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Sometimes people reduce ADHD to a stereotype of a hyperactive or spacy kid. One who needs more time on tests or forgets to turn in homework. This kid grows up into an adult with a messy desk who shows up late to meetings. Not to downplay the messy desk or forgotten homework, but a lot of us would love if ADHD’s effects were that simple.
For many people with ADHD, the organizational struggles can be dealt with. We can find ways to corral our hyperactive energy. A spouse can take over paying the bills. What cuts us most deeply, the part we struggle even to put into words, is the constant rejection and social isolation.
ADHDers are individuals. Many of us do fine socially. But we need to be more honest about the fact that many of us do not, in fact, do fine. At least not without a lot of work and support.
In a series of future posts I want to talk about social skills. For today, I’ll share a few questions that have haunted me through a lifetime of social confusion.
If you’ve felt it too, asked yourself painful questions too, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. If you love someone with ADHD, I want to hear from you, too. I hope my words here help you understand what the world looks like from our side. Sometimes the things everyone else thinks are obvious are actually pretty damn confusing.
When did everyone else exchange phone numbers?
When I was home full-time with my kiddo during his preschool years, a neighbor friend recommended Music Together. She’d met many of her closest friends in town through the program and had nothing but good things to say about it.
It was good advice. I loved Music Together. I talk about why it’s great for ADHD families in a separate post. However, it didn’t make me any friends. Not even one.
I showed up every week for four years. I smiled, said hello, and did what I saw everyone else doing. A few weeks into each session, I inevitably noticed groups of moms growing closer. I overheard them discussing standing plans to hit the local Starbucks or take the kids to the playground after class. They said things like, “I’ll text you.”
I never saw these other moms exchange phone numbers. All I know is at some point, some of us them decided to become friends who texted and chatted after class and arranged playdates.
Meanwhile, I recalled the time in fifth grade when I purchased a pair of trendy sneakers. The next day a popular boy walked up to me, sneered at my shoes, and asked, “why’d you even get [those], anyway?” In my head, this was how the other moms would react if I showed up at the playground to join them. Someone would whisper, “Why’d she follow us here, anyway?”
Most group activities seem to have a tipping point when some members make outside plans. They start texting. Sharing inside jokes. I never even know it’s happening until it’s too late.
Is that really how I look and sound?
There’s nothing more mortifying than playing back a home video and hearing myself in the background. Maybe it’s bias: I notice myself more than others. But I also think sometimes — maybe often — I’m just That Person.
You know the one: the person who’s louder than everyone else, who always has something to say, whose jokes and comments are usually weird and awkward. When I see myself caught on tape I see someone who’s annoying at best, a conversation-killer at worst.
Some people embrace this about themselves. They make it work. They spin the eyerolls into a joke they’re in on, too.
Not me. Once, when I mentioned having always been a quiet person to an acquaintance, she laughed and said, “Wait. You? Quiet? I don’t believe it.” She didn’t mean it as an insult, but I was crushed.
Deep down, I see myself as a quiet person. A listener. Someone peaceful and wise who doesn’t pounce on every opportunity to speak and is never the loudest person in the room. I dislike being the center of attention. I always have. And yet the evidence is right there on tape: when I’m anxious or understimulated, I’m not the person I think I am. Instead, I’m someone I would never choose to hang out with.
Will [Person A] be upset I stayed friendly with [Person B]?
![graphic: Will [Person A] be upset I stayed friendly with [Person B]?](https://adhdhomestead.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/4-1024x1024.png)
I talk to everyone. I listen to everyone. While I’m pretty choosy about the people I actually get close to, I don’t burn unnecessary bridges, either.
All my life, I’ve watched moments when groups of friends — usually girls and women, but some boys and men too — coalesced into an impenetrable net against a shared enemy. An injury to one was an injury to all. They were, as a friend of mine likes to put it, “ride or die.”
Am I ride or die? I support my friends no matter what, but in my own pragmatic way. If conflict erupts between a friend and a mutual acquaintance, I don’t know how to respond. Most stories have two sides. I’m happy to hear both, and I may agree with one side more than the other, but rarely will I escalate my opinion to the level of cutting off communication.
Is this okay? When my friend sees me talking to someone she doesn’t get along with, will she trust me less? (She shouldn’t.) Will she view me as two-faced or unsupportive? (I don’t think I’m either.) If I did cut off the offending party, would that person trash talk me to others? Call me petty or accuse me of getting in the middle of something that wasn’t my business? (Accusations I may not argue with.)
When people don’t get along, I don’t know what to do. I suspect clear rules exist about how and when it’s okay to mention someone’s name in passing to their adversary. Also which offenses warrant excommunication from the group, and how vehemently I should defend a friend when someone complains about them to my face. I just don’t know what they are or when to apply them.
Why aren’t we friends (anymore)?
A particular lost friendship has stuck in my mind for the past several years. It’s certainly not my first friendship loss, but it’s more confusing than most — and that’s saying something. We were best friends, the kind who texted multiple times per day and had standing dinner plans every week. Sometimes we fantasized about purchasing a duplex and raising families side by side. Several times a year we traveled together, sometimes for weekends and sometimes for longer.
And then we didn’t. More and more of my texts went unanswered. Eventually even I realized I should no longer send them. For a while I stayed proactive and insisted on arranging the occasional meal together to catch up, but that’s all it was: catching up. I tried to maintain our rapport, but it had vanished.
And to where? I tried to ask. The vague explanations I received didn’t account for the magnitude of what I’d lost. Even if I’d done nothing wrong, I still wondered: what did I miss? Something signaled it was time to move on, but what? And when?
I realize some friendships only exist in the context of a finite group experience. Now it’s children’s activities and conferences. In my younger years it was semester-long classes. I don’t expect to stay in touch with everyone I meet this way.
However, my friend who recommended Music Together still has strong connections with the women she met there — and her kids stopped going years ago. There’s another factor at play. Something specific to me.
Friendships end all the time. I get it. I’d just like to understand why, especially in those cases where I feel a significant loss and the other person seems content to pretend nothing happened.
Why does she hate me?
At the start of fifth grade, a girl in my class began picking on me. She started hanging out with my fourth-grade best friend, who stopped speaking to me as though we’d never been friends at all. She chased me around our classroom before homeroom and I got a lunch detention for running away from her. On the bus, she convinced everyone to pile their jackets on top of me as I laid on a seat alone and wished I could disappear. I had no idea why. We’d always been friendly enough.
In seventh grade, a girl in our friend circle inexplicably hated me and my best friend. We exchanged insults in class and wrote nasty notes that oh-so-coincidentally ended up in the wrong hands. We engaged in the mid-90s, middle-school version of subtweeting, scrawling bits of pointed “wisdom” on our textbooks’ paper-bag covers. I got swept up in the conflict but had no idea what took us from friends one week to enemies the next.
I thought people outgrew these behaviors. That a teammate driving a field-hockey ball into my ankle and sneering “good” when I told her it hurt was strictly teenage behavior. I was wrong. In my mid-20s, a woman in my office went from friendly to nasty seemingly overnight. Her clear dislike for me inspired awkward lunchtime rituals and strained professional communications. I was hurt, not because she was being mean but because it made no sense.
From my perspective, most sudden animosity like this has no discernible cause. That probably makes me all the more offensive to the opposing parties. After all, I’m supposed to know, right? That I don’t only confirms, in their eyes, how much I deserve their treatment.
Why didn’t it occur to you to include me?
I often assume circles of friends operate as a unit. Then I realize everyone else has shared something without me. There’s been a birthday dinner or an invitation to a private pool or a joint shopping trip before the first day of school. It doesn’t always feel personal. Sometimes I get the idea people might’ve included me, if I were the type of person anyone thought to include.
When my husband first met me in our freshman dorm, he assumed I wasn’t interested in hanging out with him — or anyone. He thought I was “too cool” for our social circle and already had enough friends.
This floored me. I had literally nothing going on. For a while I thought maybe this was my problem — seeming cooler than I was — but then I thought back to high school. I’ve remained friends with a number of my classmates, but we’ve hung out more since graduation than we ever did at the time. They never invited me to loiter at the local park after school or spend the night in a friend’s cabin. Maybe they assumed I wouldn’t want to because I was the only one who didn’t smoke, but I suspect something else. And it wasn’t that they thought I had cooler friends, because in our small high school it was clear I did not.
Sometimes I don’t care or would’ve declined to join an event even if I had been asked. But sometimes I feel ashamed, like I don’t want anyone to know I wasn’t invited. Most people won’t come out and ask why you got left out or how you feel about it. I bet they notice, though. And that leads to another question most people have too much tact to ask: what did you do?
Even if no one says it, I think it. I think it and I ask it and I come up with the same answer every time: I don’t know what I did. I’ve never known.
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