14
votes
When did you first realize you were different?
Interpret “different” in whatever way you like, for whatever context you like. Tell us your story.
When did you realize it? What was it like? What did you feel? What came of it?
Second grade. In my class, during the writing block, we would get a number of assignments, you'd start out on yellow paper writing a few sentences from the board, then you'd get a green paper and do the same thing, then you'd get a white paper, and do the same. Each paper had slightly smaller lines, forcing you to perfect your handwriting in theory.
Most of the kids in the class would concentrate on their work, get done, and have about 15 minutes to just relax and do whatever they want at the end.
For some reason, I was TOTALLY unable to ever even make it to the end of the first paper. I'd start off, then get incredibly bored and frustrated from having to do this work, and just kind of stare off into the distance, daydream, or doodle. I'd tell myself that I'd get to it after I took a break because my hand hurt, or because I was bored, or because I wanted to just look out a window for a bit. That break would turn into 15 minutes, then I'd try to force myself to work again, and take another break, and eventually I lost the ability to even force myself to do any work. By the end of each period, everyone else was done, and I'd have maybe 1/4th of the first page completed.
My teacher always told me I needed to focus and stop getting distracted, and I wanted to, but I just couldn't. It was like something physically blocked me from being able to sit down and be productive for any amount of time. This continued for my entire career at school. I'd always start off strong; I'm naturally a very good test taker, and I always told myself each year that things would be different this time, and stay on top of my homework and work, but after a few weeks, I'd drift off and just stop being able to complete work. My grades were always absolutely terrible as a result.
My parents eventually took me to get tested for various neurological or psychological disorders. I don't remember much except that it was a long battery of tests, being hooked up to electrodes, and all kinds of other things. I was young, but from what I remembered, I was told that although I was very intelligent, I was on the borderline of ADHD, and I just needed to learn to cope.
I never truly did, and all throughout middle school and highschool I had god awful grades because of a combination of extreme procrastination, overconfidence in my ability to get a ton of work done at the absolute last minute, and what felt like almost a physical inability to force myself to pay attention to anything I wasn't interested in, or I didn't enjoy doing.
College was marginally better because I had a lot more ability to choose what I wanted to pursue, but I still had a lot of issues there. I also joined the military around that time and learned that although this condition has massive drawbacks in most situations that modern society puts in front of us, it was also a massive advantage in others, bordering on superpowers.
I was trained to lead troops as an officer, and as part of that training, you're put through deliberately extremely stressful situations where a ton is going on and quick, effective decision making was a requirement. I noticed that my fellow trainees would completely drive themselves into a ball of stress in these situations, freak out, hyperventilate, and encounter decision paralysis. I had an almost superhuman ability to not freak out in these situations, take only the minimum amount of time I needed to analyze a situation, and make a considered, educated decision. It didn't matter if people were screaming in my face, if machine gun fire was over head, if explosives were going off next to me, or my soldiers were pinned under enemy fire and taking "casualties", it was very easy for me to compartmentalize, consider the situation, and make an informed decision. The military is full of high stress situations like that, and I always thrived in them.
Since that experience, I've stopped being as critical of myself for the way my brain works. I still struggle a lot with most of the things that modern adults are expected to deal with, and have to lean on coping strategies to get by, and find it extremely hard to be productive in most jobs, but in my mid 30s, I know there are situations where I absolutely thrive where others fail. Any high stress, high stakes, time dependent situation is where I can make up for my other shortcomings. Need to give a presentation to a board room full of execs and shareholders, and you only have 30 minutes to prepare? I'm your man. I won't even break a sweat. An entire data center is down, costing us millions of dollars an hour and someone needs to take charge of the situation? Sure thing, let me jump in, nothing would make me happier.
There's a long term project that needs to be effectively and meticulously tracked, and make sure people stay on task throughout that process? Sorry, but I'm just not going to do a good job with that. I know myself well enough to be certain of fact at this point, and I've given up on the idea that I can somehow train myself or change my brain to be good at those sort of things.
As an adult, I have officially been diagnosed with ADHD, and am on medication, but it only marginally helps. I still mostly am who I am. I still learn new coping strategies sometimes, and I'm always curious about more, but I don't think I'll ever be as effective in most modern jobs as a "normal" person will be.
Every time I read a description of ADHD, I say to myself, “Wow, that sounds so familiar!” I really need to bring it up with my doctor at some point, haha.
I would say it's worth it, but its not a panacea. To be honest, it hasn't helped me a whole ton. I've heard of people that have ADHD getting put on Adderall and saying things like it feels like coming out of a dark room their whole life, and while I'm happy for them, it wasn't like that for me. More like being in the same dark room except my sense of touch is a bit heightened and I'm slightly more able to sense everything around me. It helps a little, but I definitely don't feel like I'm as good at what most people call "adulting" (executive functioning) as most adults are.
I'm not as bad as I was when I was a kid. I can, for short periods of time and through sheer willpower, force myself to stay on task sometimes, but I still have an extreme tendency to drift. Everyone is different though, and medication helps some people much more than it helped me. I've also heard of ADHD specific talk therapy treatments like CBT that may be effective, and although I do go to therapy as a normal "preventative maintenance" ritual, I'm not in anything specifically focused on threating ADHD, so that may be another good option. A diagnosis can't hurt either way.
On the one hand, ADHD medication can help you tremendously. On the other, those are not side-effects free medications, and long-term effects are not well researched. They are not cheap either.
Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine) works for me, but it also increases my anxiety and worsens my fine motor skills so videogames are not as fun. It also dulls my emotional responses while active (roughly 10 to 12 hours a day), which has a sizeable impact on my relationships and also on my ability to be a normal human being.
Just to give you an example, I cannot watch comedies while under because I'll simply find no humor in them. Without the medication, on the other hand, I may not be able to sit through an episode of the Simpsons. It's really a double-edged sword. I often take a break when I don't have any task to accomplish, I get completely inattentive but at least I feel something when I look at my fiancée.
I would only recommend it if you're truly unable to manage to live a regular productive life otherwise. When I started treatment my ADHD was so bad I was unable to listen to a Ramones song from start to finish. I don't think I had much choice, but still, sometimes I think to myself, "was it really worth it"? So yeah, ADHD treatment is certainly something to consider, but not something to take lightly.
Amphetamine and methylphenidate are some of the most researched and well-understood drugs on the market; we have more than six decades of solid longitudinal data regarding long-term use. Let’s please not give disinformation from naturalist hippies undue credence.
Dear @FluffyKittens, please feel free to disagree with me in the strongest terms you deem warranted, but may I suggest you refrain from demeaning unhelpful rhetoric such as "disinformation from naturalist hippie"? Thank you so much.
While this assortment of substances are old news, the medication I use was approved by the FDA in 2008.
Lou, please know I’m not saying that to imply you’re any sort of naturalist hippie yourself, but the narrative you’re espousing is one that comes from the same confidently-incorrect swath of housewives, naturopaths, MAs, etc. that push conspiracy theories such as autism being caused by vaccines.
Lisdexamphetamine (Vyvanse) is the same old dexedrine that’s been in use forever, but with an amino acid added to it that gets cleaved away in the bloodstream to provide a slower release curve than ordinary oral dexamph. There’s nothing new or dangerous about it, and reputable medical professionals know as much.
I’m not talking blindly here; I’ve worked in medical research, I’ve taken these drugs clinically, and I’ve probably read more papers/books on ADHD treatment than your run-of-the-mill mental health clinician.
Well, I'm not American, I've never been to the US and I believe in science, so the context in which I am in is likely so different than yours that your pattern matching was led askew. The professionals who first indicated to me that such substances can be harmful were medical doctors, psychiatrists in fact.
Let me back up and say I apologize for my phrasing, Lou. The FUD campaign against ADHD medications is a broad societal issue that has worn me thin.
Ideas get dispersed globally, doctors aren’t immune to disinformation campaigns, and their knowledge gets outdated quite easily over a decade or two of practice.
Two decades ago, there was a compelling case to be made that we didn’t understand the long-term effects of these drugs. Around the turn of the century, Pfizer et al. made a big push (both in the US and globally) to get prescribers to push Adderall and Ritalin on progressively younger pediatric populations - on a scale that had never been done before. There was rightfully some hand wringing, and an associated moral panic within the medical community.
The biggest change since then has been the proliferation of better imaging techniques that have allowed researchers to look at volumetric changes in brain development over time; we now have robust evidence that childhood treatment of ADHD with stimulants is generally effective at reducing structural abnormalities in children with ADHD compared to their healthy counterparts. We have a huge population of children who grew up on these drugs, and longitudinal analysis suggests those treated fare much better than those who weren’t. From an epistemological perspective, we have thousands of published papers looking at animal models, thousands looking at humans, decades of records from millions of patients, and well-established imaging techniques to understand the (high-level) physical underpinnings. I don’t know what more you can ask for to know if a drug is safe or not.
If you have specific questions or areas of interest, I’m happy to send you sources.
Juts an FYI, I do take ADHD medication despite some noticeable negative effects they have on me... I actually said that on my original response. It's a bit weird that you went on a rant for what was essentially someone telling a drug might have negative effects but is probably worth taking for some. Mine was a very moderate take... I'm simply saying "be responsible in the use of such medications and be aware of possible side effects". That is advisable for any medication.
I was specifically zeroed in on your “long-term effects are not well-researched” comment, because it’s an often-cited claim not based in fact. Side effects are absolutely real and something to be worried about; something like long-term neural impairment or amphetamine psychosis at clinical doses much less so.
Policing someone’s “unhelpful rhetoric” and then deriding their post as a rant is some snowflake behavior, Lou. I’ve been trying to make a point instead of win an argument, but I ask you hold yourself to your own standards.
I'm sorry, it seems that I failed to respond in a civil manner. I don't think neither of us has anything to gain from this conversation any longer. Maybe we can become friends next time.
Well said, likewise.
My first experience with this was around 7 or 8. All my contemporaries had this large circle of buddies they'd hang around and talk with, but I never felt comfortable doing that, and instead had one or two friends at a time, but friends that I was super close to.
My second time was age 17, early '91. I had been struggling with a feeling of not fitting in, and not liking who I was, and I finally put my finger on it: I wasn't a boy, I was a girl. Now, keep in mind in '91 this was almost unheard of (it existed, but the support just wasn't there three decades ago.) I told my mother, and despite her being an older woman (born at the tail end of the Great Depression), she was very understanding and supportive. Ultimately, I never pursued actual transitioning (the therapist I had talked to convinced me that it was almost impossible to get approval, to say nothing of financial and social obstacles), but just knowing that makes me more comfortable with me.
The last time was within this last year. I'd always known I was bad with following through on things, had a horrible time with sleep and insomnia, and I'd always described myself as "not lazy, just unmotivated." Although I haven't been officially diagnosed, way too much of what I've read about ADHD hits very close to home, so I'm almost positive that's where I am.
There was a time at a party when a girl I had been flirting with was showing me some attention, and another guy was also flirting with her. She made out with me some, she made out with him some. This bummed me out a bit, because I wasn't getting as many smooches as I wanted, but there wasn't any of the outrage or jealousy that society had told me I'd feel in that sort of situation. Our little party got broken up for reasons too long-winded to get into, but I fell to talking with the other guy, and happened to mention my lack of concern with his presence. He was happy to explain polyamory, and I was happy to have a name for what I was experiencing. It was nice.
How old were you at the time?
and I know this goes beyond the current topic but can you elaborate on your polyamorous views / lifestyle now?
I was maybe 24? It was a while ago.
The philosophical seed at the core of my polyamory is one of individual choice. I don't tell my wife how she should dress, what hobbies she can have, or who her friends can be. She can't control those choices of mine either. Why should sex and romance be siloed away? Note that this is done against a background of safe sex and trust in each other to continually engage in appropriate harm reduction choices.
In the face of other relationships I trust that I fulfill needs in her life that mean that she'll continue to want to stay with me for the long term, and it's been true for over a decade so far.
When we were younger we had a more robust network of relationships, but even before the pandemic things had gotten quiet. My wife is my only current partner, and she has a long term boyfriend. I'll probably start dating again at some point, but I don't really have the spare time and emotional capacity to dedicate to someone new. Yet even with a single partner, I remain solidly poly.
Thanks.
For the record, I believe I am poly, and I started labelling myself as such last December.
But after the recent breakup with my SO, and the subsequent death of my other partner, I just... I’m a little lost.
I found out that the person I recently started dating is poly. I haven’t yet told her I am as well, because I honestly don’t know what I am anymore.
I’d say I could use your advice, but I don’t even know what to ask.
It's fine if you don't know what to ask. If you just want to talk please message me. I'm also dealing with the (impending) death of a loved one, so I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for where you find yourself. Death can definitely shake up our core beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world, and it's not wrong to let things rest for a bit and then rediscover yourself once you've healed.
But please, if you want to talk, I'm here.
I’ve always hung around LGBT+ folks, but it wasn’t until some of those friends started talking about never being attracted to one gender that I realized I was bisexual. I thought everyone was at least a little bit gay and straight. I’ve also since met some folks who are super duper straight (including my current partner), and it will never not baffle me.
As a kid, I went to the beach with my neighbor's family. On the way back, her father asked me "so, @lou, what did you think of our day on the beach?". I answered: "it was pretty good. Not the best I ever had, but good enough". To which he answered: "well, next time we won't take you then". I couldn't understand what had just happened, I answered a question with sincerity. I was supposed to always tell the truth, right? That was the first time in which my inability to lie harmed my social life. It wasn't the last.
To be fair, the beach is filled with sand, which is one of my least favorite substances on earth.
Yeah the sand is awful, but I like the Beach anyway, especially the water.
One of my hacks for this is to very enthusiastically say “It was pretty okay!”. People seem to appreciate the oxymoronic joke of something being intensely mild. And I don’t need to lie in anything but tone of voice.
That's awesome!
But yeah I'm almost 40 now. That does still bites me in the ass on a regular basis, but I improved a lot!
My problem nowadays is not so much recognizing when I am expected to lie, but rather lying convincingly.
Sometimes I can pull off a good small lie. But if it’s about something important like how I feel about an event or person that matters I can’t. People just need to appreciate me for who I am. I’ll elaborate so there’s no ambiguity that I’m trying to be honest rather than trying to be hurtful.
Often there’s an initial defensive reaction from the other person followed by a slow admission that I’ve got a reasonable internal perspective. I’ve gotten very good at describing my feelings on social things I don’t like. So my responses to “did you like X?” are believable and truthful.
But if I don’t care about the other person at all or will never see them again I’m happy to make a quick lie to end the situation.
Absolutely. I would never lie about anything important or consequential, that would be unethical. I'm talking about inconsequential things like "did you like our day on the beach?", with a not-so-subtle implication that only a praising answer will be accepted.
I just remembered that last week a friend of my girlfriend that I never met before invited us to a restaurant, and when he asked me what I thought of it I said the food was terrible... In retrospect, his facial expression probably "said" he was not happy with my answer :P.
Those close to me learn to appreciate the advantages of having someone that will always tell them the truth, and even find my candid remarks oddly comical. But sometimes I'm around people I don't know that well, so that can be a problem.
An interesting consequence of my behavior is that my close friends are usually very secure and confident people, the kind that can take "truth bombs" and criticism without getting upset. Maybe because they're confident and secure, they're also very interesting and intelligent. It's the best ;)
With age, I'm realizing that I don't really want anyone new in my life, I formed my core relationships and that's it. I don't wanna put in the effort to translate my highly odd autistic[1] personality to anyone else. It's a lot work.
[1] strong suspicion, diagnosis in progress, awaiting results...
There's a good chance I'm on the spectrum as well. Stimming, picky, audio/touch sensitivity, mental/moral rigidity, etc. as a child. I was also selectively mute (not that that's an ASD thing afaik) for a number of years.
Something I think helped on my end with that sort of compulsion to be honest/literalism was making a distinction between what is being said and what is being communicated.
To share an anecdote, there was a philosopher (whose name I can't recall) who committed himself to always being honest. In an interview he was asked about what he would say to his wife if she asked something like "am I fat?", and his response was that he'd say "of course not" regardless of whether she was or not.
He didn't find that to be dishonest, and when pressed on why, he explained that the question that his wife was asking wasn't a literal one. She was asking something like "do you find me attractive", "do you love me", or just "can I have your attention for a minute".
He knew that she knew that what he said in reply was communicating back to her an affirmation of that unstated question.
He might have also known that his wife would be able to solicit an explicit answer to a question about which of a few outfits was the most flattering if she wanted to. And that she wouldn't feel betrayed or lied to, if she could read his thoughts when he answered in a non-literal way.
Since there was no miscommunication, but there was a literal untruth, was it lying? Is a literal truth that intentionally miscommunicates lying?
A different anecdote that comes to mind--since I think I recall you mentioning that you were some less-common branch of Christian-- might be the white lie between God and Sarah/Abraham. That usually has a bit of a different resolution where another moral supercedes the need to be truthful.
Or another, the interpretation of the Golden Rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated could entail that a masochist ought to be hurting other people in the way they desire to be hurt. The better interpretation of an unfortunately ambiguous language is that the masochist should respect other's desires and preferences as much as theirs should be respected.
Communication is ultimately what I care about, and it's something I'll probably always have a bit of difficulty with. You need to have a good understanding of the person you're trying to communicate with, and often that understanding isn't available.
There's easily half a dozen ways of trying to go about paying for a meal that differs culturally and isn't even consistent within those cultures.
It's a headache and I definitely respect the desire or need to just... not participate in it. Glad you've got people in your life that appreciate the honesty!
That's great. The point of view of this philosopher seems incredibly useful, and somewhat related to speech act theory.
It is.
I am a very sui generis kind of Christian, but my atypical relationship with truth is not related to that. We don't have a concept of sin, but rather of consequence, so you have the duty to do whatever produces the best outcomes. So sometimes it is moral to lie, or to tell a non-literal truth like the philosopher you mentioned.
Thank you for the very interesting answer.
You know what? Honestly, I don't really remember a time when I wasn't "different". When I was very young we would have to move often because my parents were divorced and poor, so I was always taken from school to school. As a result I was always the lowest on the totem pole, and I rarely had good friends. I think that was why my sense of empathy was so well developed when I was young. But honestly that caused me more problems than anything else. For the most part it just turned me into a target for bullying. One time in the second or third grade I remember listening to this girl whom I liked as a friend talk about what her life was like at home and she was talking about her extremely strict parents and I tried to show my empathy but the teacher thought I was making fun of her and punished me for it, which of course ruined any potential for friendship I had with her.
And of course the bullying just escallated to new degrees as I grew up; most of my time in middle school was spent in alternative schools, which only served to increase the bullying and made it worse by preventing me from making any friends.
The funny thing is that I'm not actually on the spectrum. Sometime during all of this I did get a diagnosis for Asperger's syndrome from one psychiatrist, but others disagreed. I'd later discover I did have some psychological issues to iron out, but those were actually coming from home, not school.
And I did actually end up being different in one way, being that I'm gay, but the strange thing about that was that when I finally came out of the closet I ended up being more accepted for being myself than I ever was before.
Well this isn't different in the sense that it's unique or anything, but I've always had a sort of fecund mind for music. When I was in school, I remember that moment so vividly -- I was staring out the window at a tree, somewhat listlessly, while my mind kept generating catchy melodies, and I wondered why I wasn't doing something in my life that had music as a focal point. I had my own primitive method for jotting down melodies which was admittedly, very inefficient. I still do have dreams where I hear the sweetest music I've ever heard and just before I can wake up from this half-asleep state, it fades away. Or maybe take some inspiration from our friend Dali?
Or maybe it's possible that my capacity for critically judging an idea is greatly diminished when I'm in the throes of slumber...?
My brain is always spontaneously composing melodies and playing songs in my head on repeat for days (and sometimes even overnight). Sometimes it'll pick up on similarities between songs and combine them. For two currently relevant examples, these are new mashups my brain created and fixated on:
My brain just arranged these mashups on autopilot and left them playing on loop for me. But I have no musical training, I don't know how to play any instruments or do anything with what I have. Likewise sometimes I'll improvise whole new compositions, some of them are fairly complex earworms. I'm left feeling rather powerless, artistically, to make tangible the creations in my head. I can whistle pretty well, so that's something, but no one else wants to listen to that, haha. Sometimes I wish I had the ability to share my head-music with the world instead of keeping it all to myself. And it can be frustrating to get songs stuck in my head for extended periods too. I don't have a working method to make the music stop, to get some mental peace and quiet.
I'm one of those "gifted" kids who ended up being kind of a failure. Life has always been weird and hard.
I just knew but at the same time I didn't. Growing up I always felt that other people just breeze through life while I was always paralyzed by fear. And people didn't get it no matter how I tried to explain it: "Everyone feels fear, you only need to get over it".
I thought that maybe it was because I wasn't part of the right group, that maybe I was gay, or maybe I needed to hang out with goths more, maybe otakus... or maybe I just liked the Spirits Within unironically.
It wasn't until I got a diagnosis of AvPD at 25 that everything made sense, there was finally something that expressed how I felt. But other than that nothing really changed. It is not something that I share with people because they still won't get it and even trained professionals don't get it. I've just accepted that I'll always feel fear, and I hope that people will understand in those cases where it becomes a problem.