There are so many weird quirks that come with ADHD. Mind you, I was only diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago. And while it explains so many oddities about me, some personality traits which I always attributed to being eccentric end up being pretty common for ADHDers.
That both annoys and fascinates me.
It’s annoying, because I hate that almost every aspect of why I am the way I am tends to have roots in the way my brain is wired. I mean yeah, I guess it makes sense that, “how your brain works” sorta defines you, but still, I feel like my skull meat should have come with an owner’s manual.
One strangeness I recently discovered is my propensity to prefer knowing how a movie or TV show ends before watching it. Yes, I’d rather know all the spoilers. No, it doesn’t make the watching less enjoyable. Quite the opposite in fact.
Many people can relate to at least part of the issue. If you won’t watch a movie because you know the dog dies, you sorta understand the sentiment. Even if the dog dying is central to the plot of the movie, for many folks, it’s not worth the emotional trauma. (Honestly, https://www.doesthedogdie.com is a godsend, I can’t recommend it enough)
Now imagine seemingly mundane aspects of a movie carried that same emotional trauma for you. Like if the inevitable conflict in the second act is from a spouse cheating. Or from a middle-schooler getting bullied. Or from a character experiencing heartbreak. Or from a misunderstanding causing an animated snowman to feel unwelcome. Imagine every second act of a movie was as mentally debilitating as John Wick’s puppy crawling across the floor to be near him. That’s usually what it’s like inside my head. So I want to know what happens in advance. Sometimes it means I don’t want to watch the thing at all. But often, knowing what happens somehow reduces the anxiety over the situation to the point where I can enjoy the journey.
If this doesn’t resonate with you, that’s OK. If it seems a bit immature to struggle with emotions over such trivial things, hey, I agree. But one of the wonderful, terrible things about the way ADHD brains work is they tend to have extreme emotions, and very little ability to manage them.
It really annoys me when my idiosyncrasies are just bullet points in the, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Your Brain to Function Normally” book of ADHD. But also, it’s sometimes nice to understand why you’re that weird half-melted snowflake who can only wear certain shirts because over-sensitivity to textiles is part of your neural norm. (I wish I were kidding, but that’s another post altogether…)