How do you spell ADHD?

In her inimitable style, Raju Tai writes why curiosity is more empowering than diagnosis; plus, media recommendations

Hello Everyone!

There’s something personal I want to share with you today.

I barely attended any media conferences this year – a year that shook my confidence when I was diagnosed with burnout.

It was a conscious choice to step back from the rush, the pressure, and the performative small talk of “networking”.

But I knew that if I had to show up anywhere, for any community, it would be Splice Beta. Because it’s something I needed to do for myself.

When I arrived at the gathering, in the middle of our collective “rebuilding our way out of the apocalypse,” something struck me again:

Is everyone at Beta inherently affectionate?

Why does everyone greet you with a smile, genuinely try to understand your work, check in on you, ask if you’re okay? These little gestures don’t often happen at other events. At least not very sincerely.

And that is exactly what makes Beta feel like a safe space. A space where I feel I belong.

When I recently shared a post on LinkedIn, all I could recall and rave about the gathering is the warmth, affection and belonging I felt. And honestly, that is the most important force that binds us as humans and fuels communities.

These feelings of connection brought me back to something else — to how I first crossed paths with Rajashree Gandhi, a.k.a. Raju Tai, almost three years ago. We met in an accountability group our friend Dinsa created for a few of us. Most of us “go-getters” were meeting for the first time, yet we found ourselves sharing vulnerabilities, admitting weaknesses, and asking each other for advice and support. We trusted one another because Dinsa was our common friend, and over a few meetings, that initial connection grew into companionship and friendship.

[ID: Raju, a young Indian woman with short curly hair and grey rimmed glasses is dressed in a floral black and white printed top. Her radiant smile accentuates the naughty look she is giving the photographer.]

Raju is a writer, facilitator, and creativity coach. Her poems have appeared in Muse India, Wales Haiku Journal, Gulmohur Quarterly, and The Alipore Post. Her essays have been published in Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx, Age of Anxiety, Scroll, and Buzzfeed. She is crazy about the moon, pickles, and rousing our dormant parts through play and creativity. Follow her on Instagram, subscribe to her newsletter, Creative Resilience with Raju Tai and read her following essay.

How do you spell ADHD? Why curiosity is more empowering than diagnosis

Raju Tai

It was the winter of 2018 in Delhi. Scrolling Instagram, my thumb paused at a tiny colourful square listing ADHD traits in a friendly font.

For the next several days, I must have spent hours with that little square. Difficulty in task-sequencing, task-prioritization, time-estimation, self-regulation – there were words for my me-ness?

By the end of 2018, I was all set to finish my training as an English teacher. I already had a Master’s degree in media studies, and had worked a few jobs in education before I decided to nurture a career that’s closer to language and expression. Lovely. What was the problem, you ask? My final assignments. If I could just finish them, I would get my certificate and in no time, I’d be teaching a poem I love to a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers. Yay.

But as the cold hardened its grip on my body, the final deadlines stared at me. I had frozen, literally and metaphorically. This was not new. I had struggled so hard in my previous jobs to finish my work that I had developed chronic anxiety. I had blamed workplace environments, which were indeed toxic in almost all jobs. I had blamed myself since I was in school, for not being efficient enough.

But this time, I could not blame anybody. My professors of English Teacher Education were compassionate and forgiving. I was the brightest, oldest student in class and had already aced the short assignments and the teaching practicum. I had been pretty efficient until all the deadlines arrived all at once, screeching together. I couldn’t function. I was forced to be curious: Why are even favourable circumstances bringing me anxiety?

That colourful Instagram post with ADHD traits, not only held the possibility of an answer, it became a portal for life memories that finally made sense. A mirror to see my operating system, clearer than ever. For the first time, I felt like my haphazard existence had some sort of a pattern. A rhythm. A logic of its own.

And maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t doomed. Who would I be if I understood myself better? I felt curious about my brain, my wiring, my way of being.

I showed that post to friends and I started looking up videos that might help. And soon, ADHD YouTubers became my friends. I employed little tricks such as mono-tasking and setting a timer and buying a watch with clear digits. At long last, I managed to finish my assignments. I left Delhi and started working as a curriculum designer and workshop facilitator. Yay.

My therapist suggested that I could be on the neurodivergent spectrum, but discouraged me from getting tested. I trusted that her intention was positive and protective but I could not, in classic ADHD style, sit still.

I wondered if I ‘actually’ had ADHD or was I making it up. I needed an ‘official’ stamp. I had begun reading Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Mate, and wept a few times, and made chart papers out of the solutions he suggested, and the solutions really did help, but still, I needed to know if I ‘legitimately’ had ADHD or not. Once I had an ‘official diagnosis’, I would solve the puzzle of me once and for all.

So in 2019, I ended up at a psychiatrist’s office. I began to see what my therapist was protecting me from. He dismissed me. He prescribed an official test, but also threw in some personality tests, just for fun.

When I reached the clinical psychologist who would do the official test, I was greeted by this poster in the main office —

[ID Starts:

Poster headline: Hello, and welcome to the Mental Health Hotline

• If you are obsessive compulsive, press “1” repeatedly.

• If you are co-dependent, ask someone to press “2” for you.

• If you have multiple personalities, press, “3”, “4”, “5”, and “6”.

• If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Stay on the line and we’ll trace your call.

• If you are delusional, press “7” and your call will be transferred to the Mother Ship.

• If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which button to press.

• If you are depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press. No one will answer you.

• If you are dyslexic, press 69696969.

• If you have a nervous disorder please fidget the # key until you hear the beep. After the beep, wait for another beep.

• If you have short-term memory loss, please try your call again later.

• If you have low self exteem, please hang up. All our operators are too busy to talk to you.

  ID ends]

I love humour, but gosh, I don’t reckon a clinical psychologist’s office is the best place to mock serious mental illnesses, when our country is still seeped in the stigma around them.

The testing procedure was fairly dry and clinical. I answered hundreds of multiple choice, objective questions as a part of the three tests. When it was time to pay, I had to borrow money from friends to scrape together the final amount.

Something had rearranged in me as I left the office. The test induced in me an anger that cleansed me of any doubt. I knew I had ADHD, but I also knew I would not take these reports seriously. I knew I am wired differently, but I felt in my body, a refusal to let others, however ‘officially’, tell me who I am.

My friends helped me process my passionate stance and before the reports arrived, I had unlocked a new level of self-acceptance. When they did, I read them with a pencil in hand, as if it was my sword.

It was OFFICIAL! I had ADHD. Finally! Hurrah! But I was also termed anxious, depressive, manic, avoidant and a few other expletives I don’t care to recall. While I always hope neurodivergent people find a better experience of getting diagnosed, I realized that diagnosis was never the destination.

Diagnosis was never even the starting point of my neurodivergence journey. Perhaps I started engaging with my neurodivergence when I first used neon sticky notes and pink pens in seventh grade to help my brain feel excited about studying. Maybe I knew something about my neurodivergence, when I requested my sister to be in the same room while I packed for college or prepared for an exam. Maybe my neurodivergence journey ‘officially’ began when I stopped blaming myself or others for how I operate, and started to be curious about what helps me and what doesn’t.

I know diagnosis is an important event for neurodivergent people, especially when it comes late, especially for women who go for years without being detected. It gives us language, however dry and pathological. It offers relief, clarity, an explanation, and even a chance to grieve. It provides an alibi for why we don’t behave or succeed in conventional ways. For those seeking medication, an official diagnosis is even more essential.

Diagnosis helps us liberate ourselves. But it also lets us berate ourselves. The label that clarified why we fail to fit in, becomes a box or a burden that doesn’t let us thrive on our own terms. The four letters - ADHD - after they told me who I was, and then weighed me down with who I could never dream to be.

Diagnosis is just one stop in the neurodivergent pilgrimage into our deepest core and then back into the world as who we truly are.

We can find who we are by observing ourselves, talking to our friends, learning about neurodiversity. We can create our own language around it. When I wrote an essay called ‘Kite Mind’ to describe my brain, that metaphor liberated me from the pathology of ADHD.

It turned out that even ADHD experts have been dissatisfied with the label as it creates more myths than empowerment.

I especially loved the alternative ‘Kinetic Cognitive Style’ by Nick Walker. When Luis Mojica called ADHD - ‘Radical Inability to Conform’, I felt like my entire life made sense. On Instagram, I savoured a comment by Rayna Zhaveri, spelling out ADHD as ‘Attention Differentiated Hyperfocus Delight’.

While the words Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder have never helped me in anything except feeling inadequate, the phrasing ‘Interest Driven Nervous System’ helps me ask myself what will interest me right now. What is sparking my joy or curiosity?

More than my diagnosis, and the prescription for medicines it came with, it is my curiosity that compels me to heal myself. It helps me gather a range of resources and hacks to choose from. Everything from interior design to money to sexuality looks different when I look at it from the neurodivergent prism.

Curiosity, not diagnosis, helps me ask - who were my neurodivergent ancestors. ADHD, I learned, is not a modern fad but an ancient way of being.

Curiosity, not diagnosis, helps me in understanding other neurodivergent and disabled people, without comparing my advantages and disadvantages with them. It helps me understand who I am, beyond the labels of ADHD or neurodivergent. It keeps the puzzle of me alive — and so it keeps me alive.

Today, when I work as a creativity coach with neurodivergent creatives, I bring the same curiosity. Poems pop out, paintings get made, essays get crafted.

The world pinned us down to four letters - ADHD, also spelled as LAZY, but we will write thousands of words every year to spell out our lives, our perspectives, our imaginations. Here are my thousand words for this year.

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Media Recommendations

Read

This award-winning story on the murky, unregulated world of psychological counselling in India.

Listen

The Documentary Podcast’s episode, “Brain Fog and Menopause” featuring BBC tech editor Zoe Kleinman who once experienced ‘brain fog’ (coinciding with perimenopause) before going live on TV. She kept forgetting a key technical phrase and had to resort to reading from notes. Which – according to the values we journalists are indoctrinated with – is a professional failure. Zoe says that, at the time, she felt she had “failed” and her “professional pride had been dented.” Listen in for how perimenopause impacts all aspects of women’s lives.

Watch

A talk by Dream A Dream’s co-founder Vishal Talreja on how he had to let go of old beliefs and accept new narratives and choose care and wellbeing to thrive after burnout and depression.

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Thanks for reading or listening to this edition (on the Substack app). Hit reply to write in with your thoughts or engage with me on LinkedIn and Instagram. Reframing Disability has an Instagram account too - read the International Day of Persons With Disabilities post, follow and engage!

Warmly,

Priti