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. Back then most psychologists had two explanations for a child with too much energy: either you were “just hyperactive,” or your parents were exaggerating. There was very little space between those two conclusions. To be fair, the situation has not improved dramatically even today. 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. At one point I was even tested twice for ASPD because doctors interpreted my emotional shutdown during overstimulation as something far more sinister. The irony still makes me laugh when I remember my father calmly listening to their panic. Even today I keep two therapists outside my own country, partly because sometimes it is simply easier to explain the creative malfunctions of my brain in English than trying to summarize the situation in Turkish without eventually relying on the universal comfort sentence of “aminakoyim yaaa.”

My father approached the whole situation 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. One doctor said I was energetic. Another said I would calm down when I grew older. A third recommended sports. By the fourth appointment my father was politely listening to explanations that clearly made no sense to him. My father also has ADHD, diagnosed years later in Japan, 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 clinic. Eventually enough specialists examined my brain, my thyroid, and several other things that required hours of testing before they collectively agreed on the obvious: this child’s mind operates like a room full of macaque holding espresso shots and an unhealthy curiosity to experiment with everything around them.

Mostly, on my brother.

And when I say experiment, I unfortunately mean that quite literally. As a child I had a very serious scientific project that lasted several months. Every Tuesday at exactly five in the afternoon I would throw my brother from the staircase of our duplex house. Not one minute earlier. Not one minute later. Precisely five o’clock. Then I would give him one week to recover while I quietly observed the results of the previous attempt. The next Tuesday the experiment would resume. I was essentially running a long-term behavioral study using my brother as the unwilling research subject, carefully collecting physical and psychological reactions and trying to determine at which point he would finally anticipate the attack and stop the pattern. From the outside this probably looked like pure chaos. Inside my head, however, it was extremely systematic. The timing was precise, the observations were detailed, and the schedule never changed.

Which, if you think about it, is actually a perfect summary of ADHD logic. Chaos in almost every area of life except the one strange ritual the brain decides is important. Time blindness everywhere but somehow the mind insists that this particular experiment must begin at exactly at 5 o'clock.

This experiment also caused me to start on Adderall when I was 8 years old, after the weekly panic attacks my step-mom got, lol.

Anyway, 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, simply a different operating system.

From the inside this is simply how the world has always looked: normal. 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 built for a different rhythm. Everyday life tends to move in straight lines: routines, schedules, repetition, predictable steps that follow each other like a quiet railway. The ADHD mind moves differently. It moves in spirals.

Naturally the spiral brain ends up being labeled the problem. But the confusion actually goes both ways. We also do not fully understand the majority brain; we simply spend more time adapting to it because your system happens to run the society.

I can learn Chinese in six months if I find it interesting, but you cannot teach me how to breathe if I do not 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 this 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 entire experience far less tragic and much more entertaining.

Of course that does not mean life becomes simple. I still want to complain a little, using a few examples from my own life that illustrate how strange this operating system can be. These are not excuses. They are simply small stories that I usually try to hide from people same as, I usually hide that I am ADHD due to my social statue.

For example my brain has always been very good at understanding complex systems, complex people are my favorites too. I learned to read and write when I was four years old. But I refused to write anything in school until third grade simply because I did not like my teacher. At one point social services even visited our home for a warning because the school believed I had a learning disability and required special education. At the same time I 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 inevitably 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 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 one-seventy seven and adding another ten centimeters makes me look like a confused Scandinavian basketball player wandering through the street. Or a hot transexual..

Driving is another interesting contradiction. I do not know how to drive a car. Traffic feels like pure chaos to me which I cannot control other drivers. 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, breathing softly like something from a skincare commercial. Meanwhile I apparently sleep like Dracula guarding his coffin. My eyes remain half open and I sleep with my arms crossed over my chest where I find emotional comfort, 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 partly open eyes. He screamed like a full horror movie scream because he thought I was awake and silently watching him like a psychopath. I was not. I was deeply asleep babe. Sorry for the inconvenience.

He screamed even harder when he find out I also occasionally sleepwalk and talk hahahahah. And yes, we broke up short after.

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 returned calmly and said, she is already awake, she is lying there looking around. When they both entered the room together she discovered the misunderstanding caused by H's laughs. I was simply sleeping, like someone who had quietly left the world during the night and had not yet informed anyone.

The irony is that during the day I also forget to blink properly, which has given me a lovely degree three 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 has decided that depending on anything somehow feels weak. So instead I simply walk around half blind, which means my visual system currently operates in a very balanced way. At night I stare at people while unconscious, and during the day I keep staring in order to see.

Social etiquette is another battlefield. The small rituals of everyday interaction feel like a complicated choreography that everyone else memorized but nobody ever 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 keep up with it. Every greeting feels like improvising a diplomatic ceremony without preparation while everyone else seems to perform it perfectly.

Meanwhile the same brain that cannot memorize greeting rituals can remember extremely unnecessary details with perfect precision. I can tell you which wine should be paired with which dish like a sommelier in a Michelin restaurant. I know which spoon you are supposed to start with during a formal dinner, even though I 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. I am pescatarian for 20 years been simple because the meat smell like animal and chicken has a weird texture, nothing to do with ethics. 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 and feels like vomit, 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 sentence leads to another story, which leads to another observation, which connects to another completely unrelated thought, and before I realize it I have been talking non stop like a podcast nobody pressed pause on.

From the outside this probably looks chaotic. 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, this is probably the most accurate demonstration of ADHD I could have written.

People sometimes ask what ADHD feels like, expecting a tragic explanation. But the truth is much less dramatic. It is actually quite funny if you understand the language. 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 Chinese in six months.

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