#3: Sunny's Lost Years (Part 1)

This interview is particularly close to my heart. As you can see from the title, it is also particularly long. That’s because unlike the other interviews thus far, I conducted this one over the phone instead of over text.

Sunny has been a dear friend of mine for the past few years. Friendship at first sight. Our chemistry was white hot, to the point where we both seemed to forget that she was on a date with someone the first time we met. I would write more about her age and her hobbies here as I have done for others, but I decided to include the introduction in the transcript because as you will see, she is far too interesting to summarize in an opening paragraph. What I will say is that, unlike those interviewed before her, Sunny has had a particularly difficult and troubled road to get to where she is today. The nitty gritty of that road will be discussed more in depth in next week’s installment, but in this portion of the interview as well she speaks in such honest, raw language about the challenges of growing up with undiagnosed ADHD-PI.

To keep the authenticity of the “two ADHD people talking to each other” experience without making it unreadable, I’ve only minimally edited down this transcript of our conversation. Vocal fillers and constant small interjections to signal we were paying attention and reacting have been removed, but not much else. I hope this interview (both this part and the following part which will be up next Wednesday) will be as entertaining, thoughtful, and moving for you as it was for me.

[Warning: adult language]

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Hello?

Hey, Sunny!

Hey, how’s it going, love?

It’s going great, how are you?

I’m doing ok, D and I have been cleaning up around the office, picking up some shit. I ran a couple errands this morning, but other than that I’ve been doing whatever.

Big chillin’?

Yep.

Nice. Yeah, I really need to get on organizing our office. I swear we’ve got most of our apartment, ya know, pretty moved in. A little sparse. But that office… [laughs]

No yeah, I feel it. For us it’s the living room. It’s just, like, a monster. We’ve been here for, I think, 3 months officially and, like, we thought naively we’d be able to get everything done within the first 3 weeks but there’s still so much shit that needs to be done. Like, we just unpacked everything for the office.

Oh man!

Yeah. What’s interesting is that D is trying to get an appointment to get tested for ADHD.

Really?

Yeah, so that’s interesting. I mean, after being with him and being around him all the time, I can definitely see it. So, I just told him to schedule an appointment and so he’s gonna do that. I’m interested to see how that goes for him.

Yeah, no doubt. That’s awesome.

It would definitely make a lot of sense because 2 people with ADHD living in the same house untreated could definitely lead to our house looking the way that it does [laughs].

Right, right [laughs].

So yeah, are there, like, questions you need to ask me?

Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you in a comfortable space to chat?

Hell yeah, man. I’m chillin’ in the office and it’s nice and clean so I’m feeling a lot better.

Alright, so I always do a little intro blurb before really going into the interview proper, just saying your age and where you are in school or work and just some flavor text about your hobbies and passions. I feel like I could write my own little blurb on you, but I’d love your input.

So, I’m 20. I’ve recently decided to take a break from school and have decided to focus on working full time, because my ADHD diagnosis is recent. I was diagnosed as an adult which, ya know, explains a lot of the shortcomings I had growing up. I eventually do want to go back to school and become an English teacher.

Awesome!

Yeah, I love books. I’ve always been a writer, I’ve always been an avid reader. I used to get in trouble during spelling tests in school because my teacher used to say the word that we needed to spell and I’d have it, I’d be good, and I’d start reading in between the words because I was just bored. That’s the kind of person I am, I’ve always loved to read. So to be able to teach that and share the gift of a love of literature, that’s what I’d want to do.

I love that. Do you have an ideal age group that you’d want to work with?

My dream job would actually be to teach AP Lit to seniors. The AP Lit teacher I had in high school absolutely changed my life.

Oh my gosh, same.

I actually was a music education major, I thought I wanted to become a band director. But I had this dream that my AP Lit teacher came to me and told me to “Stop the bullshit,” and gave me a book and left, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that teaching English is what I want to do.

That’s amazing…

Yeah, she really did, like, change the course of my life and I could not be more grateful.

[laughs] That’s so incredible.

I told her about it too! She was like, “Well that’s weird, because I’ve been thinking about you and I was gonna call you,” or whatever and I was like, “Well shit.” [laughs]

Oh my god, what a weird empath connection, that’s incredible.

Yeah, like she gave me my copy of The Bell Jar. They used to teach it in AP Lit. I used to sit with her in her classroom during lunch while she graded papers instead of going and sitting with other people. She knew how much I loved poetry and at the time Sylvia Plath was one of my favorite writers, so as a graduation gift she gave me one of her old teaching copies of The Bell Jar.

Wow!

Yeah, I still have it in my office, so yeah, she definitely did make an incredible impact on me.

Do you have a favorite book that you read under her instruction?

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Yeah, I love it so much. It became my favorite play instantly. I have a couple movies downloaded to my computer because we don’t have internet, and one of the very few I have is the Vivien Leigh version of A Streetcar Named Desire. I love it so much.

That’s awesome. My mom, she’s a huge theatre person and she absolutely loves that play and she’s always wanted to play one of those characters, but I don’t remember which one because I’ve never seen it, nor have I read it, and I’ve always meant to.

It’s phenomenal. So, the English teacher I had, we were very close. She knew right off the bat that there were things that were going on with me that weren’t quite well, and so we developed a bond or whatever. But she knew one of the things Streetcar touches on is sexual assault, and she knew that was something I had history with. So, before we started studying it, she told me that if I needed to step out at any point that I was more than okay to do that. I ended up not needing to leave or anything even though there were guys in my class that made a lot of shitty comments. I held my ground and actually yelled at one of them one time and my teacher wasn’t even mad about it. She stood up for me. I always wanted to do what she does and give people a positive experience with literature because I believe that literature is one of the most important tools we have. And if that wasn’t the case then we wouldn’t be banning books to this day.

Right, yeah. I think that’s fantastic. That’s very, very cool. And I agree, my AP English teacher senior year was like so, so important to me and really rejuvenated my love of books after I was already starting to get a low attention span for them.

Yeah, I know I understand that. Nothing could make me finish Jane Eyre though. Nothing.

I was assigned Jane Eyre my freshman year of college before I was medicated, and I looked at it and I was like, “[laughs] I’m not even gonna pretend like I’m gonna read this.”

Yeah, that was me senior year of high school. I was like, “I’ll watch the movie, I’ll skim through it, but no.” And I’ve loved books my whole life, so that’s just one of those things that I think not a lot of people can suffer through.

[laughs] Yeah, for sure. Okay, so into some more general questions for this thing. So, when were you diagnosed with ADHD and what led up to that?

So, it was actually during the very beginning of October. So, what’s interesting is that in my freshman year of high school I was having a lot of problems in my English class with essays. Not much else, a couple of tests here and there, but essays were really, really getting me. I remember I failed this one and it was the first time I had ever failed an essay, and my teacher wrote at the top of my paper FOCUS in all red letters. And that wasn’t the first time my teachers had made comments, right? Like, all through elementary and middle school my teachers had said to me:

“Why can’t you focus?” and “Why is it so hard for you to pay attention?”

“Why do you get up so much during class?”

“Why can’t you sit still?”

“Why is it so hard for you?”

“Why aren’t you like everybody else?”

It’s kind of been a reoccurring theme my whole life. But something about that essay made my mom freak out a little bit. She scheduled me an appointment with a doctor and she had me tested for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. So, I went and took that, and I scored super high in depression, which was not a surprise. I had known that since I was like 12. Not a big deal. Anxiety, same thing. But I also scored diagnosably for ADHD, but the doctor at the time said that even though I scored for ADHD, that because I also had anxiety and depression that meant that I couldn’t have ADHD.

Huh…

Yeah, so she was like, “I’m not going to diagnose you with that even though I could and we’re just going to treat you for anxiety and depression.” So, I spent the next several years trying – like, you name an anti-anxiety medication, or an anti-depressant and I’ve probably tried it, and it probably made me feel even worse. I, for the life of me, cannot take those medications because they just make me feel terrible. And so, I finally stopped taking those about 2 years ago. Maybe a year ago. I don’t remember, time is a myth.

[Both laugh]

So yeah, so I always just thought, well, ya know, she said I couldn’t possibly have ADHD so it must just be because I’m… you know, insert any negative self-thought you could possibly have. And my parents, because I hadn’t been diagnosed, also thought it must be because of these things, so they were really mad at me because I wasn’t doing well in school.

Then I got to college and I failed. Hard. I think there was maybe one semester I did really well, then this past semester I started really well, and I was getting all my shit done. I was really motivated. And then there was a lot of personal stuff happening like with my family and some other things, so I had to take a step back from school. Also, just because toward the end of the semester my symptoms were getting really bad and I was like, “I can’t even bring myself to go to class. I can’t focus on my assignments.” And just nothing really seemed to be working so I just thought – I’m already taking out student loans, and I’m already not proving to myself that I can handle that, so it’s time to take a break.

I really evaluated what the problems were. Like, what is keeping me from doing the things I need to, and from doing the things I really want to do? I wrote them all down and I didn’t even put together at the time that they were all ADHD symptoms. And then just through talking to family and to friends I came to realize that this is what this probably was, and I should get tested again. Because I just didn’t feel good knowing that I wasn’t in school and I wasn’t progressing toward the future that I want and what I’m capable of.

I kind of had this moment of, “What the fuck is wrong with me? I’ve been this way my whole life, what the fuck is wrong with me?” And then I find out and it makes so much sense. I had to deal with a lot of, like, grieving. Like, I don’t want to be dramatic-

No, not at all.

-It’s sort of like grieving because I was like, “Well, if I had been diagnosed when I was a freshman I could have been able to do better in my classes,” right? I would have been able to have a better GPA, I might have been able to graduate with honors, which you know I didn’t do. I probably could have done better on my ACT. Like, there are so many things that I could have…

So I had to deal with a lot of grieving of what a lot of people I’ve talked to call “The Lost Years.” But you actually helped me get out of that when you said, “What we do have is the future and we can do with that whatever we want.” You saying that is what made me be like, “Oh shit, yeah.”

Awww!

So, thank you, for sure.

Absolutely, dude. I’m so glad I could help.

Because up to that point nobody really understood, so their way of trying to help me was like, “Yeah, but everything happened the way it was supposed to,” or whatever. And that’s very kind, I appreciate they wanted to support me, but it’s not really helpful to hear that I was supposed to fail college and feel this shitty about myself for 20 years.

Yes!

So, having someone say not that, but what I did need to hear and what was actually really valid was really important, so thank you.

Oh, absolutely dude. I’m so, so glad. I definitely took a long time to get there because I definitely had a long and really rocky grieving process about really similar stuff. I was diagnosed technically in 5th grade. They said I was “borderline ADHD.” Like, I was diagnosable but not severe. I think that I was just so good at using anxiety to whip me into focus long enough to get me through the test, but that’s neither here nor there. So, my parents didn’t want to put me on any drugs, you know. Alter their kid’s brain when I was just “borderline,” but I continued to just fail and fail and struggle so much. So, when I finally was medicated, I was like, “Oh shit, I finally have control over myself for the first time.” You realize all of the potential you always had, and that… it takes a while. It’s grieving a death. It’s grieving a death for who you could have been.

Yeah, yeah especially because, like, if my parents had been more educated, right? If the medical field had been more educated. Because for a long time people thought that ADHD was just something that kids got and they eventually outgrew it. And a lot of people thought, and still think to this day, that it’s not even a real thing. Right? So, we have this severe lack of education about what this really is.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s a learning disability. I’ve heard people call it a flat-out disorder. Whatever you want to call it or whatever it is, there isn’t a lot of education or resources for families or friends, so I know my parents didn’t know what it was until it was way too late.

I can’t help but think about all the people who are older than I am who are feeling the same things I am, thinking the same things I did, but don’t know what it is because there aren’t resources. It needs to be addressed and talked about more.

I’ve heard someone describe ADHD like – have you heard how normal people’s brains have like a door that opens and closes regularly? But people with ADHD don’t have that door. So, it’s like most people can have the door open and have a thought go in and then close the door, and then open the door again later for more thoughts to go in – I don’t know how to explain this well…

No, I feel ya.

But people with ADHD just don’t have that door. So instead of being able to shut out thoughts once you already have one, it’s just constantly in and out of that nonexistent door. I thought that was interesting and related to that a lot.

Yeah, I think that’s really fascinating for sure. Especially because it’s like – I feel like not having the door relates to so many different ways that ADHD feels. Because if you have no door, all sorts of bugs and creatures can go in but also go out with no control, and things from inside just spill out and you have these big emotional reactions because you can’t compartmentalize.

Oh yeah.

Yeah… that’s really interesting. I swear, I think the most interesting part of doing these interviews so far has been hearing everyone’s different metaphor for ADHD. It’s a trip.

Yeah, when I first got my diagnosis I think I texted someone or tweeted that I finally had the answer to a question that I’ve been asking my entire life.

Oh my god, yes…

That’s how I put it thus far.

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There are so many things I want to say about this first half of my and Sunny’s interview. Every minute I spend reflecting on it, I discover some new feeling it gives me.

I could talk about how Sunny has this way of speaking that effortlessly flows between comedic and heart-breaking. I could talk about how easy it made my job that I could respond with a single “huh” or “yes” and she would intuit everything that I wanted to know more about. I could talk about how hearing that I said what she needed to hear during a difficult time, even days later, makes me deeply emotional. Or how her teachers asking, “Why are you like this?” all through her childhood, making her feel like she was inherently broken as a person, felt so intimately familiar and painful.

But all of that, and so much more I could say, can be summarized this way.

No one understands us with ADHD like we understand each other. I believe that we cannot heal from the trauma of growing up different, and being treated as different, without finding each other. Building a community. Sharing our stories with others who can say, “I see you. I know you. I love you, for exactly who you are.”

Allow that scared, sad, lonely, hopeless little person you hide deep inside of you to be embraced by someone else’s.

And until next time,

Be well.

#SayThatAgain #ADHD #ADD #ExecutiveDysfuntion #Grief #MentalHealth #ADHDInterviews #Education #ADHDawareness