Last week the dirty dishes brought out her dormant OCD, but this time your friend is battling another, more damning self-diagnosis: ADD.
“I just can’t focus on anything,” she says, recalling how just that morning, she grabbed a fork for her cereal instead of a spoon. Currently, she is “stress baking”, portioning out an exact (but not obsessively exact) amount of water into her brownie mix.
As a person living with ADD, she has started watching Game of Thrones multiple times, and can’t seem to finish it no matter how hard she tries, always distracted by little things such as assignment deadlines and friends in need of emotional support. In the middle of the interview, her roommate Ruth emerges from the bathroom announcing that her parents are in the middle of a divorce, which is causing her anxiety to spike. Luckily, your friend knows just what to say:
“I can totally relate to anxiety. My ADD makes me do crazy things too, like get distracted by the fourteen different social media applications running simultaneously on my phone.”
Ruth nods through her tears. Your friend continues.
“I’m so ADD,” she says. “Sometimes, I’ll be talking about one thing and then another random thought pops into my head. Like, did I just leave the oven on?” She had just pulled perfectly cooked brownies out of the oven. “Like, I remembered that time. But what if I hadn’t remembered?” She has, in fact, never left the oven on by mistake for more than five minutes in her life.
She just sent you a Buzzfeed article called “25 Problems that Only People with ADHD understand.” Apparently, Number 9 “hit different”, though two different psychiatrists allegedly refused to diagnose her with ADD.
Despite the psychiatrists’ unwillingness to recognize her disability, your friend was seen applying for accommodations with SEAS. Her chief qualm is that she scrolls Pinterest during her econ lecture on Zoom, and demands that the school do something about it. After her request yielded no response, she took matters into her own hands, out of necessity.
She went to go snort ritalin on the beer pong table at the frat house next door and reports it “helped her focus,” though she worries that this kind of erratic behavior foretells a manic episode. After all, she is manic depressive before anything else.
At press time, your friend had finished her homework assignment well before the deadline.