I just spent like two hours explaining adhd with my brother to my grandparents (on to side of my family that doesn’t have it everywhere) and holy shitttt am I exhausted. Like I have adhd, both my brothers have adhd and so do a few of my cousins some aunts and uncles probably my gramma and maybe as well my great uncle and probably more as that is all on only one side of my family where it’s just highly concentrated at this point. But anyways that is not the point, the point is that trying to have a conversation with two neurotypicals as two neurodivergents about adhd is so fricking frustrating. So like at times my nana would interrupt my brother or get off topic about something and my brother and I would just look at each other like ‘seriously SERIOUSLY!?!???’ because we can’t just go back to the original conversation after getting side tracked that is literally not possible for us. Or at times she would get really focus on interest and being motivated by that and we were struggling to explain how interest is a factor but now I huge part in like studying for exams for example. (please note my mum, who is the not adhd sibling of her generation, is also trying to help explain this) Or also she, still my nana, got really caught up on how it must be that we can't focus because we can't see how it will immediately affect our futures when studying, which noooo we can see we just can't do anything to make ourselves study or be interested. and my grandpa was better about not interupting he did get kinda confused about if my brother (who doesn’t have an official diagnosis, the other brother and I do) was self diagnosing and how can we be sure if he does have adhd. And at this point when both of his sibling do, at least one cousin, two aunts and uncles and probably more family has it and adhd being known to be hereditary, you kinda get to know the symptoms well and can look at someone and go ‘oh yeah you’ve got this and this and this and oh that too and this over here and oh yeah your life had kinda fallen apart a bit after high school yeah maybe you do have adhd’ so nope we maybe be ‘self diagnosing’ but when we’re also working for a diagnosis and know it that well its really not in the same category.
(and yes I know that they don’t know about this and are just trying to understand and look out for us but despite having grace to them in conversation that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. and im also only mentioning the more annoying/frustrating things here)