12:42pm November 29, 2013

I used to be one of those obnoxious people who told people with ADD that ADD didn’t exist.

Because they’d tell me the traits of ADD and I’d say “I have those, and I’m not diagnosed, so it must be normal…" 

*headdesk*

I think some people do the same thing with autism these days, for the same reasons.

(I’m not sure if I actually have ADD, or if I just have many of the traits because I’m autistic.  But when people with ADD told me about it I flat refused to believe them.  But some of them caught on and told me I probably had it, which made me believe them less.  I know, I was horrible.  But I got better.)

I did the same thing with learning disabilities that I probably had or had traits of due to hyperlexia.  Like I remember a guy saying he thought maybe he had a learning disability because he read pages and pages of text and couldn’t understand a word of it, and I said that was totally normal I did it all the time.

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

And I don’t know why I did that, because I knew full well at that age that I was different, but when it came to various diagnoses I just refused to believe they had any meaning whatsoever.  I guess I didn’t know precisely how I was different, and how different so many things were.  And denial can be a powerful thing.

I just strongly suspect some of the "this doesn’t exist, everyone is like that” people actually have the condition in question and are in varying degrees of denial.  Not that it makes it any better in the short run, but some of us get a clue once we understand.

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