picking at old scabs for no reason

It turns out that October is ADHD awareness month, and I was struck by the inspiration to write about my own experiences growing up, which I’ve never done before. I started writing my blog at 16, when I had just got over a very unpleasant chunk of time in my life, and I didn’t want to think about any of that or share it with anyone. When I was 20 and my ex came to visit my childhood home for the first time, I cut up and burned my old photographs, because I just couldn't stand the thought of him having a window to those times. I wanted to erase my memories and only live for the future. It took me a long time to get over this rejective impulse, but now I feel able to think about it more clearly. This text turned out very long, and I feel unsure about publishing such a personal essay, but as long as I don't make it a habit, I hope it's okay.

Many of my experiences are probably common for girls who are ‘neurologically atypical’ (although I do detest that descriptor), and I’ll be very glad if I can help someone reconnect with their own experiences or to gain a new perspective in any small way. The obvious disclaimer is that I have no qualifications to offer any well-being advice & my views may be extremely dumb. This text isn’t just about ADHD, as I’ve come to see it in more holistic terms, although I’m also still very much in the middle of making sense of things. In this ongoing lockdown situation, I’ve been thinking about mental health and the importance of positive social relationships a lot, so writing about my experiences is also a way to process that. I am worried that spaces where we can feel a sense of belonging are becoming more and more scarce, and I can only hope that we can change course soon. Everyone has different social needs, but whatever they may be, having them left unfulfilled for extended periods of time is very destructive for one's self-image and well-being. Being able to seek out welcoming spaces & people who accepted and supported me really turned my life around as a teenager, and it’s awful to think how many people are now deprived of that freedom.

Sometimes I wonder whether the people I’ve met in my 20s would be surprised to know that I was a kind of a problem child. Growing up in the Finnish countryside, the first few years of my life were carefree. I was always very energetic, but that wasn’t a problem when I could still spend my days running through strawberry fields pretending to be a bird. After I started school, however, it seemed everything I did was wrong. I was constantly told off for wandering around the classroom and not paying attention. I could read and do some maths when I started school, so I usually finished exercises before others, which didn’t help. When I didn’t have anything else to do, the teacher would make me write poems at the back of the classroom, because that was the one thing I would sit still doing. But I couldn’t do that all day either.  

In 2nd grade, I started getting into trouble for fighting with boys. It was just play-wrestling, but the teachers wouldn’t accept that kind of behaviour from a girl. I got a lot of detention and was kicked out of an afterschool club for fighting with a boy (who didn’t get reprimanded at all). I would also get detention almost every day for things like being late for class, not doing my homework or drawing in the margins instead of listening to the teacher. Over the following few years, a kind of vicious cycle developed where I would get punished for misbehaviour, even though I was just living in the only way I could, which made me feel very threatened and anxious.

It’s probably not very surprising that when I was 9, I got diagnosed with ADHD. I think a diagnosis can be very helpful if it’s an answer to questions you’ve already been asking. In my case, it felt like something that was just slapped on me, and neither me or the adults around me really knew what to do with it. I was given medication, which didn’t alter the way I felt and behaved. Later on, I was put on another type of medication, but neither of them worked in the intended way. At 12, I decided to just stop taking the pills. My dad gave them to me every morning, but I wouldn’t swallow them. After a few months, I told my parents I hadn’t been taking the meds, and nobody had noticed any difference. At school, the problems remained the same, and I felt increasingly angry and frustrated at adults, because I thought they didn’t have my best interests in mind at all. Looking back, of course I wish I wouldn’t have made things so hard for myself and the people around me. I had this constant urge to question all authorities in my life, instead of just going down the path of least resistance, and I always had to learn the hard way. It seems obvious now, but at the time it felt like there were no other options. While I still think that authority should be questioned, and wish people would try to articulate their own values for themselves instead of simply accepting ones that are dictated by others, often it just makes more sense and is much more enjoyable to prioritise interpersonal relations instead. I know a lot of girls with ADHD overcompensate by trying extra hard to fit in, but I wasn’t able to do that.

The Finnish education system is often touted as one of the world’s best, and in many ways it is, but the teachers aren’t necessarily well-equipped to handle children who defy their expectations. I have a lot of understanding for them (I can imagine that in many other school systems, my experience would have been much worse), but I still think they made some mistakes that could have been avoided. For example, in 5th grade, there was an incident with one teacher in the school canteen. I was sitting opposite a friend, facing the teacher, and I rolled my eyes a couple of times, as that was a tic I had at the time. The teacher thought I was making fun of him and got immediately furious. He came up to me and started shouting, but I had no idea why he was angry at first. Before I got the chance to open my mouth, he grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise and dragged me upstairs to call my dad and complain about it. I tried to explain the situation but he never apologised. Things like this contributed to my bad reputation; the next day, people were whispering that I had stabbed a teacher. Later that same year, the teachers punished me for tardiness by placing me in the special needs class for a month. Most of the other children in that class were boys who had severe dyslexia or cognitive issues, and the teaching was very poorly suited for me (as I generally had the opposite problem of finishing things too quickly), so I just felt more bored and disconnected from the few friends I had. In my small hometown, there was just one school comprising all grades from preschool to high school, so the people around me were always the same.

In middle school, I started skipping class all the time, because I hated the school environment so much and felt embarrassed about standing out negatively. My anxiety was causing more tics, so I would blink my eyes constantly or bend down to touch my shoelaces a lot, which made me a magnet for teasing. I barely showed up to school, and when I did, boys would make fun of me for doing so. Everyone thought I was very weird. I only really had one school friend, a boy who wore make-up and got teased for it (but didn’t seem to care, very unlike me), and we’d hide away listening to Opeth sometimes. But we were never that close, and later on I made things awkward by kissing him. Most of my friends were online, and I’d go see them on the weekends every now and then. That helped me feel more hopeful about possibilities beyond the present. I really wanted to leave my small hometown and go somewhere new, where I didn’t have the reputation as the strange girl who never shows up. I think the people in my hometown had good intentions and were all just trying to live their lives in their own way, too, but I failed to fit into that, so there was tension. Over the years my loneliness became self-reinforcing, because there were no new people to meet and I had been stuck into this extremely negative mindset. By the time I got to middle school, I’d become like a scared little animal, convinced that everyone disliked me and that I needed to be wary of them. After all this time I’m still unlearning that. 

It’s not that I didn’t want to study - I’d always been curious about a lot of things, and I loved reading and learning. In that environment, I somehow just couldn’t. I begged my parents to let me go to another school, but there were no other schools anywhere near enough to commute by public transport. They also said it would be pointless and I would have just the same problems anywhere I went, because it was my own fault I couldn’t make friends at school. I felt like I had no agency, I felt antagonised by nearly everyone around me, and that made me reject my environment in kind. Instead of going to school, I would just hide away somewhere writing or reading, wander around listening to music on my MP3 player, and text faraway friends (I didn't have a smartphone yet, which is probably a good thing). I fought with my parents constantly, because they didn’t understand why I couldn’t just go to school (I didn’t understand either). I felt very depressed and hopeless pretty much all of the time. It got really bad: in 9th grade, I amassed hundreds of hours of absences, felt like I only ever went to school to cry in the toilets, and was told I’d need to clear off dozens of hours of detention before I could graduate middle school. I did manage to graduate with decent grades in the end, and the headmaster congratulated me and said he never thought I would make it.

Almost everything changed for the better after middle school. Although my parents hadn’t allowed me to change schools before, they were thankfully supportive of my plan to apply for a high school in Turku, the largest city in my region. I think they were worried about what kind of trouble I’d get into if they tried forcing me to stay - I don’t know what would have happened, but probably nothing good. Through a combination of entrance exams and my grades, I got accepted to a school that specialised in performing arts. I wanted to study directing, dramaturgy & writing of all kinds, and most of all, to finally exorcise the loneliness that had grown up with me. My parents agreed to pay the rent of a tiny university dorm room (it was only about 200€ a month, which seems very crazy now that I’m living in London), and I was free to leave my hometown the summer I turned 16. Being purified of my clingy bad reputation allowed me to open up again, and I found myself surrounded by people I could actually get along with. I’m a naturally outgoing person, and the isolation I went through in middle school had made me feel like a shell of myself. I was so thankful to realise that I could actually make friends. My relationship with my parents also recovered after I moved out. I didn't go back for a few months, and when I did, everything already felt lighter. In my new home, I gradually built a social circle and got involved in things I enjoyed doing, such as going to punk gigs and volunteering at a bookcafé that organised all kinds of events.

As I was able to channel my energy into positive relationships and doing things I loved, I started doing a lot better at school, too. In fact, after starting high school, I never skipped a class or a lecture because I just didn’t feel like going. I remembered how horrible it was when the absences kept stacking up and it was harder and harder to actually attend. I still had (and continue to have) some time management issues, but I would always show up and do my best. I felt encouraged and included and extremely grateful for it. In the end, I graduated high school with the 2nd-highest grades in my year and left the country to attend university in Glasgow.  At uni, I did quite well from the start, because the less structured learning environment suited me. It’s a bit funny that I ended up doing an MSc at Oxford, as 10 years ago everyone (including myself) thought I may never even get a middle school leaving certificate.

Although high school was an incredibly happy time compared to middle school, I also developed a very unhealthy coping mechanism (as to coping with what, the answer is not clear-cut). I had already had some issues with food and body dysmorphia before, but living alone, they ballooned out of control. At first, it was just the typical teenage negligence of a first-time home-leaver. I never cooked anything and bought almost no groceries. I would eat lunch at school, have some food at the café/waitressing jobs I worked, and go dumpster diving with my friends sometimes (dry rye bread and soft avocadoes were always abundant), but I got worse and worse at feeding myself properly. I didn’t have a lot of spending money, as my parents gave me a small weekly allowance (school lunches were free after all), and I tried to save as much of that as I could to go travelling later. I also saved most of my wages after I started working. While I indulged in wilful ignorance of the harm I was doing to myself, my bad habits grew deeper roots. At some point I decided to start counting calories, and my diet became more and more restricted.

I didn’t even own a scale, but I became fixated with biological numerology. I would weigh myself at friends’ places, measure the circumference of different body parts and count every bite I had. It didn’t have much to do with the way I looked. I had internalised a lot of fatphobia and self-hatred, and seeing myself become more angular was a source of some misguided pleasure, but that was never the main reason I starved myself. Something I wish people knew about eating disorders is that they’re usually displaced attempts to process something else. It’s never for other people, so saying things like ‘but you already look great’ is counterproductive. At first, it was like a game I was winning, and I fell in love with the feeling of success. Later on, there were times I felt terrified, as I realised my mental processes were being corrupted by this disease I couldn’t actually control at all. By that point, I was unable to reverse course, so I tried to just shove the fear away. It was a very busy time in my life, as (beside school) I was involved in a big theatre project, messing about in a band, doing some restaurant work and so on. In hindsight, I was using that state of constant busyness as a tool and an excuse for neglecting my diet. I would be running around all day simply refusing to acknowledge my hunger. I told myself I wasn’t trying to lose weight, I was simply trying to not gain weight and to save some money. I convinced myself everyone did similar things. It was only months later, when a doctor examined me and told me my heart isn’t working properly because I’m malnourished, that I had to confront the facts. I wasn’t winning the game at all; instead, my brain had been taken over by numbers and would need to be debugged & rewired completely.

Talking to doctors, nurses, social workers and psychologists in treatment, I understood that many of them had their own ideas of who develops eating disorders and why. It seemed they (at least in the beginning) interpreted me as this archetypical ‘teenage girl with perfectionist tendencies’, which always felt off to me. I’d never really cared that much about doing well by other people’s standards, and I don't think diagnoses should be treated like synecdoches of identities. I’m still unsure how to delineate symptoms and one's identity, and whether a fixed identity even exists. Nevertheless, there is something in me that makes me suspectible to compulsive behaviours, such as this game of numbers. It seems that links between ADHD and eating disorders have recently been found in multiple research studies, but they are still poorly understood. In middle school, I also had problems with compulsive violent thoughts that disappeared after I opened up to my sister and allowed myself to stop worrying about them so much (I’m mentioning it quite lightly here, but it was a difficult process). Understanding myself makes it easier to avoid giving into these kinds of behaviours again, and I have never had a relapse, thankfully. Overall, my experience with the people who treated me for the ED was very positive. I felt they really tried to understand me and support me, which was a big contrast to the more negative experiences of my childhood. That must have been largely because I understood the purpose of the treatment and was much more receptive.

After I left the country, I haven’t sought treatment for mental health-related issues, except for once at the University of Tokyo. I went to the walk-in counselling service, as I had trouble sleeping and just wanted to talk about it and maybe get some advice. The person on call was a psychiatrist who immediately just asked me if I wanted benzoes (I didn’t). That was a somewhat disheartening first experience of mental health care in Japan. Generally, I’ve been coping on my own without seeking professional help for ADHD symptoms or other issues. My mindset has been that when it comes to everyday life, I want to figure things out for myself, and I’d only seek help for symptoms that prevented me from doing the things I need to do.

I’m still unsure how to even really conceptualise ‘mental health’ or the self, and a lot of the pop psychology I see on social media just kind of annoys me (I guess I might be overly cynical due to my childhood experiences). I’m pretty good at compartmentalising and often prefer to go down that route, but I know it’s hardly en vogue. At the same time, I am very well aware that you never see your own limits until you meet them, and unhealthy coping mechanisms are often only acknowledged in hindsight, or possibly never. It also bothers me that therapy remains mostly a luxury, as waiting times in the public sector are so long. It seems that ‘mindfulness’ and similar trends have become crowdsourced alternatives to personalised mental healthcare by necessity, because access to that is so limited while the pressures of daily life are so great, and it’s not nearly enough for people with more acute symptoms. At least it's good that there are more and more people trying to create free resources for mental health care.

n.b. this is my kind of mindfulness practice.. maybe more on that some other time. picture taken at anatomie studio, which is thankfully still open for practice

I’m very curious about the ‘nature/nurture’ dynamics and mental health. It’s clear that one’s external environment has an impact on their mental and physical state (I’ll omit further reference to the pandemic situation, because it’s just too grim and hardly requires explanation). On a more macro level, I believe, for example, that greater exposure to narrow beauty ideals has made eating disorders more prevalent, and that neoliberal capitalism is conducive to depression. Honestly, I think that a lot of the mental health symptoms people experience result directly from the lifestyles we lead. Maybe therapy in this context amounts to sticking band-aids on amputation wounds. It is difficult to carve out more positive spaces within our socio-economic systems, and it is also a privilege, as most people are not free to choose their environment and lifestyle. I’ve been at my unhappiest when railing against structures I failed to conform to, and striving for autonomy since I was a child; but I’m also very aware that I could do that because I lived in an environment that was safe and economically secure and relatively permissive. I’m from an agricultural background, and my mother and my grandmother grew up doing heavy physical work. If I’d been born a generation earlier, I would also have had much less choice in my daily activities. It’s hard to say whether that would have made me more anxious, or whether the physical work would have been a more constructive outlet for my nervous energy.

Whether or not external conditions trigger severely harmful symptoms/behaviours surely depends on both the already existing layers of experience within a person and their ‘natural’ tendencies. For that reason, I’m very interested in neurobiology, although I don’t believe it holds all the answers & am very wary of reductionism. For instance, it’s possible that my symptoms have something to do with the serotonin levels in my brain, but it’s difficult to verify and far from perfectly actionable information. I think we actually understand very little about the way our minds work, and there are a lot of issues to resolve within the modern fields of psychology & psychiatry & neuroscience. I don’t really like the idea that I’m neurologically atypical, either, as the norms are quite arbitrary (how [and why] do you really measure someone’s neurological profile anyway - the methodology remains very underdeveloped).

I’d imagine that for a lot of people who struggle with fitting in at school, focusing on academics etc. and then get a diagnosis later in life, it can feel very relieving and even exhilarating. I’ve had a more complicated relationship with my diagnosis, and I’m still processing it. My attitude on medication, too, is probably very different from many who were diagnosed with ADHD as adults. ADHD meds didn’t work for me the first time around, and I didn’t even consider trying them again for more than a decade. Recently, I’ve started wondering if I might be more productive/creative if I tried them again. Sometimes I do struggle with not being able to switch into focus mode, but at other times I get crazy amounts of work done in short spans of time. I’ve been a freelancer for years and have never missed a deadline, so I have managed to teach myself discipline in that sense. During my time at university, I actually worried I was becoming a bit too disciplined as a way to keep on top of all my work, and it was smothering my creativity. Now I’m trying to find a balance between allowing myself to have a less structured lifestyle, which feels more natural, while also staying focused on the things I want & need to do. I’d like to think that it’s OK to take twists and turns, to have a meandering work style that goes in ebbs and flows, instead of trying to ‘stabilise’ it into a steadier stream of attention. Maybe I’ll try medication again at some point, but my general principle is that treatment should only be sought for symptoms that cause distress/harm, which I’m not really experiencing. The key challenge is channeling my nervous energy into meaningful things instead of letting it warp into anxiety, and I’ve been getting a lot better at that over the years.

It’s been a relief to discover that I haven’t had to drastically change in order to be accepted by others. Of course I’ve grown as a person, but if anything, I’ve learned to be more true to myself and to seek environments & relationships that let me develop in a positive way instead of constricting me. One of the most painful things in my childhood was the constant feeling that I was selfishly causing trouble and disappointing others. I think we’re all interdependent (not just within our species), and to my best ability, I want to be good to myself & others. As I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to feel a sense of belonging in different places & groups, and that has been very healing. Apparently I’m a bit strange in terms of the way I think and behave (I can’t really pinpoint how, but people often tell me so, or say I’m ‘whimsical’ or something like that, which just seems like a euphemism for being a bit loony). But as an adult, it doesn’t seem that most people want to ostracise me for that. I feel my experiences have also made me more empathic towards others in many different ways. There are actually a lot of advantages to growing up weird, but they only tend to become apparent after some hardship. Thankfully, I think this is also an experience shared by a lot of girls like me. It’s all an ongoing process of learning to live with yourself/as yourself.