Exceptional Student Work: 'When ADHD Was Scariest and Most Dangerous'
In which current Essays in Journalism student Emma Simon recalls what happened at a key doctor's appointment
I haven’t had the chance to share work by a current student in a minute. Part of it is I’ve been busy. Haven’t we all! Part of it, I suppose, is the pressure. I mean, I’m in the middle of instruction, there’s some level of distance I need to carve out to think to myself, well, who among my current crop has produced something marvelous, a piece I just have to share?
That person is Emma Simon. A student in Essays in Journalism, Emma gave me the impression, early on, that she might play it a bit safe. Give me some essays about the environment, our need to do something, a few calls to action.
Then I got this piece about ADHD. And lunch in the trunk of a car. And why she had two desks in elementary school.
It was bonkers. She covered a lot of time. I found some lines deeply affecting. The scope of it all had some moments I couldn’t forget.
Would she want to share?
Yes. Yes indeed. But not before she completely reworked it, in class Emma style. Warning: It has some tough stuff.
Enjoy!
What I Don’t Remember Can’t Hurt Me
By Emma Simon
At seventeen years old, part of me must have enjoyed giving the impression that I had given up on high school. I was terrified of being exposed as a tryhard; I wanted to be casual and aloof. I snacked on homemade granola in class, passing the reusable bag around to share with anyone who wanted some. I only raised my hand when I knew the right answer and had a funny joke to go along with it. I turned in essays late, smudged and crumpled from the bottom of my transformed trailpack, and received them back with reluctant red checkmarks.
“I got lucky.” I would lie to my friends to cover for the sleepless nights I spent recopying notes. “I don’t know how I did well on this test! I don’t deserve this grade.”
By the end of my third year of high school, I had straight A’s and two truancy letters. I slept five hours a night and ate lunch by myself in the trunk of my dilapidated minivan, next to the boogie boards and deflated soccer balls. I stayed up until sunrise working on assignments that I could have finished in class. I threw up every meal I ate, first by choice and then out of compulsion. I found a wooden post riddled with staples and punched it until my fists bled. I told my dad I was in a skateboarding accident; ever the truth-seeking attorney, he didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. I lost friends. I stole a pack of single-use razors from the pharmacy and ripped scars in my thighs. I quit the soccer team, quit my job, quit making wishes on dandelions and stars. I collected pills from the medicine cabinet, slowly to avoid suspicion. I wrote a series of letters to my friends telling them I loved them. I gave myself an ultimatum: either I graduate with a 4.0, or I kill myself.
It seemed reasonable at the time. No bad options, really.
I didn’t understand why school was suddenly hard. I had been told my entire life how smart I was, so why didn’t I feel it? How did the people around me make it through each day in one piece? How did I?
The only possibility was that I wasn’t working hard enough. I was furious with myself, inferior to my classmates, blessed with intellect but no will to make it worth it. LAZY. What could be worse?
It was my mom who finally answered that question, eventually deciding my haplessness was beyond LAZY.
“Can you find four differences in these pictures? Take your time. Let me know when you’ve finished.” Any other time, it may have been fun, missing school to answer riddles, but I felt like I was on trial. Charged with failed potential and fraudulence.
The interrogation didn’t end there. Had I always been forgetful? I don’t remember. My mom shot me an are-you-trying-to-be-funny look, then took it upon herself to correct my answer. To a doctor whose name I’d forgotten. “Yes.” To me. “In first grade, the front office had a box of snacks that I refilled monthly in case you didn’t have your lunchbox. In second grade, you had two desks— a desk to sit at and an ‘overflow’ desk for your things. And in third grade, the first time we let you walk by yourself to school, we received a phone call asking if we could please pick you up or bring you a pair of shoes.” Oh.
The first time I confided in a high school friend about my deep dark ADHD secret, my intuition was proven right. “Weren’t you valedictorian?”
I was eighteen years old in that office and I felt like I was nine years old and shoeless.
I had been told, so many times, to save my questions. Sitting across an expansive desk from the unnamed doctor, I had a lot of questions. None to do with what she was saying. Maybe I would have questions about that, too, if I tuned in to listen, but my mind was too noisy. Why were the office walls so colorful, pink and orange and yellow? Were the abstract overlapping shapes an attempt to relate to my messed-up mind? Or was I just far above the median age of patients in this room? Both? Did the doctor think there was a correlation between mental illness and enjoyment of colors? Was there? Or, did someone in the office just have an affinity for unserious artwork? I tore my attention from the pattern and back to the woman speaking. She didn’t seem like she would have picked out the wall art. It must have been someone else. Why was she looking at me like that? My mom side-kicked me under the table. The doctor asked me a question. Shit.
The unnamed doctor delivered my verdict with the same tone I imagine she used when breaking the news to middle school boys in League of Legends hoodies with nacho cheese-stained fingers. “Twice-gifted.” The first gift was ADHD. The second gift was the fact that I’d made it this far without getting caught. What the fuck kind of gifts are those? I asked my mom as she drove me, the nineteen-year-old child, home.
I tried to avoid looking at my fingernails, cracked and raw and gnawed down to fragments, as I considered for the first time— but not the last— that all the ways I defined myself were not character traits but symptoms.
People liked me because I was spontaneous and carefree; people disliked me because I was brash and forgetful. My identity only existed to the bounds of this chemical disorder. Without ADHD, did I cease to exist?
“I’m so jealous you never had to work hard in high school,” an ex-friend once told me after graduation, after I’d had time to reflect upon my sentence. What was I supposed to respond? Yes, I was a truant. Yes, I fell asleep in class so often it became a running joke— one that I hated. I spent my nights doing schoolwork in bed just so I could spend my days sleeping at a desk. My classmates only saw half of it.
The first time I confided in a high school friend about my deep dark ADHD secret, my intuition was proven right. “Weren’t you valedictorian?” There I was again, swallowing down the screams with an uncomfortable laugh. I wanted to point to the white-hot scars hidden beneath the line of my shorts. AT WHAT EXPENSE?
When I got to college, I was forced to reassess my undercover identity. It seemed everyone had ADHD. I didn’t know whether to be threatened or welcomed. ADHD in college meant something new, and I rebelled against the change. I became a bitter, angry old man, shaking my fist at kids on my lawn. How dare they claim Tik Tok diagnosed them with ADHD? They needed to suffer to claim the rights. I was torn between wanting everyone to experience my pain, and wanting to keep it all for myself.
In the back of a tiered lecture hall, shaking the lonely ice trapped in the plastic cup of what used to be an iced oat milk chai latte, listening to Professor Boyd lecture animatedly in a class titled Environmental Policy and Regulation, I learned that when it came to ADHD, I was denied the choice to be selfish with my suffering.
ADHD in college meant something new, and I rebelled against the change. I became a bitter, angry old man, shaking my fist at kids on my lawn.
My process of choosing a college major was an awful lot like being shackled to the world’s fastest merry-go-round and then asked to throw a dart at a class registrar, but I hit the bullseye with Environmental Science. It’s a lot easier for me to pay attention in class when I enjoy what I am learning, and it’s a lot easier for me to enjoy what I am learning with classes like Marine Parasitology or Meteorology of Extreme Weather. Plus, the professors really stressed the whole climate change thing, convincing me that the fate of the planet lay in my scribbled notes.
In Environmental Policy and Regulation, hammering home a point about the failures of U.S. pesticide control, Professor Boyd switched the projected presentation slide to a new statistic. Air pollution exposure increases adolescent ADHD rates five times. Not just ADHD: anxiety, depression, autism, low IQ… name a neurodevelopmental disease, and now take a deep breath of industrial chemical-polluted Los Angeles air.
This country’s decades-long disregard for meaningful environmental policy has already failed its children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, by valuing the seductive ease of synthetic chemicals over the health of their bodies and minds.
I will never be grateful for the depression and loneliness I experienced in highschool. This is not an essay about how my struggles have made me stronger. That’s bullshit. If I have learned anything from the relentless tug-of-war with my mind, it is the value of information. ADHD was scariest and most dangerous when I didn’t know what it was. A diagnosis granted me the opportunity to treat myself with compassion for behavior I could finally begin to understand, but it wasn’t until it was contextualized that I was able to extend that compassion to others.
Recently, my mom told me I reminded her more than ever of the girl I was at six years old. Some might read that as a dig at my ever-present immaturity, but my mom meant it as a compliment, and I knew that. I cherish the idea that I’m growing closer to six-year-old Emma, not further away. I liked that version of me. I liked my curiosity about the world, my bravery, my readiness to give and accept kindness without second thoughts. I’ve never felt more me than when I was little, before I went to school and learned about the importance of things like shoes.