My ADHD Journey as a Mid-Twenties Nonbinary Person

If you follow me elsewhere on the internet, you may have seen that I was diagnosed with ADHD on October 6th 2021. It has been a long journey, I gave a brief summary in my first video discussing my ADHD Graveyard of how I got here but I wanted to give further details of the full journey I have been on.

My initial self reflection began with questioning if I am Autistic. It seems like a lot of people are usually the reverse, they were diagnosed ADHD and then started to wonder if they we also Autistic. I've had numerous friends in my life diagnosed Autistic and they were some of the first people I ever really went "damn, you get me," about anyone. And the one person I knew had ADHD, we had a rocky friendship that ended up in a pretty solid understanding of each other. Reflecting on these friendships I had (but also all my other interactions I remember) made me see more and more traits and gave me more clarity on why some circumstances even happened. It was because people could see my neurodivergent traits and didn't like them.

We Need To Talk About White Privilege

text reads: TALKING WHITE PRIVILEGE with carrie, drew, charley, ruby, kenna, piper, dan and sunny. Image of artie on the right. images of people listed along the bottom.

As white people, we are so used to being referred to as ‘people’, we are not used to being referred to by our skin colour and being spoken to as a ‘white person’ can throw someone off. We take for granted that we are often the baseline for a lot of products. There are a lot of beautiful masks being made in the midsts of the Corona outbreak, I see lots of my white friends sporting them on their outings to the shops or for a walks, but I have also read many stories of Black people expressing the sheer terror of wearing a mask that isn’t very clearly a medical mask because police associate a Black person covering their face with committing a crime or being in gangs. There have been a few face filters going around that have been exposed, the smile rating one that marks your smile from 0-100, black people can reach the 100 relatively easily, but can’t reach a frowny 0 unless they hide their lips. Even going to the toilet in a public bathroom, the mechanism of how an automatic tap, soap dispenser or hand dryer works is often based on how much red light is reflected back and Black skin doesn’t reflect enough light for the machines to turn on. Our world is not built with Black or Brown people in mind.