Mindblown… I was thinking that in 2021, I had a three-year undergraduate degree from 1998.  Now, just over four years later, I upgraded to a four-year honours undergraduate degree, I have a Master’s, and I am in the process of working to get a PhD.  Who am I?

If you had told me in 1998, with my “C’s get degrees” approach to university, that I would be where I am now, I would have thought you were crazy. I often think about this and try to understand how I got here. When I returned to school, I decided to medicate myself for my ADHD for the first time since childhood. I was unable to take medication for ADHD as a child due to other health issues that contraindicated its use. I had absentee seizures until puberty, so no ADHD meds for me.  It seems you cannot take a stimulant and a suppressant at the same time because bad things happen.  Almost as bad as the things that happen when you experience absentee seizures in class, which come with the occasional vomit or peeing your pants and being picked up from school by ambulance.  School was great, it’s not like kids are mean or anything.

I was the weird kid. I looked “normal”, but that’s where it ended.  This framed my entire elementary academic experience. By high school, I was just angry, and in university, I found some of my people. Being unmedicated at a time when there were no academic or other accommodations. I did stop having the seizures when I hit puberty; without explanation, they stopped as spontaneously as they had started. Regardless, the educational expectations at every level of my education were the same for everyone, irrespective of individual differences.  If we did not fit the standardized student expectations, they did not care. Do the work or redo the grade.

I remember in elementary school, we had to do speeches.  We were required to choose a topic and stand before the class to deliver a speech.  Public speaking, they told us, is a life skill.  All I knew was that I was mortified at the thought of standing in front of the class and speaking with only a few cue cards that I was not to look at unless absolutely necessary.   This was my own personal hell, already an outcast of sorts because I was the weird kid who looked “normal” and petrified I would have an episode. My inability to recall and remember due to ADHD just added to my anxiety.

 It was a do-it-or-fail approach to learning.  To life in general.  We developed grit because we had to push through adversity.  I sometimes wonder if being forced to push through and hating it is why we now do all we can to prevent kids from having to push through.  I have mixed feelings about this: I now see students in their late teens and early 20s struggling to push through everyday tasks, and I wonder if we have done them a disservice.    I ask myself this as I try to accommodate, to alleviate their struggles, thinking I am making things easier while also asking whether I am making them worse.

On a side note… How many times do you need to do something for it to become a habit? Day 4…