Identifying Your Limiting Patterns Part 1
“You’re not living up to your potential. You’re so smart and you could do so well if you just applied yourself. You know what to do, you just don’t want to do it. It’s a lack of effort, you don’t want to put in the work. You’re being lazy. I know you can do it but you don’t seem to want to do it. You always want the benefits but never want to do the work. If you know so much about it why can’t you just do it?”
How many of these lines have you heard some version of in your life? Growing up with ADHD and not realizing it until I was older made me feel like I was a failure. It made me feel like I would never amount to anything. You see, I had heard those kinds of things so many times that I actually started to believe them. After all, it’s not like it was my bullies who were saying it. I heard it from my parents, teachers, counselors, and other family members, so why wouldn’t I believe it? Even though it wasn’t intentional, hearing those things from people who were meant to give me guidance at a young age made it part of what I believed was my identity. I don’t resent or blame anyone for it, they were just as unaware of my ADHD as I was. Unfortunately, that still didn’t stop it from affecting the way I saw myself.
Even if you were diagnosed younger than I was, or don’t have ADHD but another neurodiversity, you can probably relate to the experience of wanting to do things the “right” way but not being able to follow through. That feeling of guilt, shame, and disappointment in yourself is a hallmark of the internal neurodivergent experience. Our different ways of thinking are characterized in society by the way they show outwardly or affect the people around us. Those who are neurotypical don’t always understand that these are deeply emotional disorders that go far beyond being fidgety, impulsive, or awkward at parties. It’s also hard to understand that we don’t have a lack of knowledge or desire preventing us from doing things the same way as neurotypicals. Most often we know exactly what we need to be doing, how to do it, and why we should, but we simply are not able to do it, which is incredibly frustrating.
It makes sense that so many of us feel this way. Without any knowledge of the fact that you think differently or why this is happening to you, how could you think that it’s anything but a personal failing? You hear negative statements about yourself over and over, and you start to feel like the only think you can do consistently is to fail. You fail to follow through, fail to “reach your potential”, and fail to act like everyone else, never knowing that you’re not even supposed to. You spend most of your life wondering why you just can’t seem to execute the plan, even though you can make perfect sense of the process.
If you are fortunate, you or someone close to you will realize that something may be different in your brain. I encourage you to seek treatment if so, because when you do eventually get a diagnosis it’s such a relief because it takes the blame off of you personally. It’s a freeing feeling to learn that you are not just bad at life, and that for years you’ve been judging yourself by a standard that shouldn’t be applied to you. There’s a quote that’s been attributed to many people which says “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” This is what we’ve been unknowingly doing to ourselves this whole time!
You may feel hurt by this realization, like you’ve missed an opportunity. You may have been diagnosed young and realized this already, but haven’t been able to do anything about it yet. I want you to know that it’s not your fault, and it’s likely not your parents or teachers fault either. It’s most likely due to a lack of knowledge of what was really happening. Even so, I’m not going to try and put the blame anywhere specific, because it doesn’t really matter how we got here. What I want you to understand is that even though it’s not anyone’s fault, this is your life we’re talking about, and if you’re unhappy with it then it's nobody’s responsibility but yours to change it. We can sit and mope and be upset about what might have been, continuing to be miserable forever, or we can decide today to do things differently going forward. We can’t change the past, our only option is to change the future by deciding what we do about it today and every day. Are you going to keep doing the same things that haven’t worked, or are you going to decide to move forward on your own terms?
Thanks as always for reading,
Aaron Frank
