"Girl, Interrupted" is my favorite movie. I will always remember the way I felt the first time I watched it. I felt like I was watching the darkest pieces of me played out on the screen; I could relate to almost every single one of the characters. It was like going to therapy without having to talk at all.
This movie fell into my life during my freshman year of college. A tough time for everyone, of course, but a year I handled about as well as a dog trying to hold a baby. I had just ended a year of seeing a therapist almost every week and I was still trying to navigate the world with this new-found sense of clarity that had been granted through the power of talk-therapy and anti-depressants. Naturally, there were high and low points of the year. My roommate and I couldn't have been matched more perfectly. My boyfriend broke up with me a week before my birthday. I found my best friends. I struggled to keep my grades up. Through each of these events I found ways to cope.
Sophomore year brought its own set of troubles. New roommates brought adjustments, classes were harder (I failed my first class ever), and my grandmother passed away. Nevertheless, I made it through. My coping strategies were probably not some of the best, but I did the best I could, just like I always had been.
Its funny, though, how good our brains are at finding ways to compensate for certain flaws. My proficiency at procrastination was discovered by eighth grade, but it was nearly impossible for me to change this habit. I spent many nights in high school and my first two and a half years of college awake until the wee hours of the morning just so I could complete homework I had known about for days, perhaps even weeks in advance.
When the first semester of my junior year of college was winding down, my brain decided that it was tired. It didn't want to cope anymore, it needed a vacation. The timing could not have been more terrible.
On more than one occasion (per week, it feels like), I would call my mom in tears. I was exhausted and sad and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. In fact, the week before fall semester final exams, I was sitting in the library trying to start my homework, but my body would not let me. I couldn't breathe, and all I could think about was getting out of the library. I practically ran out of the building and called my mom.
One day she told me that two of my cousins had recently seen a neuropsychologist and, after extensive testing, were discovered to have relatively severe ADHD. With this in mind, my mom made me an appointment with their doctor, and arrangements were made for preliminary visits as well as a date for a long morning of testing during my winter break.
The day for the testing came and went. A few weeks after coming back to school for the spring semester, I had a FaceTime meeting with my doctor and parents. The test results were explained to me in layman's terms and the sense of relief that I had been hoping for for so long washed over me.
It was official. I have ADHD.
All of the struggles I conveyed to my doctor about reading speed and inability to focus finally made sense. There was an organic reason behind everything. After years of feeling completely inadequate and having that feeling reinforced through mediocre grades, I could breathe again. I was finally convinced that I could stop telling myself I was unintelligent and that college was just one more thing for me to fail at.
This semester is my first with this knowledge. I take medicine every day so I can be the student I want to be. Through my struggle with depression, I learned not to be ashamed of something I neither can help nor deny is a huge part of my life. I'm not ashamed of this disability. I don't want other people to be ashamed either.
If you stop telling yourself you're crazy, maybe you'll start to believe that, too.
