We all have internal struggles. We're humans, none of us are perfect, and we all have at least one thing that we struggle with on a day to day basis. For me, it's my ADHD. I don't like to be THIS person, but it really seems like no one understands ADHD unless they have it themselves.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD is defined by Web MD as "a chronic condition marked by persistent inattention, hyperactivity, and sometimes impulsivity." People who struggle with ADHD have trouble focusing and staying on task, trouble sitting still, and often act upon things or say things without thinking. Though it is more common in children than adults, adults can struggle with the disorder as well because contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always just go away after childhood.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 5 years old and I have been struggling with it ever since. I was put on Concerta to control it, but all it did was turn me into a robot. I started Concerta at 5 years old and continued taking it until I was 17. My psychiatrist wanted to see how I did in school without it so that I didn't have to take it in college, so he took me off of it the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Coming off the medication was such a relief. I actually felt like a normal functioning human being for the first time in 12 years. While I was on the Concerta, I couldn't even laugh at the things my friends laughed at. I didn't understand their jokes and I didn't find anything funny that they found funny. I was literally an emotionless robot. Concerta did help me stay focused during school hours, but once it wore off I was interested in a million other things while trying to get homework done. It would literally take me 5 hours to get one homework assignment done because I couldn't sit still.

ADHD also makes it hard to understand math. I've hated math since childhood and I always will. Because math builds on previous skills, people with ADHD struggle with this because we have such short attention spans and have trouble remembering things we learned. Teachers would get frustrated with me because they didn't understand why I found math so difficult. I would cry in class over math concepts and my teachers would kick me out of the classroom for crying. It made me feel like I was stupid compared to my peers.

Another thing about ADHD is that we always have to be playing or fidgeting with something. Children with ADHD have trouble sitting still. They will get up out of their chair and run around the house, restaurant, etc. because they don't know how to handle their energy. A child that acts like this is often perceived as a "devil child" - they're not devils, I promise; they just don't know how else to release all their extra energy. As someone with ADHD gets older, it gets easier to sit in one spot, but we often have to be playing with something or fidgeting with something to channel our energy elsewhere. This may include playing with a hoodie string, fidgeting with a pencil, playing with a fidget spinner or fidget cube, or even tapping your foot or hands. Personally, I bite my nails. It's a bad habit, but it helps.

In elementary school, even while I was on the Concerta, somehow the trees swaying in the wind outside was more interesting than what was going on in class. My teachers would constantly yell at me over this but just didn't understand that I had to stare out the window for a couple minutes because my brain told me that was more important than class. I would count trees, cars, clouds, and birds. My conscience would "make" me count the number of times a tree swayed until it swayed 20 times, even if it took 10 minutes to get to 20. Even if I by some miracle got myself to pay attention in class, I would read all the posters around the room, examine everybody's shoes, draw on my paper, or spend 5 minutes trying to figure out why the teacher had a tiny statue of some football player on her desk.

In high school, all the students gathered in the cafeteria in the morning before homeroom. I was usually the second or third student to get to school, so if I had a test that day, I would use that time to review my notes and make sure I remembered what I studied. As time passed, more and more students filtered into the cafeteria. Obviously, this meant it progressively got louder and louder. I complained to my friend one day about how I can't focus on my notes with all the noise. She said to me, "Just drown it out." This particularly pissed me off because what a lot of people don't know about ADHD is that we have trouble focusing on one particular thing. Our brains can't pick one thing to focus on, therefore we have trouble focusing on what we need to focus on if there are a million other noises or things happening around us.

When I was younger, and even sometimes now, I would ramble on and on about the most ridiculous things. I would ask a million questions without letting the other person answer my first question, and I would talk forever. Adults would say to me, "do you ever stop talking?" and laugh it off like that statement was no big deal. I've heard that statement a countless number of times throughout my lifetime. And no, I don't ever stop talking, because I can't. Those of us with ADHD have to get our thoughts out as soon as possible, or else we will forget our thoughts and be bothered by it for literally the rest of the day. With ADHD, there is no such thing as "hold that thought." Even if those thoughts are small-scale and don't matter to other people, like "wow the leaves are turning," even if everybody else can see that the leaves are turning, we have to tell someone every single little thought that pops into our heads. I have to point it out.

Yes, some children who are diagnosed with ADHD grow out of it going into adulthood, and these people are very lucky, but a lot of people don't fully grow out of it. I'm now 19 years old and still struggle with it, especially because I'm off medication for it. As we grow older, we learn how to manage and cope with our ADHD, but it doesn't always go away. I still get distracted by the littlest things, like having to watch the solar dancing flowers in my room for a total of 2 minutes instead of getting my work done.I literally cannot think when I have to if there are surrounding noises. This is very bothersome because the average person absolutely has to listen to music or they cannot focus. I am the extreme opposite of this. I need complete silence or very minimal noise in order for my brain to be able to carry out tasks that require a lot of thinking. For example, if I have to work out a math problem, even a relatively simple one, I absolutely cannot focus if there is any sort of noise in the background. I have a lot of difficulty drowning out surrounding noises, which believe it or not, caused a lot of fights at sleepovers as a child. Every single one of my friends absolutely positively could not fall asleep without having the TV on. I, on the other hand, absolutely positively could not fall asleep with the TV on, because my brain literally cannot drown out the noise. Even if the volume was on as low as possible, my brain would find a way to hear that and it would prevent me from falling asleep.

An ADHD brain cannot process everything someone says to us all at once. When I'm in class taking notes, I'll try to write down anything the professor says that's not on the lecture slides, but because my brain is so slow at processing information, I'll maybe be able to get 3 words down before I forget the entire sentence, which leads to me missing the rest of the things the professor said. And because I can't process all this information, I won't be able to recall oral notes from that day like the average person can do. My friends will tell me that a certain professor said something on thisday, and even if I wrote it down somewhere I will not be able to recall what the professor said without looking it up.

All I ask is to please stop getting annoyed with us when we ask you to repeat something you said to us because we were distracted by a squirrel running up a tree, stop being annoyed by the fact that we always have to fidget with something and stop saying "everyone has ADHD moments." Yes, everyone gets distracted sometimes and yes, everyone gets overwhelmed. But not everyone has ADHD and not everyone knows what it's like to constantly be distracted by the littlest things.

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