Apparently, This Is Called ADHD

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was five years old. Which, if you know anything about the Turkish medical system in the early 2000s, is already a minor miracle. At the time most psychologists had two possible explanations for a child with too much energy: either you were “just hyperactive,” or your parents were exaggerating.

To be honest, there are still not many ADHD specialists in Turkey who can talk about it without confusing it with autism, a learning disability, or some kind of personality defect. I still keep two therapists outside my own country simply because sometimes it is easier to explain the creative malfunctions of my brain in English than trying to summarize the entire situation without relying on the universal Turkish comfort sentence of “aminakoyim yaaa.”

Back then, however, my father approached the problem like a man trying to diagnose a strange mechanical noise in a car engine. He took me from one doctor to another with the quiet persistence of someone who knew the machine was behaving differently, even if the mechanics refused to admit it. The first psychologist said I was just energetic. The second said I would calm down when I grew older. The third recommended sports. By the fourth appointment my father was sitting there politely listening to another explanation that clearly made no sense to him. My father also has ADHD, which meant he recognized the pattern immediately. Eventually he would lean forward and say something like, “Respectfully… this is nonsense.”

So we went to another hospital. Then another university clinic. Then another doctor. Eventually enough specialists examined my brain and collectively agreed that yes, this child’s mind does in fact operate like a room full of monkeys holding espresso shots and an unhealthy curiosity to experiment with everything around them. Mostly on my brother. My father was delighted. Not because his daughter had ADHD, but because now it had a name and he had been right all along. Once something has a name, you stop fighting it and start understanding how it works. That is when the real learning begins.

For me ADHD never really felt like a disability, despite what most people assume. Maybe I was lucky. I was diagnosed very early and grew up with a father who refused to treat it like a defect that needed to be fixed. Instead, he treated it like a system that needed to be understood and trained. So ADHD never felt like a broken brain to me. It felt more like a different operating system.

From the inside this is simply how the world has always looked. Normal world. If you ask many people with ADHD, they will probably tell you the same thing: inside our own heads we are the normal ones. The difficulty appears only because the world around us is designed for a different rhythm. The majority rhythm. Everyday life runs on straight lines...routines, schedules, repetition, predictable steps. Meanwhile the ADHD brain tends to move in spirals. One idea leads to another, which connects to something completely unrelated, which suddenly forms a pattern that nobody else noticed yet. Naturally the spiral brain ends up being labeled the problem.

But the confusion actually goes both ways. We also don’t fully understand the majority brain; we simply spend more time adapting to it because your system runs the society. Many things that seem effortless to most people, repetitive tasks, remembering endless social rituals, following predictable routines, can feel strangely complicated to us. At the same time there are things that come almost instinctively to our kind of mind: connecting distant ideas quickly, recognizing patterns between unrelated topics, or falling into a level of hyperfocus where hours disappear without notice. I can learn Chinese in six months if I find it interesting, but you cannot teach me how to breathe if I don’t find it intriguing. In a strange way these are simply two different mental ecosystems trying to live inside the same civilization, occasionally looking at each other with quiet confusion.

And that is where early diagnosis changes everything. If you are diagnosed late, you often spend years believing you are broken. If you are diagnosed early, you grow up thinking something much simpler: “Ah. So this is just how my brain works.” Which makes the whole experience far less tragic and much more… entertaining.

But, I still wanna complain a little with my own examples from own my little life...
These are not an excuse at all but a funny moments I try to hide from people.

For example, my brain has always been very good at understanding complex systems. I learned to read and write when I was four years old. But I refused to write anything at school until fourth grade simply because I did not like my teacher. At one point social services even visited our home because the school believed I had a learning disability and required special education. I also had a speech delay until I was eight years old, and I was not allowed to attend kindergarten because my stepmother was convinced I would conduct some chaotic social experiment on another child that would end in disaster. Now I am twenty-seven and my adult problems look slightly different. I can draft fifty-page legal agreements, analyze behavioral patterns in people, and connect ideas across completely unrelated fields.

At the same time, however, there are certain extremely basic human tasks that remain deeply suspicious to me. For example: tying my shoes. Which is why I mostly wear high heels. Besides the fact that I am already 1.77 meters tall and adding additional 10 more cm makes me feel like a confused Scandinavian basketball player walking through the street. Or transgender.

Driving is another interesting example of this contradiction. I do not know how to drive a car. Traffic feels like pure chaos to me, too many moving objects, too many rules, too many unpredictable humans behaving unpredictably. But I do know how to drive a yacht. Apparently my brain is perfectly comfortable navigating a large floating vehicle across open water, but the moment you place me inside a small metal box surrounded by honking strangers my mind simply refuses to participate.
That contrast alone probably summarizes ADHD better than any medical definition ever could.

Then there are the physical quirks. One completely unnecessary talent my brain seems to have developed is sleeping like a horror movie character. Most girls sleep like small princesses... ahh peaceful, curled up like a cat, breathing softly like something from a skincare commercial. Meanwhile I apparently sleep like Dracula guarding his coffin. My eyes remain open. Half open due to side effect of Adderal fuck up's in early ages I believe or just too my open pages still on run. I also sleep with my arms crossed over my chest, which means the visual effect is somewhere between a medieval vampire and a very relaxed corpse. The first time one of my exes witnessed this phenomenon he woke up in the middle of the night, turned his head, and saw me lying there in complete darkness staring directly at him with wide open eyes. He screamed so hard like a full horror-movie scream. He thought I was awake and silently watching him like a psychopath. I was not. I was deeply asleep. He gave the same reaction when he first saw me sleepwalk. LOL

Something similar happened once when I stayed at my best friend H’s house. In the morning she asked her mother to wake me up for breakfast. Her mother went to check and came back saying, “She’s already awake, she’s lying there looking around.” When they both entered the room together her mom discovered the misunderstanding which made my 20 years been friend cracked even today and tell everyone as a great story of us: I was not awake at all. I was simply sleeping with my eyes open like I left the world middle of the night and dicovered 2 days later by my landlord.

The irony is that during the day I also often forget to blink properly. Which has given me a lovely degree-three.zero astigmatism from constant dryness and forced me to wear glasses since childhood. Of course I refuse to tell anyone I wear glasses because some irrational part of my personality that has nothing to do with ADHD has decided that depending on anything somehow feels weak. So instead I simply walk around half-blind. Which means my visual system currently operates like this: at night I stare at people while unconscious, and during the day I keep staring to see.

Social etiquette is another battlefield. The small rituals of everyday interaction feel like a complicated choreography that everyone else memorized but nobody gave me the script for. When you greet someone, do you kiss both cheeks? One cheek? Two times? Three times if they are French? I genuinely cannot remember. Every greeting feels like improvising a diplomatic ceremony without training. Meanwhile everyone else seems to perform it perfectly.

But the same brain that cannot memorize a greeting ritual can remember extremely unnecessary details with perfect precision. I can tell you which wine should be paired with which dish like a sommelier working in a Michelin restaurant. I know which spoon you are supposed to start with during a formal dinner. Even though I am extremely sensitive to cutlery shapes and will probably spend half the dinner secretly judging the spoon.

Food itself is another adventure. Not only flavors but textures. Certain textures simply offend my nervous system. Paper coffee cups are one of them. If someone hands me a drink in one of those cups I instinctively hold it like it might explode. Hair is even worse. Even mentioning it gives me the ick. I have kept my hair short since I was three years old simply because I cannot tolerate hair touching my skin. If someone’s hair brushes against my arm I react like a cat that accidentally stepped in water. Which, as you can imagine, creates many very elegant social moments.

When I am alone, I can remain completely silent. Days can pass without saying a single word. But the moment I step outside and meet friends something switches on. One blah leads to another story, which leads to another blah blah, which suddenly connects to another completely unrelated blah blah. Before I realize it I have been talking non-stop like a podcast nobody pressed pause on.

From the outside this probably looks chaotic. But inside my head there is actually a system. It is simply a very loud one.

And now that I read what I just wrote, I realize something else.

This entire text jumps from topic to topic. Diagnosis. Yachts. Dracula sleep. Shoelaces. Wine etiquette. Paper cups. Which, if we are being honest, is probably the most accurate demonstration of ADHD I could have written.

Because that is exactly how our mind works. Like a horse in high ketamine finally managed to escape after years of captive. But make the scene stuck on repeat.

One thought opens another door. That door opens five more.

People sometimes ask what ADHD feels like, expecting a tragic explanation. But the truth is much less dramatic. It's funny if you can speak the language. You can read the jokes in subtitles even if the person like me, try to hide it or mastered.

Sometimes those spirals produce chaos. Sometimes they produce strange stories.

And occasionally they produce a woman who cannot open a bag of chips without scissors but somehow manages to learn a Chinese in 6 months.

Which, if you ask me, is a perfectly acceptable trade.