Taking it slow: Mental Health edition.

This won’t be a long blog post.

I was lucky enough to be born in an era where ADHD was diagnosed, but unlucky enough to be born in an era where the true depth of it’s symptoms and what it entails was not understood. Before it was seen as “he doesn’t pay attention and he’s hyper. But AHA! He can focus on the TV for hours! It’s fake or will power can defeat it!” and other such statements because hyper-focus and rejection sensitive dysphoria were never a commonly taught thing about the condition. As a result the condition wasn’t taken seriously and there were expectations of me that I truly could not handle.

For people with Autism, especially if they are not diagnosed, people expect them all to act like the rain man or that weird kid with a football helmet on his head screaming and slamming his head into the wall. When Autism isn’t particularly apparent, people don’t know they have issues, and again expect them to do things normally.

For me it’s the fact I can fail at highly mundane and simple tasks with fine motor skill but excel at large projects and skills that are difficult to learn, granted I could be creative.

But because I failed at mundane things, boring things, I tried hard to do things as fast or faster than neuro typical people. I did math courses I had no business doing in highschool because of pressure from my parents and from my own desire to keep up with my high achieving desi family. In university it was taking more coarses than I should have.

Through tutors and help I managed to pass highschool. In university I never got tutors but the skillsets I was working on I could do myself, but I was overwhelmed with work and I burned out and dropped out for years, going off and on in school.

The advice I would give myself and others would be to slow down. Do things at your own pace, no matter what your family, friends or even advisors say.

A boxing coach once taught me in striking to ‘move only as fast as you can move’ well this advice applies to our focus and our workload.

Occupations and employment often force us to do things we can’t handle. We can’t control that. But the things we can control, we should always take our time.

And when we take our time, we may get to the goals slower than ‘normal’ people, but we do it in a way unique to us, sometimes in a way most of the world could not achieve.


Take your time. It’s rewarding.