ADHD Made Me Bad at Friendship

This is Late Bloomer, a column by Carla Ciccone on her experience of being diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, and how it made her reevaluate parts of her past.

“That girl’s trouble,” I heard Mrs. Thompson say through the wall. I felt like crying but bit down on my lip instead. I might’ve been eavesdropping while picking my chipped nail polish on the end of Pam’s plush bed, but her mom was speaking to her at full volume right outside the door.

I hadn’t considered myself trouble before. Troubled, maybe, but not trouble. It made me sound like a hurricane, hailstorm, or other natural disaster—something bad that ruins things. Pam opened the door, eyes to the floor.

“I think you should go,” she said.

I nodded. I knew. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” I said, but what I meant was, “I’m sorry I’m trouble.” My stomach churned at the thought of running into her mom on my way out, but she had disappeared. It had been my fault, of course. When it came to Pam and her friends, any transgressions were usually my fault.

We’d just come back from a walk through the lamplit streets of her affluent community. Feeling free and fearless, I dug out and lit one of the dry cigarettes I’d stolen from my dad’s pack weeks before. Despite slathering aggressively scented peach lotion on my hands, the lit-cigarette smell permeated enough to aggravate Mrs. Thompson’s possible rhinitis.

Even years before the smoking incident, I had the feeling she didn’t like me. Normally, I got along with my friend’s moms. I had good manners, helped clear their tables after meals, and always commented on how delicious the food was. But the first time Pam invited me over for dinner in sixth grade, I came prepared with polished politeness and was quickly caught off guard by an inquisition into my family’s history.

“Your last name, how do you say it?” Mrs. Thompson asked.

“Chi-cone-nay”, I said.

“That’s Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Are both of your parents Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Did your grandfathers fight in the war?”

“Um, yeah.”

“For Canada or Italy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Probably Italy,” Mrs. Thompson said, looking down at the unseasoned steamed carrots and peas on her plate.

“Yes, probably,” I offered. At twelve, the only thing I knew about my grandfathers’ Second World War experiences was that they both refused to talk about it to anyone but each other.

Although this disapproval seemed based on things out of my control, it still added to my shame. I'd already been struggling with a general feeling of preteen unease, as though everything I did or said or felt was wrong. Now, it seemed my family was wrong too.

Despite this feeling, I’d go to Pam’s house about once a month over the next two years. Her mom would avoid eye contact with me while asking her daughter questions about school, telling Pam to make sure “[her] friend” went home in time for her to get homework done. Even when I doubled down my efforts to win her over, complimenting her new couches or holiday decor, the only one who welcomed me besides Pam was the family dog, and he peed on me once.

As I aged from tween to teen, my feelings of alienation turned inwards. I feared Mrs. Thompson sensed a deep wound or fatal flaw in me and she didn’t want her daughter anywhere near it. She probably didn’t suspect that I had ADHD; her motives for not liking me seemed to stem largely from her own prejudices. The reason it hurt so badly was because the untreated disorder was seeping into my malleable sense of self, turning other people’s bad opinions of me into my own personal truths. ADHD made me confused, anxious and sure that I was the worst version of myself, at a time when most teenagers are already grappling with the ravaging effects of rampant hormones.

I began to distance myself from Pam and the rest of my friend group. Unlike them, I’d been having a hard time at school and felt a growing affinity for boys who slept on their desks or drew pictures in their notebooks instead of paying attention in class. They didn’t seem to care about grades, and they relieved their boredom when they had to. I admired their brazenness; Pam thought they were losers. So what did that make me? Mrs. Thompson said I was trouble and I understood that to mean I should stay in my lane, with the stoners, the skippers and the smokers.

ADHD made me confused, anxious and sure that I was the worst version of myself.

At my school, these were considered the cool kids. Despite being extremely uncool and largely terrified of them, I now felt they were my only option. Their bold embrace of loitering and various adult vices made me uneasy, but it was also exciting. I was sure that they considered me a huge dweeb, so I’d have to become a more palatable version of myself if I wanted to earn their friendship.

Cue the world's saddest makeover montage. Heather and Monica, two acquaintances a little closer to the finish line of turning cool, met me to dye our hair together in Heather’s cold basement bathroom. Heather was going blonde, but was blonde already. Monica was brunette going for a dark red hue. I clutched my box of L’Oreal Préférence like it was the key to my future. I wanted to erase all traces of Italianness from my person, and that meant one thing: becoming a blonde. Like three children about to conduct a grand science experiment, we prepared our home hair dye kits and applied them carefully. After waiting the required amount of time, knees dancing as my scalp itched and burned, I washed out the mixture and looked in the mirror. I was expecting to see Courtney Love. Instead, I was met with the sight of myself with a bright orange stripe at my roots and unchanged dark ends.

I went home in shambles and wept to my mom that I looked like a skunk. After two more boxes of dye, I was a bottle blonde. I tweezed my thick, black eyebrows into what resembled two single blades of grass—also bleached blonde. I wanted to be someone else, or at the very least look like someone else. I was fourteen.

I felt exposed by Pam’s mom—my mask ripped off—like she knew my darkest secret and might tell everyone, and I desperately wanted to never feel that way again. If I looked different maybe I could feel different, act different, be different.

*

The loss of sturdy friendships was a cataclysmic event that I attributed to my own defects. I didn’t know then what I know now: that I was getting overwhelmed by the symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD. I was always lost in a daydream, a habit that made it impossible to concentrate on anything I wasn’t captivated by. I frequently became deeply upset over any and all minor hurts of the day, taking to my room to cry and listen to Nirvana after dinner. Then, I’d try to do homework but inevitably succumb to writing bad poetry in my diary instead. I always seemed to be disappointing someone for doing things like forgetting my Biology textbooks at home, or leaving my mom’s winter gloves behind on a city bus. Even when I wasn’t losing things, I struggled to keep my bedroom clean and never remembered to make my bed in the morning. I’d developed certain tactics to mask the condition I didn’t know I had—like passing my quietness off as shyness to cover for the fact that I wasn’t listening, or got confused, or didn’t understand, or had no idea how to play along. They were like janky poles holding up my wavering executive function.

I was drawn to the thrilling little acts of teenage rebellion that brought focus to my mind—changing my hair color, listening to punk music, drawing on my bedroom walls with pastel crayons, smoking behind convenience stores wearing my dad’s old jeans, putting mascara on and loitering outside liquor stores to ask adult men for a boot, drinking in darkened playgrounds that I had played in by day only a couple years before. I didn’t know how else to get that electrifying feeling of freedom except by turning into something of a deviant.

Dedicating myself to the task of befriending the cool girls was like stepping onto a rollercoaster I couldn’t get off of. They cycled through an ever-rotating roster of rivals: boyfriend stealers, nerds, bitches, losers, sluts and flirts. I worried about what they might say about me when I wasn’t there, so I tried to be more like them, which didn’t come naturally. Having undiagnosed ADHD didn’t make me seek out bad friends, but it did contribute to the warped ways I saw myself, and in turn my distorted sense of how friendships should feel. Deep down, I was heartsick that the main friendships in my life were now flimsy as rolling papers. But I tried to accept it by focusing on the positives, like being peripherally cool for the first time in my life.

Adolescent torment is terrible for teens no matter what, but it can be excruciating for those with ADHD. They’re also more likely to be victims of peer victimization than their neurotypical peers. One of the symptoms of ADHD present in many girls and women is rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD.) Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria. It comes from the Greek word dýsphoros, meaning “hard to bear.” For people who have it, rejection, even minor, innocuous or perceived rejection, is cripplingly painful. Not to say that neurotypical people like being rejected—no one does—but those with RSD are unable to handle rejection at all.

*

The top cool girl took me under her wing—not a mentorship so much as an internship. I was her sidekick when she needed me, her tagalong pal who’d go wherever she wanted and stay out of the way when she signalled. I spent a lot of time with her older boyfriend's friends, who appeared to relish sizing me up to tear me down. Their leader, in particular, seemed to see right through me, right down to my scared, faulty essence.

Adolescent torment is terrible for teens no matter what, but it can be excruciating for those with ADHD.

One Saturday afternoon in early autumn, the year we started tenth grade, I accompanied her to visit her older boyfriend’s friend Scott, who’d gone to my elementary school. There were about four boys in the backyard, all in eleventh grade. I had a crush on the quiet one but I don’t think he knew I existed. The leader, a dimpled troll with sweaty palms, greeted me with “Hey, wop!” I said hi, started smoking, and tried to blend into a hedge, but this kid was too restless to ignore me.

“Who are you, the Queen?” he asked me, imitating my smoking with a pinky finger to the sky. My “friend” laughed so I laughed along too. “Shut up,” he told me, so I shut up.

“I’m so fucking bored,” he hollered, like a king demanding to be entertained by his court.

Ever faithful, Scott spotted a large, full bucket of what looked like water sitting by the side of the house and started chasing me with it. His friends howled as I ran from him, and for a moment, I let myself enjoy what this might be, in another life, if I was another person—a boy chasing a girl he had a crush on.

That fantasy made the humiliation easier to bear. He had me trapped against the fence, with nowhere to go, and my smile faded as he tossed the contents of the bucket at me like he was throwing sewage down a manhole. When my skin started burning, I realized that whatever he’d thrown wasn’t water. When I looked down and saw the cream-colored outfit my aunt had just bought me, transformed by large white splotches, I knew it was bleach. I’d previously had positive associations with bleach. It took stains away. I grew up watching my grandmothers and mom scrub their sinks and toilets sparkling clean with it. I used it to transform my dark hair into a wheat-colored mane, and it turned my unwanted, dark body hair into glittering blonde fuzz. Bleach gave me the power to erase what I didn’t want to see, to appear light-haired and carefree. In this careless boy’s hands, it had become a weapon.

“You asshole,” I said reflexively, as he laughed and his friends laughed and the top girl laughed.

The cold walk home in my wet, bleach-stained outfit felt like a death march. I’d have to explain to my mom what had happened to my brand new clothes. I was furious at Scott, but behind that anger, I also felt like I kind of deserved this. Like ruined clothes and a ruined spirit were the price of admission. I was fifteen.

*

A year earlier, the walk home from Pam’s house was as confusing as the time I’d spent with her family. It was 8 p.m. on a brisk September night, and the sun had set half an hour earlier. I didn’t want to call my mom to come get me for fear Pam’s mom would tell her I was trouble.

Instead of keeping to the main roads, I took a shortcut through a park. This was something I did sometimes with Pam, but alone in the dark, my sense of direction was off. I found myself jumping at squirrels scurrying by and leaves rustling until I was right back where I’d started thirty minutes before. I took to the sidewalk, and started on the long way home under the bright street lamps, where buses whizzed by and adults walked their dogs. I cried so hard the streets started to look like a suburban Monet painting through my glassy eyes. I felt like a failure. Like my chance at a safe, steady life like Pam’s was over.

It’s easy to wish I had known then what I know now, but the world—especially my corner of it at the time—didn’t have the tools or resources to help a teenage girl struggling with undiagnosed ADHD. It took decades for me to get a diagnosis and access the help I’ve always needed. Looking back at these parts of my history used to fill me with shame. But now that I know what I was up against, I feel only compassion for the sensitive kid I was, who desperately wanted to be liked, to be loved, and to be normal.

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