how do u draw so much so fast

well,

Hey, sorry if this is intrusive, if you don't want to answer it's fine. But I saw you reblogging some posts about adhd and I wanted to know If you are diagnosed, and If so, how was your process. Because I relate to like 80% of the simptoms, rsd and inattentiveness hit me especially hard, but I have no idea how to get a diagnose. I'm from Brazil too btw, and I see basically no one talking about this, and they mostly spot young restless boys.

Oh, it’s not intrusive at all! I’ll be happy to share how it went with me. You see, I was only diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, but I had been diagnosed with NVLD first in my teens.

During my entire childhood, I had trouble with socializing, couldn’t read social cues very well, and, despite being a “good student” in general, I’ve always been disproportionately bad at anything involving numbers. My parents have always been averse to the idea that I had anything “wrong with me” because I had learned to read and write at a young age, and school psychologists have always told then I was smart, I was just immature for my age and “didn’t try hard enough”. They left it at that and my dad, who has always been very good with numbers, used to go over the entire coursework with me so I would at least get good enough grades at math to not flunk my classes.

When I was 15, I changed schools and started to really feel the pressure to “fit in”, which I was really bad at. That was when an artist I admired on DeviantArt once described her experience with being on the autism spectrum and I could relate to a lot of aspects of it. I started to suspect I could be on the autism spectrum myself. I asked my mom a lot if I could see a psychiatrist about it, and she eventually agreed to let me attend this study made by a teaching hospital to diagnose young people who might have different kinds of mental disorders.

I took a lot of different tests and, after some months, I was diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, which isn’t in the autism spectrum per se, but shares a few characteristics with it, mainly the whole thing with socializing. What differentiated it from an autism diagnosis was mostly difficulties with visual-spatial awareness and numbers, which in of itself would be called dyscalculia. So I was like “OK, this is what’s up with me, then.” and I started seeing a therapist to help me with it. I was 17 and in high school, then.

Despite knowing about my shortcomings, though, my therapist often told me that my problem was that I was “too lazy” when I related my issues with things like paying attention in class and not being able to just “get up and do things” sometimes she also body shamed me a lot but that’s not really relevant. Anyway, I stayed with her for a while but eventually it got too expensive to continue, so I left.

That was when I left high school and got into university for the first time. I got into vet school, which was the first time in my life I couldn’t ask my dad to help me with certain subjects I did badly in, because, unlike with math and physics and the like, he couldn’t really help with things like anatomy. Long story short, I did well for a while, then started doing really badly and eventually, I had to drop out. I attributed that to my bad visual-spatial perception and started attending another university, this time to learn animation, a subject I’ve always been passionate about. The same thing happened: I did well until a certain point, then I got in trouble with a single subject (this time it was 3D modeling) and eventually did so bad I had to drop out again.

This all took a big emotional toll on me and everything, but that was when I realized I had pretty much always followed a certain... pattern when it came to my academic life: I just couldn’t pay attention to certain subjects at all and had to try my hardest to learn them, often needing outside help, while others were naturally interesting to me so I didn’t really need to study. That was also when I first learned about executive dysfunction, which is very often a trait of ADHD, and I could relate to it a lot. The more I read about ADHD, the more I could relate to it. I started to suspect I didn’t only have NVLD, but I could have ADHD as well.

Also I kinda rushed things up for the sake of brevity but just to situate the story better, between graduating high school, getting into an university, studying for a few years, dropping out, getting into another university, studying for another few years and dropping out again, a lot of time passed. I was now 26 years old.

Anyway, I decided that I wanted to see another psychiatrist about possibly having ADHD, and I eventually got around to it. She asked me a few questions about my academic life, how I paid attention to things, whether or not I experienced “brain fog” (I did, and I described it as TV static in my brain) and about executive dysfunction, she told me “Well, you look like a pretty textbook case of Inattentive Type ADHD, alright” and decided to start me on a low dosage of Ritalin. And! Everything changed! My chores didn’t take the whole day long to complete anymore and eventually, I decided to give animation school a try again, and I did way better at it! I also started seeing a behavioral therapist, which also helped me much more than my “regular” therapist had ever done.

So... if I learned anything from all this, is that, in the end, we know ourselves better than we give ourselves credit for. If you read about a certain disorder and start to heavily suspect you might have it, there’s a good change that you do or that you have something pretty similar. The older you are (and the furthest you are from the “hyperactive little child” stereotype people usually have about ADHD) the harder it might be to get a formal diagnosis and medication, but it’s definitely not impossible! It might take seeing quite a few different psychiatrists -which is not going to be cheap, I admit- but with some trial and error, you might be able to find someone that’s willing to test you for ADHD.

That’s about it, I guess! Sorry for the length, and I wish you the best of luck!!!