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year-of-yes · 4 years

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Rabbit Hole

There’s nothing that those of us with ADHD love more than falling down the rabbit hole of a new hobby. I’ve decided that my new rabbit hole will be vaginas. Queer vaginas.

I’ve been exploring my sexuality more thoroughly this year, prompted by quarantine and my last year of grad school, to really lean in.

I’m a serial monogamist and find myself with free time - my boyfriend is studying abroad for the next year - and we’ve decided to open up the relationship. Given that I’ve always been in relationships, or spent most of my pre-tinder years woefully sexually repressed, I’ve never just gone balls to the wall in terms of prioritizing MY sex life. For me. I’m a notorious people pleaser and just the thought of telling a guy on a first date that I was only interested in casual sex would have made my skin crawl 5 years ago.

But no more!

The first few months of my new found freedom have been a veritable smorgasbord of men WAY out of my league. Something about knowing I’m in an open relationship allows guys to relax and just have fun with intimacy. (Men are the worst.) Ive never been on smoozier dates, with nicer wine and hotter guys in my life. Should I ever become single again, I will probably just continue to pretend to have a boyfriend, because DAMN. I’ve started keeping an album in my phone of their tinder profile pics just so when I’m old I can look back and remind myself that yeah, I FUCKED.

Part of this new exploration has been coming to terms with the fact that yes I like women, and yes, I’m not attracted to ALL women, and yes I have mostly hooked up with guys but YEAH, I was definitely bisexual. And that I should stop being afraid and just DO IT.

But like any baby dyke on her first foray into the unknown, I was like a traveler with a brand new passport leaving the country for the first time, blinking out of an airport to realize that I didn’t speak the language, and oh yeah, I was dressed like a tourist.

Despite the wisdom in taking things slow, my ADHD impulsivity had taken over and like any good hobby worth hyper focusing on, I was determined that I would learn by DOING. I wanted to have sex with women. Now, preferably.

I thought hooking up with a woman for the first time would be as easy as matching with someone hot on tinder - after all, thats all it really took with guys. I casually started following more queer women on instagram, tiktok and twitter, paying attention to what I could learn, assured that on any given day, I’d run into someone at the grocery store or match with a babe on tinder who would sweep me off my feet. Because now I was ACTIVELY looking at women! Not passively checking them out!

WRONG. After months of falling for dozens of matches who never messaged me, or conversations that never led to plans, or plans that fizzled out, I pulled on my big girl pants and decided that I was going to be a woman of action and get.myself.on.a.date. I’m hot goddamn it! I was going to MAKE SURE they knew I wasn’t just another straight girl bored on an app. I WANTED TO EAT PUSSY.

it might be time to introduce that in addition to my very noticeable ADHD, I also have much less noticeable autism. All that business about girls presenting differently than boys means that others rarely pick up on it - and I don’t feel the need to mention it unless I think it will impact our relationship, like with a friend or coworker. I’ve learned that mentioning it on dates doesn’t really make things easier, but thanks to years masking, I can pull off a first date no sweat. Continuing on to dates 2 and 3 can be trickier, but I’ve learned how to navigate those waters with men who, suffice to say, are rarely intuitive enough to pick up on anything. In fact, I would venture a guess that most people on a date with me consider me very extroverted. Nevermind that I’m too mentally exhausted to leave my room the day after a date. I talk a lot, occasionally too much. I often look bored or bitchy because resting autistic face is more exhausting to change than resting bitch face, so I make up for it by being overly chatty when we hit on any of my special interests.

I have NO idea how this will translate on a date with a woman. My instinct is to say that I am overthinking and likely it will feel like any other date, but then I’ve always found women harder to read than men, and found it harder to see how they read me. I was also terrified that flirting would feel different - what if I was giving off a friendly vibe, not an I-want-to-fuck vibe? Is it typical for women to fuck on a first date? Should I touch her to let her know I was into her? Or did the fact that I had gotten all the way from a swipe right on tinder to an actual date suffice in itself to let her know? These might not be the sorts of questions a non-anxious neurotypical person might ask themselves, but they are the questions that I had slowly built up an arsenal of information for over the last 14 years in my interactions with men - information that was no longer applicable. So I set about seeking out this information in a way familiar to most autistics learning information that came naturally to others.

Google! I realized that I know very little about the actual gay scene despite having queer friends. How do lesbians flirt? How do you pick one up? What is considered too forward? And how in gods name did you eat pussy? Because goddamn it I intended to be good.

I had heard the term lesbian tiktok thrown around and decided to see what was what. Mostly I found videos of 20 year olds with flawless skin making lewd tongue movements that were supposed to be sexy. After probably 40 cumulative hours of trawling tiktok I realized I had a type: androgynous girls who were beautiful despite dressing down and not wearing a ton of makeup. Then I had a real heated soul search with myself. Was I attracted to them because I…wanted to be them? Liked the way they looked and dressed because I too aspired to cool androgyny? A few more days on tiktok and I put my guilt behind me: I definitely had a type and who gave a fuck if it was sort of self indulgent.

I also refused to go back to a time when I was bad at sex. I consider myself a solid sexual partner, keeping guys generally out of my league coming back for more. Thats because I refused to feel self conscience naked, was an excellent kisser, an active participant, vocal about my desires and (most important for men) my ~enthusiasm, and understood the power of delayed gratification.

I realized that while I could read articles about eating pussy all day long, it would ultimately come down to what the other girl was into. I’m a proficient masturbator and know what I like others to do to me - but I wasn’t yet accustomed to picking up on the cues that women give about what they liked. I resolved that the first time I was with a girl, I was going to lean in to the delayed gratification. Focus on kissing, touching, necks, ears, breasts, navels etc. so by the time I came face to face with a vagina it would be so wet I’d have my work cut out for me. In a little vagina shaped cake. Why not just ask them, you say?? Because! I’m extremely awkward and don’t want whoever she is to know that I’m woefully inexperienced. Fake. it. til. You. Make. it.

It was like being a horny teenager again: desperate for interaction but unsure how anything worked. I was googling phrases like “bisexual style” and “how to eat pussy without getting tired”. I read hours of r/actuallesbians, Tumblr posts and go magazine articles. Mostly I realized that I would be able to skirt through to some degree: I was a solid 6-7 on the attractiveness scale, willing to be aggressive and outgoing no matter how awkward it made me feel, with a roommate who could make sure I looked stylish and a can-do attitude.

Now all I had to do was find a girl I wanted to fuck, who wanted to fuck me too.

#bisexual #queer #baby dyke #girlswithadhd #girlswithautism

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earlgreyandadderall-blog · 6 years

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“Don’t Call Me That!” - My Relationship with “Disabled”

When my psychiatrist told me I had ADHD, I was shocked. Like, really shocked. I had asked for a referral to a psychiatrist because I knew something was wrong, but ADHD was the last thing I was expecting to hear. I was thinking at best depression, at worst borderline personality disorder. The symptoms that prompted me to seek psychiatric help were a total absence of motivation, uncontrollable fits of anger, and severe attachment and abandonment issues. I remember her going through the checklist of every possible disorder in the DSM, asking me if I heard voices, if I self-harmed, if I binged and purged. Then she started asking me what I thought were the stupidest questions in the world. Did I interrupt a lot? Yes. Did I start projects and never finish them? Yes. Was I very forgetful? Yes. Did I spend money recklessly? Yes. I wanted to ask her what any of this had to do with anything, because those were just normal aspects of life for me and always had been, and I didn’t think they were symptoms of anything. I didn’t see how they were related to what I was going through at the time. She stopped writing, looked at me, and asked me if I had any idea what she was talking about. I laughed and said no, no idea.

I’ll never forget the way she lowered her glasses, smirked a little, and told me “You have ADHD.” “Oh.” I’m generally pretty deferential to authority as long as it isn’t being abused, so all I said was Oh, but what I was thinking was more like what the fuck? On what planet? How?

At the time, I think I knew or knew of maybe two or three people with ADHD, and only one of them was anywhere close to not completely fucking batshit insane- and to be honest I didn’t really know her personally but some of the things I’d heard about her were kinda pushing the envelope on that. What I mean by not completely fucking batshit insane is that her hair was a naturally occuring colour, she didn’t identify as demisexual aromantic nonbinary, and didn’t feel the need to change her name to an inanimate object like Pokemon or Beansprout. Still, what little I did know of this girl involved some pretty out of control antics. To be fair, yes, the primary reason I had sought a psychiatric evaluation was for out of control antics within an intimate relationship, but I wasn’t like that all the fucking time; it only came out when I was under a high level of stress. I guess what I’m trying to say was that seven months ago, I didn’t know anyone with ADHD who I would have considered “normal.” I guess my thoughts were written all over my face, because my psychiatrist jumped right in to explaining that so many girls like me go undiagnosed until post-secondary precisely because we seem “normal.” She told me that if you’re not being loud and disruptive in class, and especially if you’re getting good grades, teachers won’t look at you twice. She wasn’t wrong. All of my high school teachers knew that all-nighters before exams and tear-filled breakdowns over papers were the norm for me, but none of them worried. They just saw my straight-As and figured I stressed over school because I was a perfectionist. They didn’t see how hard it was for me to sit down and focus, because in high school you honestly didn’t need to focus that hard to do well. They didn’t realize that I wasn’t crying because I thought my essays weren’t good enough- I was crying because I didn’t think I was ever going to get them done. Slowly, she explained to me how everything I had been experiencing fit into my new diagnosis and that I was far from the only girl who felt this way, and in spite of myself, by the end of my appointment I was fairly confident that she knew what she was talking about, that I was both “normal” and a person with ADHD, and that those two things were not mutually exclusive. I went home bound and determined to learn all that I could about ADHD so that I could improve my life as much as possible. The internet, as always, was very helpful, but there was one thing I saw that bothered me deeply. My psychiatrist spoke about ADHD like it was basically a mental illness. Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that because it impacts a lot more than just your emotions, and you can’t “recover from” or “beat” ADHD, but that was basically how she presented it to me. Reliable websites referred to it as a neurodevelopmental disorder, and a lot of people spoke of it as a difference in cognition. I didn’t know exactly which of those definitions I identified with most, but out of every label I saw, there was one that I rejected as if it was a hot coal being pressed into my palm from the minute I saw it- disability.

I was glad that I didn’t see Wikipedia or WebMD or, most importantly, the DSM, referring to it as such- it was mostly the kind of batshit fucking insane blue-haired Tumblr snowflakes I referred to earlier who adopted this label. Still, it made me angry, almost irrationally so. It has bothered me every day for the last seven months, and it still bothers me today. For that reason, I’ve decided to make this post exploring and examining the various reasons - from medical to personal - why I reject this label, while at the same time critically examining why I have such a distaste for being labelled disabled in the first place. Thinking about this has forced me to confront my own ableism, and while I believe I have done that successfully, I still personally reject the idea that ADHD is a disability. I’m going to separate this entry into three sections, discussing the personal, sociological, and medical reasons why I do not identify as disabled. I would be more than happy to hear everyone’s thoughts on this, so don’t hesitate to message me or leave a comment on Facebook!

Let’s Talk About Bias

Out of all the reasons I reject the label disability, there’s only one that isn’t really grounded in either science or sociology. In fact, it isn’t grounded in much of anything besides my own upbringing and my own bias, but as bad of a light as this may cast me in, I still want to be honest with y’all and talk about it. Honesty? I just don’t want to be disabled. I don’t understand how being disabled is a reality that anyone would want, let alone an identity that they would choose for themselves, which a lot of the ADHD community and the mentally ill community more broadly seems to be doing. I don’t think being disabled is something desirable and I have no fucking clue why anyone would embrace it if they don’t have to.

Is that bad? Is that ableist? I don’t know. I’m very much into social justice, but I’ll admit that ableism and disability activism is probably the area that I know the least about. So if I say anything here that’s ableist, don’t hesitate to call me in, but please forgive me- this is not my area of expertise, and I’m just trying to be honest about how I feel about my own situation. Let me give you a little bit of background here. I come from an immigrant family, and I was raised on a lot of tough love. I grew up with the notion that if there was something I couldn’t do, it was probably because I wasn’t trying hard enough. For this reason, it took literally a decade from the first time I had a panic attack to the first time I sought treatment for mental health issues. I was diagnosed with anxiety and anorexia about four years before I was diagnosed with ADHD, and while my family was supportive, they were also firm, and always reminded me that if I wanted to recover, it was up to me. ADHD might be a little bit different than anxiety or anorexia- it’s basically lifelong, and you can’t just recover from it. However, when I was diagnosed with ADHD, I knew that my quality of life was still up to me. It was up to me to take my meds. It was up to me to make sure I get enough sleep. It was up to me to keep a to-do list and to ask my friends and family to help hold me accountable. It was up to me to make dietary changes. At the end of the day, even though ADHD would be with me for life, I was in control. I can’t beat it in the sense that I can’t end my battle with it, but I can beat it every day by choosing to do the things I need to do to feel healthy and normal. Based on what I was taught growing up, that isn’t a disability. While my parents gave me a lot of tough love, they also taught me compassion, and taught me that I was very fortunate to be of able body and mind. I could “tough love” myself towards a life where ADHD didn’t hold me back. People with disabilities literally can’t do that. Someone who uses a wheelchair is not going to be able to walk if they start getting eight hours of sleep. Someone with a true learning disability cannot overcome their struggles in school by taking Adderall. So I mean, why would I want to be disabled? It’s not that I’m looking down on people with disabilities or perceive their human worth as less- not at all. It’s just that obviously people who are disabled have a unique set of struggles that are largely impossible to treat or to overcome, and I acknowledge that I’m very privileged and fortunate not to be in that situation. What I have may be lifelong and it may be challenging, but it isn’t untreatable, and with the right medication and self-care, it isn’t impossible for me to live more or less the same life as a neurotypical person. And I’m happy about that. I don’t want to embrace a label that implies that that isn’t the case. It’s not just that I like being abled, and it certainly isn’t because I have any sort of disdain for disabled people. Most importantly, I think that calling myself disabled would really cheapen the term, because I know that what I struggle with is not really comparable to what someone with autism or Turner’s Syndrome or spina bifida struggles with. Which brings me to my next point…

“Disabled” As an Identity

The 2010s have been the decade of identity politics, and in my opinion this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People have been organizing and advocating around certain identities that tangibly affect the way they move in the world and what their lived experience in society is like. Identities are things like gender, race, religion, and sexuality, and within these identities, there are privileged groups and non-privileged groups. For example, men are privileged and women are not. White people are privileged while other races are not. Christians and secular people are privileged while Muslims and Sikhs are not. Of course, one of these identity groups is based on ability. Abled people are privileged while disabled people are not. Based on this, when I’m deciding whether or not I’m going to identify as disabled, I really need to examine my privilege. Basically, I need to ask myself if my ADHD impacts the amount of privilege that I have in society. People are often quick to jump the gun here and assume that any challenge means a lack of privilege. If that were the case, ADHD would definitely be a disability. However, challenges that exist internally, like having a hard time focusing or not being able to control your emotions, are not about privilege. Privilege or lack thereof is not about internal challenges but about the degree of ease or difficulty you experience accessing and interacting with social institutions. For example, black people lack privilege when dealing with law enforcement. A white person who keeps getting arrested because they keep committing crimes does not lack privilege, because their arrests have nothing to do with the way law enforcement sees them. On the other hand, Eric Garner for example was choked to death by a police officer for selling cigarettes, which is a clear misuse of force and clearly exemplifies that the police officer saw Mr. Garner as less-than. People with ADHD need to ask themselves if the struggles they experience are a product of their position in society, and if they are in that position because of their ADHD. Of course the answer is no. ADHD does not really alter the way people look at you or interact with you, as it would for people with profound intellectual disabilities, and it doesn’t come with accessibility concerns akin to those that come with using mobility aids such as a wheelchair or walker. Since ADHD doesn’t result in any significant loss of privilege, when questioning my identity on the axis of ability, I have to align myself with the privileged group and say that I am not disabled. A lot of people will jump at this and say “well the legal definition of disability includes ADHD!” Yes, it does. It also includes all mental illnesses, diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. The legal definition of disability has a specific function that is not particularly relevant to whether or not one can fairly assume the social identity of being disabled- the legal definition simply exists to protect anyone with any medical condition from being discriminated against on the basis of that medical condition. These conditions are classed as disabilities so that they can be dealt with by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and treated as “discrimination on the basis of ability.” I think we all agree that diabetes and heart disease are not disabilities, so now that we’ve cleared that up, you can proceed to throw the legal definition of disability in the trash, because it is truly irrelevant.

Basically, if being disabled just means you have a medical condition that makes things difficult, then sure ADHD is a disability. But especially in today’s world, where truly disabled people are organizing and fighting for their rights as a marginalized group based on this identity, then the word has to mean something more. Otherwise it loses its power as an identity around which marginalized individuals can advocate for change. And honestly? To anyone who thinks any mental illness is truly a disability- no one with a real disability believes you. Okay, I shouldn’t say that. None of the three people I spoke with while writing and preparing this entry believe you. But their voices matter. No one knows better what is and isn’t a disability than disabled people. And at least in my experience, disabled people don’t think ADHD is a disability.

I see a lot of “mental illness is a disability” in student politics- something that I have a love/hate relationship with, as anyone who knows me knows. Student union offices, your campus’ women’s centre, or CFS conferences are great places to hear people going on and on about how hard it is to be neurodivergent, and to see people with anxiety and depression and ADHD describing themselves as disabled and talking shit about how it truly impacts their lives and experiences and blah blah blah blah blah. So I want to issue a challenge to students especially: look around your student union office. Look at the posters that cover your student centre during elections. Look at the people in attendance at CFS conferences. Ask yourself if you see one autistic person. One person with Turner’s Syndrome. One person using a wheelchair. I bet you don’t. It drives me crazy how people can write essays about their “disabilities” when the spaces they are involved in and find solace in aren’t even accessible to disabled people. So as harsh as this sounds, honestly, if you call yourself disabled because you have ADHD or any other mental illness, check your privilege. Literally.

Medical Reality Matters

Last but certainly not least, like the subheading says, medical reality matters. Just as much as disabled has to mean something socially, it also has to mean something medically. Quite similar to my more sociological analysis of the term, medically speaking disabled cannot just mean a chronic condition that impacts quality of life, because again, this would include everything from diabetes to arthritis to heart disease. Obviously, we need to narrow it down a little. It goes without saying that ADHD is not a physical disability or a profound intellectual disability, but is it a learning disability? I don’t think so. And frankly, you can’t just say you’re disabled if you’re not. It doesn’t work like that. According to the Learning Disabilities Association of America, learning disabilities “are neurologically-based processing problems. These processing problems can interfere with learning basic skills such as reading, writing and/or math. They can also interfere with higher level skills such as organization, time planning, abstract reasoning, long or short term memory and attention.” ADHD certainly does interfere with executive functioning skills such as organization, time planning, and attention, but it isn’t a learning disability because it isn’t a “neurologically-based processing problem.” It is a neurodevelopmental disorder, but the issue is not with processing the material in and of itself. Although it may feel like it, ADHD does not actually impact our ability to learn, but rather our ability to create and fulfill the conditions that enable effective learning. Obviously the struggles with focus and time management that come with ADHD make learning more difficult, but these do not originate in a problem with information processing. As we all know, ADHD is the result of problems with our neurotransmitters, specifically dopamine and norepinephrine. This is nothing to do with our ability to process or retain information directly, although it can seemingly affect our ability to do these things. On the other hand, the brain of someone with dyslexia has a problem processing letters; the brain of someone with dyscalculia has a problem processing numbers. Although we may have some similar struggles, the problem is not the same. The Learning Disabilities Association of America actually addresses ADHD directly, stating that ADHD is “a disorder that includes difficulty staying focused and paying attention, difficulty controlling behavior and hyperactivity… ADHD is not considered to be a learning disability. It can be determined to be a disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), making a student eligible to receive special education services. However, ADHD falls under the category “Other Health Impaired” and not under “Specific Learning Disabilities.” I don’t think I can do much better at making my case than citing the Learning Disabilities Association of America, so there you have it.

Ultimately, I can’t tell anyone what to do or how to identify (although the Learning Disabilities Association of America can, ha!). I didn’t write this entry to start an argument or to criticize or attack anyone. This is simply a topic that I’ve been discussing amongst my friends for a while now, and I figured I would put pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard) and share it with all of you, especially since I have been majorly neglecting this blog. I hope that this was informative, and as always, if anyone has any questions, feel free to message me or drop a comment on Facebook. Hopefully I’ll be back again before another three months goes by!

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