Mazey Eddings

Tilly in Technicolor

Jazelle H

Stop, Mom. Just stop. Stop laying out all the things you'd change about me and blaming them on a diagnosis. 

ADHD hasn't "changed" me, which is how my mom views it. It is me. It's an undeniable and simple fact of who I am. Like my black hair or my gray eyes or the bump on the bridge of my nose. It exists in my DNA, probably right between my hopeless romantic gene and the raunchy sense of humor allele. It's woven into who I am. It's not some disease that needs to be cured.

When feelings build and overwhelm me, pushing at my joints until I feel like I'll fracture from them, I do something weird and explosive with my body. It just feels...good to move. To get it out.

"They don't have the right to make you feel uncomfortable to fit their ideas of what's proper," Mãe had told me.

But I'm disappointed this tortuous flight did not a romance make. I don't know why, but my brain is always hooking on to random people, wanting so badly to find a connection with someone, even when there's no logical reason for one.

I often get too excited and dart around from idea to idea. Then I realize how circuitous it all gets, which makes me hyperaware of my talking and it all ends up making my tongue feel thick and awkward and like my throat's choking on the rambling sentences.

I once asked my mums if I should consider myself directionless because I didn't have a job title at the ready why an adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. They told me it's okay to not know exactly where I'm going, as long as I'm happy where I am.

There's so much energy in the way she moves, the way she holds herself, that, for a moment, I think the vibrant colors are coming straight from her palms.

It's hard to trust new people to accept you as yourself when the world at large doesn't tend to accommodate you.

It always feels like there's a curtain between me and any person I'm talking to, and I worry I'll always feel this separation from the world. Like I'm a extra piece to a jigsaw puzzle, discarded and forgotten under the couch, while everyone else clicks with their matching corners. My wonky edges won't ever have the luxury of complementing someone else's.

She's like an asteroid striking my axis off-balance and sending me spiraling around the room.

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