The Year I Met My Brain Quotes

“the lesson I internalised was that the version of myself I was when I wasn’t actively trying to mask and fit in was unlikeable and egotistical, and that it was my job to shrink that person down and keep her hidden.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“I wasn’t interrupting because I didn’t care what others had to say, but because I’d already worked out the end of their sentence and if I waited rather than blurting out my reply, my thoughts might disappear back into the buzz of noise in my head.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“Turns out it’s really hard to adopt healthy habits to help treat your neurological condition when the very neurological condition you’re trying to treat makes it really hard to adopt healthy habits.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“truth be told, a lot of the time I wasn’t interrupting because I didn’t care what others had to say, but because I’d already worked out the end of their sentence and if I waited rather than blurting out my reply, my thoughts might disappear back into the buzz of noise in my head. Often it was talk now or lose the ability to follow the conversation altogether. And I wasn’t relating everything back to my own experiences because I only wanted to talk about myself; it’s just that’s how I thought you showed someone that you understood and could empathise with what they were going through. I never noticed that it wasn’t something everyone did.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“The space cadet: ADHD’s predominantly inattentive presentation Probably the most misunderstood and overlooked version of ADHD is the primarily inattentive presentation (ADHD-I). Someone presenting this way will have a much harder time staying focused and might be prone to making careless mistakes in their work. Unless they find a task super engaging, it might be difficult or even impossible for them to keep their attention homed”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“But, hey, even if a government doesn’t particularly care about preventing crime, breaking the cycle of poverty or, you know, lessening human suffering in general, they probably should still care about ADHD, because it turns out this condition costs our economies a staggering amount of money, too.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“ADHD involves a lot of delaying. Sometimes something important needs doing but it feels too overwhelming, or we’re scared we’ll do it wrong, or we’re embarrassed we haven’t done it sooner.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“seemingly unable to stop talking despite my brain screaming at my mouth to shut up.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“Jumping back to the classroom, those with primarily inattentive ADHD probably aren’t going to be the kids tripping over chairs and interrupting. They’re more likely to be sitting there quietly, gazing off into the middle distance or focusing on the way the bird hops from branch to branch in the tree outside the window.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“A common argument is that the real danger of people self-diagnosing with ADHD is that it could lead to people self-medicating for ADHD too.
But, I'm sorry... What?!
Do you believe there are actually people out there convincing themselves they have ADHD, purposefully deciding not to go to a doctor about it, and instead planning to buy a regular supply of Dexies from their sketchy cousin for literally 100x the prescription price?”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“It’s not that we have a deficit in attention; we have a deficit in control over it.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“nor did I have any clue about just how much hard, painful emotional work was ahead of me to undo the damage that the undiagnosed decades had done to my self-esteem.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“She’s just finished university, moved out of home and started her first full-time job. Sure, she’s bright, and she’s always been a high achiever, but now that the scaffolding of formal education and the daily support provided by living with her parents has fallen away, everything has become so much harder.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“If you’re a non-ADHDer reading this in the hope of understanding how you can help your ADHD loved ones, that’s how you do it. You ask them what they genuinely need, and listen to them when they tell you.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“What I wanted was something tangible that I could hold up to show my peers or the world and say, ‘Hey, I might be weird and I’m pretty sure my friends all secretly hate me, but I am worth something.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“I would float from one group to the next, often being told I was too bossy or too annoying to play with. I would find a group of kids I got along with, but arguments were common, and each time I found an incredibly close best friend, the friendship would utterly implode after a couple of years.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“While the former is overwhelmingly found in children, the latter can persist well into adulthood, and is basically an excessive difficulty with following rules, and persistently behaving in a socially unacceptable way, such as showing aggression towards people and animals, destroying property, stealing, lying and breaking laws. These conditions don’t appear in many mainstream media conversations about ADHD, but according to the DSM-5 are really quite common, with conduct disorder affecting about a quarter of children and teens with ADHD-C (combined).”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD

“But it more often means becoming unreasonably obsessed with some random TV show, or convincing myself I’m going to become the kind of person who sews all their own clothes, including designing the patterns (turns out, not as easy as it seems) and purchasing a tiny $50 sewing machine that breaks the first time I try stitching through sherpa fleece and then lies abandoned under my couch for the next year.”
― Matilda Boseley, The Year I Met My Brain: A travel companion for adults who have just found out they have ADHD