Breaking Free of the Box: Finally Knowing You’re Neurodivergent

Back in high school, on paper, I was dazzling. Perfect, accomplished, put together. Because I had to be. I was able to fool everyone, at the cost of devoting every drop of energy to ensuring the performance would go on.

Cut to my personal writings — the backstage tell-all, in which my self-resentment, frustration, and disappointment are captured brutally, honestly, and angrily on tear-stained graph paper in my AP Calc BC binder. “I’m not good enough,” and “feel nothing but bad at everything.” They read messily, and I was convinced I deserved to feel that way.

I was formally diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety years later, at 19. Though I’d known about my anxiety for years, it was actually during my first year at Harvard that I started to put the pieces of the ADHD puzzle together. It clicked when reading the diagnostic criteria for ADHD felt like the results of a personality quiz of traits I once desperately tried to unlearn or hide.

Still, the ADHD diagnosis was hard to accept at first, both for me and for Jailene Ramos ‘24, who was diagnosed with ADHD and clinical depression during summer 2021. As Ramos describes, “I was a straight-A student, graduated valedictorian.” She tells me, “I’ve always had to be on top of it,”a sentiment that we bond over. “So how is it possible that I have ADHD?” Ramos recalls thinking to herself.

Steph Brecq ‘24, a fellow neurodivergent student with ADHD, depression, anxiety, and PTSD, captures this duality best: “you may function really well in some places, but you’re really struggling in others and that gets unnoticed.”

Therein lies the power of knowing or recognizing that you’re neurodivergent — the privilege to actually try thriving on your own terms, or at the least, validate your experiences by unlearning internalized ableism. This privilege of diagnosis, of discovery, or simply of openly being neurodivergent is denied to so many for so long due to countless interacting forces, be it social, financial, cultural. So, in turn, we learn to internalize our needs and rule out the very possibility of being neurodivergent.

Without the neurodiversity explanation, you and the people closest to you constantly push the questions of, “but if you can do all this, why can’t you manage something as simple as that?” And yet, when you find the courage to bring up your struggles, you’re too smart to be struggling. The only seemingly logical answer is that you’re the problem. “I’m just not trying hard enough, I’m making it up, It’s all in my head”, I’d think to myself, though it quite literally was.

Though you may not recognize the label of internalized ableism, it’s everywhere. It’s the thoughts I just described. It’s the deep-rooted beliefs that “not doing things means you're lazy,” or, “if you can't pay attention in class, you don't care” Alyx Britton ‘21, a recent Harvard graduate with ADHD, relays. Thus, “it was really powerful to be able to to put a finger on what was going on as neurodivergence,” they continue, because “I can at least be like, ‘Alyx, you're not objectively bad.’ I will still feel bad about myself. But I know it is not because of a worldly judgment on me. It was because of things I've learned,” and in knowing that, they can “work against that.”

At its core, working against internalized ableism is being yourself and asserting your needs. It’s sending the email that you need an extension, it’s letting go of the shame of talking too quickly and too loudly, my personal power combo. It’s stimming; it’s empathy for yourself. So, to “allow myself to be okay with struggling whenever I'm experiencing an episode” as Ramos relates, is radical.

This isn’t to say that earlier diagnosis or discovery of our neurodivergence may have definitively changed things for the better, considering how rampant stigma remains. As Brecq explains, “whether it be just having a lot of energy and talking or doing random things or stimming, there’s certain things that just have this connotation of ‘oh, that is somebody who is neurodivergent, and as such, that is somebody who is in some ways almost inhuman or less than or just not intelligent.’”

We are definitely not Harvard’s first or only neurodivergent students. Because experiences like ours aren’t discussed enough, most of the time, it’s lonely. “On the outside, they look put together. They have that same mask on that I had on my entire life. They're still stuck inside the box,” Ramos says. “Luckily, I've been able to sort of break free of the box,” she expresses. But, “Because we see everybody also trapped inside the box putting up this wall of, everything is fine. Everything's perfect,” we still ask ourselves, as Ramos emphasizes, “Oh my god, what is wrong with me?”

I write this from outside the box, having left behind the performance of perfection. After nineteen years, I finally know that there was never anything wrong with me. Unknowingly neurodivergent? Yes. Wrong? Never, though it takes a lot of courage to remember. From a former boxmate, I urge you to consider breaking the box of put-togetherness. Punch out of perfection. Here outside the walls, we’ll fight for the freedom to be everything we are, neurodivergent and more.

Anuksha S. Wickramasinghe is a Neuroscience concentrator and Crimson Editorial editor in Mather House. Her column “Adhdventures” appears on alternate Wednesdays.

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