Skip to main content

Why ADHD is a Superpower

From a very young age, my parents noticed that something was a bit different from me. I had trouble sitting still and paying attention. After they talked to my pediatrician, she diagnosed me with ADHD. When I was old enough to understand what ADHD was and how it affected me, it bothered me, as it would for any child. But I figured it was the hand I was dealt, so I might as well just deal with it. That said, I have taken medication for it pretty much since I was diagnosed; however, medication doesn’t alleviate all of the symptoms, and in my case, helps primarily with the hyperactive aspect of it by mellowing out my personality quite a bit. That said, pretty much everyone I know understands I am far from being a mellow person, even while on the medication.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to see ADHD as a superpower of sorts. Sure, it has its negatives, like not being able to hold trains of thought for very long and struggling to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes. However, I view most of the symptoms as positives. In my field of computer programming, a great deal of creativity is required. At first glance, programming looks very logical, and it is up to a point; however, once you learn how to use the languages, you’re provided with the opportunity for near-endless creativity. As an analogy, you can’t write creatively in English until you know English first. But after you know the language, you’re unleashed to write motivational things, sad things, happy things, and everything between. Programming isn’t all that different.

One thing I’ve noticed programmers without ADHD struggle with is devising ideas for projects and how to flesh out those ideas into a functional program. This is in no way saying that programmers without ADHD are incapable of these things—they certainly aren’t. However, after talking with many programmers with and without the diagnosis about this, I’m confident in saying that these skills come much easier to those with ADHD.

Fortunately, though, ADHD has provided me, and many others, with other benefits. Another that comes to mind is one I also listed as a disadvantage earlier, which is getting distracted easily. In a learning environment, this can be a big setback. However, in personal conversation, I’ve noticed that it helps a lot with coming up with conversation ideas and helps to keep conversations flowing. Also, when sitting around, swimming around in your thoughts, this can help a lot with staying positive. In my case, I’ve found that when I start thinking about something sad or depressing, I very quickly get distracted from the idea, and shift to a more positive thought. Of course, the same thing happens when thinking about positive thoughts, however, these thoughts often are just replaced by happy thoughts.

In conclusion, I’d encourage anybody struggling with an ADHD diagnosis to look at the benefits that it gifts instead of the negatives. Most of these positive aspects relate to general creativity. Once you are aware of and learn to adjust for the negative aspects of the “disability”, you can truly embrace the positive aspects of the condition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Professional Writing?

How did I end up here? As I've gotten closer to graduating from college, I've had people ask me how I ended up on the path that I'm on and why I made the decisions that I did. It still makes me laugh a bit when someone asks me those questions because truthfully, I've never felt like I knew what I was doing. The short answer is that I continually made decisions that I thought would make me happier in the long run. When I applied to Purdue, I already knew I didn't want to go there. No offense, Purdue, but I grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'd promised to my parents for eight years that I would be moving away for college. To my utter dismay, after all of the college applications had been submitted and returned, I found myself needing to make a decision between going to an out of state college (my dream) and taking out student loans, or staying here and graduating debt-free. I'm here, so obviously I chose the latter. Applying to the Professional Writing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Writing Professionally Outside of Professional Writing

In an earlier entry, I noted that one of my vivid memories from my time in professional writing comes from the ironic realization that I was doing very little writing throughout one of my courses. Instead, this computer-aided publishing class mainly focused on the design of text and other content that already existed, with the actual writing in the class dealing with the decisions that went into the creation or modification of any presented design. In a sense, this course therefore focused more on the overall user experience of a document—how the user would view all the words and paragraphs and content as a whole—rather than how one would create the technical written elements that were necessary to form the document in the first place. Perhaps to balance this out, then, I want to discuss a recent writing experience that I find to be almost thematically opposite. One of the classes I took this semester was Purdue’s software engineering class, described on the university’s catalog as an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtual Learning Presents New Distractions for Elementary Students

  College students aren't the only ones using Zoom. For those of us in the academic world without children, it easy to forget that elementary students were also asked to adjust to this new e-learning way of life. Unfortunately, though, many of their questions remained unanswered when their world began changing so rapidly. This post will explore the thoughts and feelings of one current 4th grader. For privacy reasons, her name has been changed.  A 4th grader's personal anecdote.  In March 2020, two days before the elementary school shifted entirely to virtual learning, Sarah's father took her out of school and told her she would not be returning until the COVID-19 pandemic was under control. Sarah, who was still in 3rd grade at the time, did not understand what was going on, but she understood that, as her father said, she probably would not be returning to school for a while. The following Monday, Sarah received all of her textbooks and a Chromebook in the mail. Her teach...
Post a Comment
Read more