ADHD: A Short Story

That day, the sky was bleak and dull. Gray light filtered through the windows. The cafeteria wasn’t lit by electricity, and was barely lit by the outside. It was a cold Fall, and the Ohio weather wasn’t helping. As I sat there, curled up into a ball, I wasn’t really thinking about anything besides the moment. Later, I would think of everything that led up to it, and how it led to something greater.
It began with the moves leading to Shaker. Starting with my Dad’s, going to my Grandma’s, then ending (or so I believed) at Shaker square. We lived in a small apartment in a large apartment building amongst rows of large apartment buildings. Every day, I would walk down the many flights of stairs to the decorative courtyard separating my building from the building next to it. From there, there was a sidewalk where I got on the bus. On the bus, I tried my best to pick an unoccupied seat and make myself invisible.
I don’t think my classmates knew what to make of me, I don’t think they ever did. Being young, none of us had any idea what ADHD was, so we all, including myself at times, thought I was crazy. If not crazy, I was certainly different. While they were to young to know exactly why I was different, they were not too young to know that words could be painful. Their ability to come up

The slightest misstep would land me in the timeout desk. Needless to say, I grew quite accustomed to that desk. I wasn’t a bad kid more than I made a lot of mistakes. At this point my classmates were at the peak of their tormenting game. They still didn’t have a very good moral compass, and really outdid themselves at times. It was only in later grades that they realized that they had taken things too far at times, and they dialed back a bit. I never had to worry about physical wounds, but the mental ones were on a day-to-day