Lakelore

by Anna-Marie McLemore

The name I’d been given when I was born had a kind of weight I couldn’t carry.

Everyone wants to think they see the best in everyone else, but when the bad comes out, they want to pretend that’s all they ever saw.

I forgot, at the worst possible moment, that someone like me doesn’t get to fight back.

So I’m not the only one who sometimes feels like I’m fighting my own brain.

Some people think ADHD means I can’t pay attention, but so often I’m trying to find the point between paying too little attention and paying so much that I get overwhelmed.

Sometimes it’s meant burning my own heart to the ground to make sure the way my brain disrupts me doesn’t disrupt anyone else.

My sheer existence is as much nuance as I get to have. Who I am uses up all the space the world is willing to give me, and even that, I have to fight to keep open. I am already a living confrontation. My story doesn’t get to be complicated.

Every time I try to find a place solid enough to get my footing, it turns to ash and crumbles underneath me.

“Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things,” Lore whispers.

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.

“You try things,” Dr. Robins says. “And you figure out what works. And you accept that some things will work for a while and then stop working.”

My ADHD is made out of paradoxes and contradictions. It’s having weirdly high energy and then getting tapped out fast. It’s making impulsive decisions and then being unable to make them at all. It’s inattention and hyperfocus. It’s being so sensitive I can feel everything around me and being so oblivious I miss things that seem obvious. It’s acting too fast, and being too slow. It’s thinking everything is possible and then wondering if anything is possible for me.