I wrote this to make a point.

People with my neural architecture are less than 1/20th of the population. This creates problems, far beyond any that might be intrinsic to my status — I live in a world of people that will never quite understand me.

What would things be like if the script was flipped, and — instead — only 1/20th of people weren’t like me? These outliers wouldn’t be told that they had ‘anti-ADHD’, of course. I’d imagine that it would be called ASLD — Attention Surplus Lethargy Disorder.

Would they be pathologized, instead? Would they feel lost and confused in a world not built for them? Would they feel isolated, in a world full of people that were simply different from them?

I feel sorry for those people, in that world.

Of course, though, no such world exists. The real point of this is as an exercise in imagining how I can reframe my own internal narrative. What if I don’t declare myself to have ADHD and be abnormal — what if I declare everyone else to have anti-ADHD and say that I’m normal? How does that shift of perspective, essentially arbitrary, change how I think about myself? How does it change how I think about other people?

Despite the obvious imaginativeness, I feel afraid to put this in front of my audience. Why does it feel so transgressive to imagine that such a world — or even such a place — could exist?