It's me in this clown makeup and I don't like it.

College was really hard for me. A big bundle of distractions at a vulnerable age in my life. I about failed out twice out of STEM degrees. I finally found a Liberal Arts degree that I could get a BA in.

Then a few years later, I had married somewhat. I went back and completed by STEM degree, somehow.

Now I'm back at it again 20+ years later, working on my Masters in IT. It takes all of my ADHD coping skills. Making lists. Exercise. Counseling. Supporting friends and family.

It's possible, but it's hard.

I got diagnosed pretty early compared to most of my friends, and it still got attributed to laziness.

im in this photo and i don't like it

literally just suffered failing my classes last semester, everything fell apart, and im just still called lazy

Is lazy a synonym for adhd?

Not to 1-up everybody, but I strongly suspected & brought the suspicion to a psychiatrist at age 43. He felt unable to to confirm, deny or somehow check.

At 46, finally a referral to a clinic by my GP, who believed it. No appointments available though, not even in the distant future.

1.5 years later, I'm in the process of getting checked, and it looks like I'll get a "yes" or "no" (very probably "yes") within a few months.

Obviously a dropout, too, but I managed to get a fraction of my potential due to an unexplained (to this day), 5 year lasting obsession with IT in my 20s, which caused me to study frantically day & night. Came and went, but a lot of it is still relevant.

In the past 20 years, I managed to land fat jobs over and over again, but like relationships and everything else, the fuss around the work itself gets "too much" and I quit after 6 - 18 months.

That weird 5 year study-frenzy was a blessing overall, but it also got me to think I was just an assclown before and after, rather than having a medical condition.

I'm going to diagnose you as a loser. There seems to be no cure, so keep blaming your problems on your diagnosis that 20% of people get.

EDIT: Oh, whooops, I genuinely misread the subreddit as being the autism memes one, I'll still leave this one here, that rant felt too good to delete.

Yes, I feel this one so much. Only make it "in my thirties" - and I completely internalised my masking, leading to self-hatred and inability to properly overcome it. I got misdiagnosed with a whole slew of different disorders over the course of my life, too. Which made me try so fucking hard to do what is right and push myself again and again, only to break down into long phases of complete withdrawal, burnout and depression every damn time, even though I did "the right things" to overcome stuff like anxiety and depression. Now, to be fair, it's correct to be noted that throughout that life, I also developed a personality disorder from internalising all those things I heard, being lazy, having to remain restrained in my behaviour at every moment, questioning and repressing every intuitive emotion out of fear of it being "wrong".

I only very recently ended up being able to recontextualise all the prior shit in my life, am currently in a phase where I am reconnecting with my anger, which I had forbidden myself completely and repressed it deeply into my unconscious in my early teens, after having had daily aggressive meltdowns in my childhood, which led to both physical violence and deep shaming and essentialist shaming of me "being wrong" by my parents. And looking back at my life, considering I was in different kinds of psychological and psychiatric care almost my whole life, I simply don't understand how no one even considered autism at any point. Yeah, sure, it was not as well known as today in all its details, but the more I reflect, the more things I discover in my past that were just clear signs even back then.