with their own pros and cons, but theyre worth looking into. also DO NOT join the military no matter what they promise you.

i think a lot of people are very afraid of graduating and going to college and getting a job because theres this sort of doom and gloom of a soul-sucking, meaningless 9-5 job and horrible suburbia and misery and your teen years being the best of your life. i know i was (and still am) afraid of that, but honestly it doesnt seem real.

like yes you will have to do stuff that isnt always fun, like work and pay taxes and rent and bills. but you can also do literally whatever you want. ive liked being an adult more than i ever liked being a child.

but you can do whatever you want. if you dont like your job you can quit. if you arent a morning person you can work 2nd or 3rd shift. you can live in a van. you can drop everything and move to thailand or korea to be an english teacher. you can be a bartender. you can do LITERALLY whatever you want. (though TBH its much easier to wake up early once you hit about 21 due to hormone shifts).

and not all work is meaningless. i currently edit history articles, do marketing for a wine bar, and volunteer teaching english to refugees. i really like all of my jobs and think theyre all fun and meaningful. sure, sometimes theyre boring or not fun but i mostly like them. i still live with my parents and am looking for full-time employment in chicago.

i hope this helped and you can always ask me other questions! <3

Why I’m a Leftist

I know I’m probably just some dude who reblogs cool stuff to most of my followers but I’ve got a nice long story/rant about my political beliefs here that I’ve been wanting to write for awhile

I am a leftist first and foremost because I value human life. Everyone matters. No person is inherently more important than another person. Everyone has inherent rights that should not be infringed. People who infringe on other’s rights are morally wrong to do so. In essence my leftism is based on doing what is right. Obviously everyone has their own opinion on what is right but what is vitally important is knowing why your moral code is right. This is why so many people become liberals or conservatives or otherwise rather than leftists. They simply do not know enough about how the world works. There are a lot of reasons they don’t know, not the least of which is intentional covering up history and preventing education. I don’t believe people who aren’t leftists are stupid, but I do believe leftists know more. It’s kinda fucked up but it’s the only way you can explain inconsistencies in other’s values.

My path to leftism was full of cringe. When i was 7 years old Al Gore was running against George Bush for president. I did not know enough to have a real opinion on it but I am happy to say that I wanted Al Gore to win. This thought was based on very little if any logical reason. I basically flipped a coin in my head I think. Or maybe there was some outside influence that I wasn’t aware of, like my older sister who I looked up to might have said she liked Al gore. Either way, from then on I was in favor of democrats and did not like George Bush. When 9/11 happened I remembered thinking how dumb it was that people lined up around the block to get gas. Even as a child I knew that some buildings going down wasn’t going to end the great nation of the United States. In general I thought the United States was a great country. I knew from movies and tv as well as elementary school history that the United States was the most powerful country in the world. 

I recall in Sixth grade my teacher mentioned she liked George Bush because he was against gay marriage. Somehow at the time my opinion was the opposite despite being raised Catholic. I believed in god until I graduated high school and suddenly my desire to be religious slipped away and so did my belief. I do not consider this a great loss. 

Sometime in middle school or early high school I had solidified my opinion that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was pointless and George Bush was a bad president. I was heavily influenced by movies and somewhat by video games that had imparted plenty of anti-war messages. Talks with my dad about nuclear missiles, watching History channel shows about world war 2, and playing Metal Gear Solid which had explicit nuclear disarmament messages, all informed me on the horrors of war. This was not enough to make me totally anti-military. In high school I wanted to join the military because I thought it was an easy way to get life experience and eventually pay for college. I was attracted to the Marines because of how cool movies like The Rock and video games like Call of Duty made it seem to be a Marine. I thought they were the best of the best. I was simultaneously against war, against veteran worship, and very pro-military. I was indoctrinated by years of government propaganda but also disillusioned by all forms of media including the book All Quiet on the Western Front which was about a soldier becoming disillusioned by witnessing horrors of war and the negative impact it had on everyone in his country. I spoke with a recruiter during my senior year and expressed my desire to be a Marine but I told him I wanted to wait a year after high school so I could get physically fit enough. The recruiter did not care that I was underweight and out of shape. He didn’t even care that I was very enthusiastic about joining, he was still putting on his best salesman demeanor which made me incredibly uneasy. The experience is supposed to pressure people into signing up on the spot, I think they even had forms for me to sign (i can’t really remember though) but I was not ready and was aware enough how I was being manipulated although not entirely cognizant. After that I no longer wanted to be in the military.

I also have to point out that I grew up in an unstable household. My parents were both loving but they were flawed and made mistakes and had problems. My dad was a typical Gen x man’s man. A little bit too emotionally repressed, but actually really good with kids when it came to play time and still is. He worked a lot because my mother couldn’t. My mother has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as long as I can remember. Her medical bills related to her problems combined with other financially bad decisions by my parents caused my home life to be fraught. I lived in varying degrees of poverty until my parents separated and me and my siblings moved with my mother to her parents’ house away from my father. Prior to moving though, we endured great financial difficulty. We were unable to afford school lunches but could not apply for free or reduced lunches because technically my father made a lot of money, however it was all garnished for medical bills. My father always tells about how he bought a car that had hidden frame damage and when he attempted to sue the dealership for selling a bad car he lost and was garnished for that as well. Despite making over 25 dollars an hour in 1999, my father could not afford school lunches for three kids and couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill. Without going into too much more detail, life sucked and continued to suck until I graduated, at least financially. I still found plenty of joy and it wasn’t always that bad. We still found ways to have good things like video games and we could always rewatch old movies but there’s a lot of psychic weight that comes with being that poor as a child and I’m sure it affects me and my ability to empathize with others who in bad conditions. 

So i watched a lot of movies and documentaries, read a lot of books growing up, discovered internet forums at the age of 11, played video games, moved to a town that had a very large Hispanic population, and I even grew up poor. All of this life experience turned me into a very average liberal upon graduating high school. I was a very optimistic 18 year old. I thought science could save the world. If I was 18 today I would be an average redditor stereotype probably. The point here though is I still wasn’t a leftist. Only vaguely progressive and full of optimism. This is when I got sucked into the anti-feminist pipeline.

I can’t remember what exactly what I had going on in my life but I remember it was around the time of Gamergate. Everyone on the internet, celebrities, and pop culture were saying “if you believe in equality between genders you’re a feminist” an did not like that. And there was a ton of people online to tell me I was right in not liking that. They all said feminism was not necessary anymore because legally you couldn’t discriminate against women and I agreed. Gamergate made it worse for reasons too complicated to get into in this already long post but suffice it say I was “pro Gamergate.” This put me at odds with my closes friends who thought feminism was great and had no qualms with it, and were already embracing the idea of being a “social justice warrior.” Despite reading all kinds of anti-feminist think pieces and reveling in the discourse, I was still very progressive and liberal minded person. Still thought the military was bad, that black people were discriminated against etc. But so many aspects of anti-feminism were appealing to me as a white guy who tried their hardest to do what they’re told is right, had low self esteem, undiagnosed adhd and depression, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism was. Two things got me out of anti-feminism though. The first and most important thing was having friends who were patient with me about it. I didn’t reveal how into anti-feminism I was because I was ashamed but they could sense it and pushed back when they could. The second thing that got me out of it was actually finding feminists online and reading what they had to say, staying away from poorly written clickbait articles that fueled misogynist tirades against feminism. After reading and learning from feminists it finally clicked. Our society is patriarchal and that affects how people interact with each other regardless of what is legal. Many of the complaints of anti-feminism talk about how men have it in society, so how can society be patriarchal. It’s because of patriarchy that men are put in bad positions. Some of the more self aware anti-feminists had retorts against these ideas but they were emotionally charged. There’s still some anti-feminists I have respect for because of how well prepared and logical they were when it came to disputing feminism. But when it came down to the fundamental tenants of feminsim all they could respond with was anger or outright denial of reality. (If you’re like I was and don’t understand how anyone can thing modern feminism is good please feel free to ask me more, I just can’t get into specifics in this long ass post) Anyways, once you understand patriarchy and how it affects an individuals actions then you can start seeing how other institutions and cultural norms can affect an individual. This is basically fundamentals of leftism. I’d say about 90% of my path to leftism was just naturally absorbing cultural and historical information through consumption of media. The most conservative people I know are people who haven’t read very many books or seen very many movies. I’m not saying watching Austin Powers at the age of 10 will make everyone a leftist but constantly recontextualizing the world by learning something new, even if you learned it from some dumb comedy movie, can give you better grounding in a shared reality.  Don’t know how to end this but I want to say when I was a teenager I thought “communism is good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice” and I had almost no historical basis for it other than the vague notion that USSR = bad despite having consumed a massive amount of media. None of it taught me what communism actually was, I didn’t know who Karl Marx was, and I had no clue why communism in the USSR failed. You can know a lot without knowing the truth so if you’re struggling with a loved one who is mind poisoned by conservative keep in mind that they know a lot but they’re missing something important to give clarity. 

This has been my Ted Talk

Drunkpromt: Dark Academia, humanAU. 3 brothers all go to an exclusive college, but lambert has an extremely hard time keeping up with his studies because of undiagnosed dyslexia. His brothers have tried helping him in the past but got so frustrated and called him stupid so much that he stopped asking them for help. He is smart but just can't manage to study fast enough, and in order to not get kicked out, he ends up letting ALL of the professors use him as their fuck toy just so he passes.

Honestly? Dysxlexic Lambert is a headcanon i never thought i needed. Already headcanon him with adhd because... well. I have it and his behaviour is a big ass mood. So now he has both. It’s canon because I’m married to him and he told me so. Anyway, back to the prompt-

Lambert just tries so hard. His brothers knows he does, has seen him spending countless hours with his books and heard as he slams his fist against his desk and calls himself stupid at three am before an exam. At first they tried to help him, but the constant belittling comments and frustrated screaming that he isn’t even trying! made Lambert stop asking years before college. It’s a miracle he got in, honestly, but Vesemir pulled some strings and his old teachers vouched for his potential and bam! There he was at one of the most pristine schools offered to young adults.

The first semester is... hell. He is on the verge of failing most his classes already, the workload not impossible, but far worse than any school before this. It’s not even interesting subjects, his mind wandering as soon as he tries to focus and leaves him staring at a page for hours while chanting to himself to focus, dammit! As winter draws close, he is summoned to one of his professors to discuss his grade, his office neat and spacious as he enters. It’s a long and boring duscussion, the man disappointed in Lambert’s grades and surprised by them considering all the good words he had heard about the guy. When he brings up his brothers’ grades Lambert is on the verge of losing it and storming out, perhaps wrecking that ugly ornament by the door while he’a at it just to ensure he is to be expelled by the end of the day. But he doesn’t, just sits there like a good boy and takes it. Eventually the professor walks around his desk to stand in front of him, asking the other to rise up as well. He does a slow walk in a circle around him, studying Lambert like he’s meat before stopping once again in front of him.

“Perhaps you have potential anyway.”

And that’s how he finds himself on his knees with the man’s cock far down his throat, tears just about to falla s he chokes on the thick member over and over for minutes on end. He is forcefully dragged back by his shirt collar before his face is painted in ropes of come, the sticky seed running down his cheek and dripping to the floor off his chin. Lambert can’t tel if it’s come or a lone teardrop that is slowly trailing down his face. Not that it matters. He is promised to pass if he keeps being a good boy.

Apprently rumours spread quickly, because barely a week later he is sat on his own hands in a plush chair as another professor bounces on his cock. He can’t touch, is not allowed to rock his hips with her motions, but in the end he comes and leaves with another passing grade.

The rest of the school year is the same. He is bent over oak desks, fingered open and fucked in a majority of offices and forced to eat out more cunts and suck more dicks than he can count. It’s all humiliating, Lambert hating every second of it even as his cock pulses and he spends himself more often than not, but he isn’t complaining. All he can think about is the proud look on Vesemir’s face as he sees his grades speckled with C’s and B’s, an A thrown in for allowing two of the older professors take him at once.

Emotional Abuse and ADHD

Ok, first real post on the ADHD sideblog, so lets dive straight into the heavy stuff.   TW/CW for emotional abuse, gaslighting, and probably some other things too (please feel free to let me know if I should add additional tags).

I had trouble sleeping last night because my brain kept insisting I needed to start this blog, like immediately, despite it being clearly not an opportune time to do anything of the sort. Or at least, it insisted, I needed to jot down all the essay/ramble/whatever topic ideas I had complicated thoughts on so I could start the blog today. I managed to resist doing both of those things, and get to sleep eventually, but here I am.  The first topic that brought this on was wanting to talk about my experience in an emotionally abusive relationship and how many aspects of that were exacerbated by various symptoms of my (then undiagnosed) ADHD. 

I’m going to assume a certain amount of baseline familiarity with some terminology and whatnot here, if you’re confused by any of the ADHD terms I use here I recommend heading over to theadhdmanual.com and reading their very helpful “three pillars” articles which do a great job of explaining Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and emotional hyperarrousal (also elsewhere called emotional disregulation, I’ll be using both terms interchangably but won’t be abbreviating the latter for hopefully obvious reasons).  On the emotional abuse terminology front, there’s a couple great articles on gaslighting on everydayfeminism.com that I recommend seeking out. 

It is possible I am slightly stalling here by providing all this context.

At this point damn near ten years ago, for most of my senior year of college and for a good few months afterwards (I don’t remember how long exactly since adhd brains suck at timelines and I don’t feel like logicing it out right now) I was in what I later realized (with help from the aforementioned everydayfeminism articles) was an emotionally abusive relationship.  My then-boyfriend, who I will call Al, was insecure and jealous. I had more sexual experience than him going into the relationship, and he used that as an excuse to guilt-trip, manipulate, and ultimately control me.  I realize now, that the primary weapon he would use against me was my own RSD. 

Whenever I did something that upset Al, (typical infractions included things like accidentally mentioning one of my exes, correcting him about something,  “flirting with” --read: talking to-- any of my friends who were more my friend than his, or singing along to music) he would generally make his displeasure known by ignoring me--withdrawing all physical affection, coupled with the silent treatment.  If you’re familiar with RSD, you can already guess how effective this was.  If you’re not, then for comparison you should know that ADHD people can spiral very quickly into completely irrational “they hate me, don’t they?” thought spiral from something as small as a delayed text.  Al would almost never tell me what I did to upset him, and in my guilt-spiral I would usually tearfully beg forgiveness for everything I could think of until I guessed correctly and/or he arbitrarily decided I’d had enough. 

As an aside,  he would often do this silent treatment toward me in public while being perfectly cheerful and whatnot with our other friends, often making it seem to others like he was just joking or messing with me. On one memorable occasion he refused to say anything to me but the word “spoon” with varying inflections for the better part of a day--a pretty skillful gaslight because to everyone else around this just seemed like goofy ol’ Al being his silly self, but from context I knew this was part of a punishment, and I couldn’t express any kind of being upset about this, even annoyance, without looking like I was overreacting to a dumb joke.

Ultimately much of what he actually did (or didn’t do) in public didn’t look like much to an outside observer, but he knew my (RSD fueled) insecurity would make it hurt, especially when I wouldn’t be able to address anything with him until we were in private later. 

Also (and I intend to write a whole different post about this later) my particular brand of emotional disregulation takes the form of crying extremely easily.  I cry when I’m sad, when I’m tired, when I’m happy, when I see something too cute to handle, and (most importantly, in this instance) when I’m angry.  Because of this, every time I tried to address some relationship concern I had with him, whenever I tried to call out some of his shitty behavior or bring attention to my own emotional needs, it was extremely difficult--nigh impossible--to do so without crying.  This gave him a massive amount of gaslighting ammunition--it made it very easy for him to say I was overreacting, overemotional, irrational, trying to manipulate him, et cetera.   And it was hard to defend myself against that, even to myself. After all, lacking the ADHD diagnosis and resources about emotional disregulation that I have now, I had pretty much internalized the idea that I’m just “oversensitive” when it comes to crying, so I rationalized that I was also being oversensitive about whatever concern I started with in the first place. So every time a conversation started with me telling him he hurt me some way, it inevitably ended with me apologizing to him instead of the other way around.

Just to add to the already nasty cycle, Al also considered crying over something he didn’t deem worth crying over a punishable offense, so it often triggered the previously discussed silent treatment. 

A third aspect of ADHD I haven’t discussed yet also played a major part in how I was abused--Memory.  I don’t have a good resource to link on this one (I’m pretty sure there are some good howtoadhd videos on it on youtube but I’m not going to go dig for them right now), but ADHD people, on the whole, have terrible memories, especially short term/working memory.  Mine in particular might be even worse for some kinds of things  for unrelated reasons (aphantasia, which I might write about later but this is already really long and it’s not actually that relevant here).

Al was perpetually convinced that I was cheating on him, and any time we were apart he would quiz me afterwards on where exactly I was, what I did, for how long, and in what order.  Any inconsistency in my account, or any “I don’t remember”s would mean he would accuse me of lying about the whole thing.  I am pretty sure I have in common with most ADHD people that between time blindness and bad working memories, giving a consistent and accurate account like that is basically impossible, so this rarely went well for me.  Just to further complicate matters, being accused of lying when I’m not is practically guaranteed to make me cry, and trying to keep from crying (to avoid angering him further) means I swallow a lot, and somewhere Al had heard that excessive swallowing is a sign that someone is lying, so again these various ADHD symptoms would combine to just make everything worse.  

 I eventually got out of that relationship, and not too long afterwards got together with my now-husband, who is wonderful, so that’s a happy ending. Getting diagnosed with ADHD a few months ago, learning about these symptoms, and figuring all this out has made this make much more sense to me than before.   But in addition to my ADHD symptoms making me more vulnerable to these emotional abuse tactics,  I’m pretty sure the leftover baggage from the emotional abuse may have made those very same ADHD symptoms worse, and while my new meds seem to help immensely with the executive disfunction aspects of ADHD, they don’t do a damn thing about RSD spirals or emotional disregulation.  Healing and processing it all is slow going, but it has gotten a lot better over the years, and knowing now that even another aspect of this isn’t my fault helps too.  And taking my meds today did help me motivate myself to write all this out, so maybe that will help as well. 

I’m not sure what the takeaway is here, other than I strongly suggest everyone learn what gaslighting and emotional abuse in general looks like, but especially if you have ADHD or suspect you might have ADHD because we might be more vulnerable to being on the receiving end of it than most people.  If anything I talked about here sounds a little too familiar, I strongly recommend reading up on gaslighting, and consider getting the heck away from anyone who sounds too much like Al.  Maybe us ADHDers will inevitably get into some nasty thought-spirals or bad emotional places sometimes, maybe we’ll cry over nothing or worry too much that something we said will make everyone hate us, but if anyone tries to use any of that against you, uses it to get you to do what they want, or intentionally makes you feel worse, they’re not someone worth being around, and I promise you deserve better.

Not sure if anyone will read this, much less any fellow ADHDers because yeah, it’s a big ol’ wall of text and I get that can be hard, but if you made it this far, thanks for listening and I’ll try to go not quite so heavy with my next post, (assuming, of course, that I have a next post and this blog doesn’t become yet another started-and-abandoned project).

That’s all for now.

hi! i dont mean to restart shit but i feel like the reason neurodivergent ppl butt heads over gifted kids so much is that to kids like me who had undiagnosed adhd that had me hide my report cards and tests in elementary school, its kind of a slap in the face to hear so many people who you were compared to and put down against talk about issues that have plagued you since you were super young, but framed in a way that only they could relate to! the education system fucks over both “gifted” AND-

-kids who were barely scrapping by! it just affects us at different stages of our lives, and for different reasons. tying my intelligence to my self worth, an inability to ask for help, always feeling like im underperforming, etc, these are all things that affect me because i dont want to be the ‘dumb kid’ again. i still have to do extra work my high achieving brother doesnt because my mom doesnt trust my intelligence!! + i also think that ppl are bitter yall cld do so well during school-

- in the end, i think our experiences are more like a mirror; “ure dumb and forever will be vs if u get less than the top of the class ure a failure and ur achievements dont matter” (also, personally, even after hearing all the shit the gifted program put yall thru, id love to have been a gifted kid. id rather know i have the capacity to be smart than be the kid who regularly scores in the bottom of the class)

Listen, I am neurodivergent. That's what my entire post is about, how because I was gifted, I was seen as ""too smart to be disabled"" and given no accomodations whatsoever, even though I greatly needed them. I was autistic, but nobody in the education system even THOUGHT to look at why I suddenly started failing classes when I got into 10th grade, nobody even thought to ask me why I was having such a hard time. Because if I was ""smart"" then I should be able to do good in advanced classes. So ergo, my struggling was laziness. Except for one teacher, who when I told her, told me I needed to suck it up and get my homework done or she was going to fail me.

Like, I'm not trying to demean your experiences in the school system or say "I had it worse than you", but the entire reason I made the post in the first place was because I was absolutely fucked by the gifted label in school because I was neurodivergent. The gifted label leaves no wiggle room. You're either smart and pass your classes, or you're lazy and get shit grades, according to teachers.

I had a burn out at 15 years old. Think about that. I was 15, a time where I should be hanging out with friends and doing fun things. But instead I fell to the floor of my bedroom and cried for over an hour because I just couldn't face the fact I didn't do my homework again and my teachers were going to fail me. I was so mentally unstable because of the expectations put on me by the gifted label, I was so scared of seeing that big fat F painted across my report card, that I just broke.

On top of that, I was placed in advanced classes or classes I didn't need because I was ""smart"" and it would look better for getting a ""smart"" job. They kicked me out of the one place I felt safe in the school, Art, and replaced it with electives I didn't need or want simply because it would look good on my college applications. They replaced my Language Arts classes with a ""Gifted Class"" in Middle School and specifically because of that, I have no idea how to structure an essay more than 6 paragraphs long. Every time I asked a teacher for help, they'd tell me to stay after school (which I couldn't at the time, I didn't have a ride) and wouldn't even explain in the simplest terms what they wanted because "You're smart [gifted] you should already know this."

You do NOT want to be a gifted kid. Trust me. Especially if you're neurodivergent, because gifted kids are basically pressured to be mini-adults as kids and when they don't respond as being a perfect pinnacle of maturity or smart-ness, they're said to have problems with laziness. Or ""behavioral issues"". I needed SO much in school, but because I was labelled as gifted, I never got any of it. If we need help with anything we're ""supposed"" to know, you're shit out of luck, because nobody will give it to you. "You're smart, you're supposed to know this!" Is our mantra, and eventually, we stop asking.

The reason I made the original post is because the ""gifted"" label is thrown at anyone who has even a moderate IQ score who ""think differently"" than others. See how that ties heavily into the neurodivergent community? Some people with the gifted label might be neurotypical, but a lot of them end up being neurodivergent later in life for the sole fact "they were too smart to be disabled" and nobody ever said "Hey, you Might be neurodivergent" because they were seen as smart.

Gifted kids don't have it easier. Our praise from adults is always tainted by "You could do better". We don't get accommodations we need. Our education is lax because we're already supposed to know it, despite never being taught whatever it is they expect us to know. Adults want to make all of our academic decisions on how smart they think we are. We're given double the work because "we can handle it". And worst of all, we're constantly beaten down with "You're so smart! Why aren't you understanding this?" As if not understanding something is somehow our fault.

The post wasn't being like "GOD GIFTED KIDS HAVE IT THE HARDEST IN SCHOOL BECAUSE OF X". It was "The neurodivergent community greatly intersects with the gifted community and their struggles in the school system need to be acknowledged and not talked over because of the notion 'gifted kids have it easier because they're smart'."

I'm not going to lie, most of the reason why I dropped out from 10th grade was because I just couldn't handle the expectations from my teachers to be the perfect student and hand in perfect papers. They beat down that 15 year old teenager who liked anime and Sonic and reading to the point where I had a complete mental breakdown and I begged my mom to let me quit. Begged her, on the floor, sobbing. I burnt out so bad I couldn't read a book for over 4 years. I'm just now starting to read again.

School is fucked. But the Gifted label adds another layer of Hell to it that neurodivergent kids just aren't equipped to handle, and I feel very strongly about letting these kids talk about what they went through, bitter people or not.