I was diagnosed with clinical anxiety when I was eight years old. At the same time, I was diagnosed with my NLD. So, for nearly as long as I can remember, those things have effected my life, even before I was diagnosed, looking back at prior behaviors.
And I hated it, being diagnosed. “Slap a label on her, she’s done!”
I hated having to explain it to my teachers, to my friends that “No, I’m not stupid, I just don’t grasp things when you explain it like that, try to explain it like this.” or trying to get around my own inability to explain or learn things exactly as I wanted to, no matter how hard I tried, it was like the words that wouldn’t come out.
It made me feel attention seeking, or overdramatic, when I’d have to go in and explain “Yes, this effects my everyday life, yes it still applies, no I can’t just get over it.” Sometimes, I still worry that I make up or exaggerate how much of an effect these things have on my life, on my interactions with people, hell even just on my own.
Like it’s fucking fashionable “Oh yes and I have compulsions.”
No, really, I do, I get up every morning and do things in a “just so” way and if I don’t do them in that just so way, it messes me up the rest of the day with my brain screaming “WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG” at me. And what’s more trying to explain that I can go around that for cons or events, because I have to or want to makes it feel even moreso like that, even though doing that will fucking exhaust me, or leave me shaking and needing to take lots and lots of breaks throughout events, or even with a goddamn migraine.
Or the short attention span. Or trying to get people, man, fuck that was the worst one. Or not grasping basic fucking shapes because they get mixed up. And it’s not even in the fucking obvious ways like you got a straightforward explanation for dyslexia on Static Shock, for me it’s fucking symbols and not even “a square looks like a fucking diamond!” it’s just that they all fall together or apart.
And if you say “Oh it’s a learning disability.” folks immediately chalk it up to schoolwork and that’s the only place it applies. Except you’re learning everyday of your life, aren’t you? You’re interacting with people, with habits, with traffic lights, with stores, with parties, and you’re learning how to respond.
It isn’t like you learn to read in grade school and then it never applies outside of school.
And even if it was just applicable to school, most of this massive fucking disability isn’t even acknowledged as existing to schools, just the bit with the dyscalculia.
And I wonder just how much of my personality is composed of these things, the fact that I fret my way into panic attacks, that I like things “just so”, that I have to ask and ask again for clarification of things just to make sure that that’s what someone meant, and not just what they said.
I wonder if I’m making it up. If I just got a label and happily went along with it.
Maybe it’s just all in my head. Sometimes I resent how much of my life got affected by these things.
But last I checked the brain exists on a physical plane of fucking being between my goddamn ears.
So maybe I’m not making it up. Just on the off chance, maybe.
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