Lakelore

by Anna-Marie McLemore

And maybe this is because I’m trans, and always looking out for it, but I got the flicker of recognition that comes with finding someone else like you. A feeling that whatever words this person got assigned at birth maybe didn’t fit them either.

Except if I tell her that, she’ll say something to someone, ask for them to talk me through it again. And that’s going against the current of how I’ve lived with ADHD, trying to make it small enough that it doesn’t inconvenience anyone.

Over years of adapting to living with my own brain, I’ve perfected a nod meant to convey everything from yes, I absolutely understood all that to of course, I’m fine, definitely not overstimulated/overwhelmed/wishing I could hide under a piece of furniture.

“Okay.” Lore hesitates, licking water off their lips. “Except you’re not alone in this.” I think I’m in control of my facial expression until Lore says, “No, don’t roll your eyes. I’m not trying to reassure you. I’m literally telling you that you’re not alone in this.”

And the reason could be anything. It could be things they’ve told me show up in a brain like mine. Trouble with working memory. Processing and retrieval problems.

Hey, random question, but did you grow up thinking there was maybe something weird about your own brain? Or that your brain was doing things the wrong way? That you were doing things the wrong way?

We all have warehouses where our brains store words. People who read without dyslexia—and what puto decided a reading learning disability should have that spelling?—they have one really big warehouse, and everything about words gets stored in there. How words are spelled. How they sound. How to read them in your head and out loud. But for me, it’s like I have two totally separate warehouses. One for how words sound, how I hear them and say them. Then another one for how words look on the page, how they’re spelled, how I read them. And for every word I know, those two warehouses each have a different item number for it. Take the word platinum. I hear that word, and the first warehouse, the hearing/speaking warehouse, goes and gets that word and all the information it knows about it. I know how to say that word out loud. I know how it sounds. I know what it means. When I hear it, it calls up the cold sheen of an expensive ring, or Marilyn Monroe’s hair.

But the process of explaining things wears out my brain. I want to take everything I’m thinking and just throw it all out there at once, like upending the contents of a box. But conversations don’t work that way. And it’s not lost on me how ironic it is that I don’t want to explain things even as I need things repeatedly explained to me. That’s where resisting my first impulse comes in. My first impulse is screw it, not worth it. But I set that aside, and instead, I do the math.

“Did you know ADHD and dyslexia have something in common?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks. I shake my head. I shake the glitter jar. “They both affect executive functioning,” she says. “Working memory. Emotional regulation. Problem solving.”

Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things.

feel in my hands, in the tension in my knuckles, how hard I’ve tried. I shove all of this down, and then, like a balloon, it bobs up above the surface. It’s as unbothered by my effort as I am drained by it. I didn’t realize how tired all this was making me. Not just the effort it takes me to function, but the effort it takes to make it look like it’s not effort. Trying to act like it doesn’t cost me anything is costing me more than I have. I

“You can’t separate everything hard from everything beautiful.”

Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.

there will be days when I don’t know it. Today, I may accept how my brain works. Tomorrow, I may be fighting it again. There will be days when I feel proud and worthy, and days I feel frustrated and defeated and lost.

It’s not just the dyslexia that makes reading harder. It’s how the world responds to it. I learned how to read, but then got told I was reading wrong, that I had to read another way no matter how hard my brain fought it.

days mean I’m irretrievably lost. I used to think the only options were the world under the lake and the world above it, good moments in my brain and bad moments in my brain, parts of me worth keeping and parts worth forgetting. But maybe that makes as little sense as thinking there’s only boy and girl and nothing in between. I’m proof of what exists between, and so is Lore, and everyone like us, just like the world under the lake is proof that there’s something between air and water.