My Personal Hell: Navigating Life, Family, and Late-Diagnosed Neurodivergence

I remember reading "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate" (Dante's inferno) and the first thing it came to mind was home. Me entering my front door's house. Don't get me wrong, my house is not hell but sometimes it feels like.

A story should not start from the end but a couple days ago in the middle of an argument I was asked "What makes you special?" I ignored the sarcasm and thought: ADHD makes me special. Autism makes me special.

I'm 48 and I was diagnosed last year with ADHD and autism. All is still new to me even though I lived with it all my life. I'm a difficult person to deal with but it becomes more difficult when my own family doesn't want to understand the why.

I can feel their frustration when I don't hear what they say. The thing is I hear it but it takes a bit of time for me to decode the words from all the other sounds I'm hearing at the same time, time they don't give me as they expect an immediate response. Because of it they made me go for a hearing test, which unsurprisingly showed perfect hearing. So instead of believing me when I try to explain, they prefer to believe that the test is wrong.

I'm a chronic procrastinator which makes me look lazy at their eyes and I also forget things. I forget the things I said I wouldn't forget and I forget the things they didn't want me to forget and for them it's like I don't care.

And there are the things they don't know about, like the time I spend daydreaming about things that make me feel happy when I should be thinking about life.

And there's the voices too. Well, not literally the voices but my mind repeating over and over a song I listened to, a poem I wrote, a message I sent... It takes a lot of me to get out of that loop.

I guess it's hard for them to get over all the annoying things I do and until they realize it's not my fault, our lives are going to be hell and the guilt I feel will be mine to bear.