Last Call at the Local

How can you think you’re too much, when I can’t get enough of you?

You deserve every good thing, even when you’re having dark thoughts. You deserve to be happy, even when you aren’t well. And love — you deserve that too.

I'm over it. All the little costs of having ADHD that add up in the long run. Lost customers. Overdue bills. Replacement phone chargers. Time spent looking for things. The way it makes me feel, like a child. As if everyone else is a real adult and I'm just pretending. The frustration that I can't do the simple, everyday things that most people can. Like laundry, and making phone calls, and remembering to take out something from the freezer for dinner. It's the missed deadlines for opportunities I could've had. The broken relationships. How people think I'm lazy and selfish. How they think I don't care. How I think I'm lazy and selfish, even though I know I care.

What do we do with doubt[...] Acknowledge it. Accept it. Keep going anyway.

A mess in every way. Someone must have made her see herself that way, and whoever it is, I hate them,

If I like someone, it doesn’t matter if I’ve known them for five minutes or five years. They’re a friend until proven otherwise.

I can be extra sensitive to rejection, even when it isn't actually rejection.

Aithníonn ciaróg, ciaróg eile," he says. "It's an Irish proverb. Roughly translated, it means, One beetle recognizes another.

But my problem isn't that I don't think. It's that my brain only has two modes: think everything all at once and make sense of none of it, or think about one thing obsessively at the expense of whatever actually needs my attention. The point being, I am always thinking. Just never about the right things.

Sometimes one beetle recognizes another, and it doesn’t matter if it’s been five minutes or five years.

Most people are desensitized to trauma. Maybe the world would be a better place if they felt a bit more.

It can be a challenge for me to give anyone my full and undivided attention. It's not personal. My brain is just a shitty computer. [...] Most of the time, I feel as if I'm running a different operating system than everyone else.

But after twenty-eight years of living with ADHD, I'm so used to making these little mistakes, so used to frustrating the people in my life with them unintentionally, that even the tiny ones feel huge because that're a reminder that I fall so short of what is expected.

I love that I can unravel this man who is always so busy trying to keep himself in control. I love that he can’t help but give himself over to the way I make him feel.

When I look up at him, his arms loosely wrapped around my waist, it feels like tilting my face up to the sun, like standing in the middle of a new city that somehow feels like home.

I have been touched in these places but not in this way. I have been a means to an end, but I have never been everything.

You feel a lot. Why is that a bad thing?" "I don't know," I say. "I just know that it is. I just know I'm too much.

You smell nice and it makes my brain happy.

The thoughts keep coming, but I tell myself they're just thoughts. They're not true. They don't mean anything.

Life is better when you don't take it too seriously.

And you seem like a woman who says whatever she's thinking." "Most of the time." Whether I want to or not.

I'm not sure I'm making any sense or really answering his question, but my mouth keeps moving anyways.

Usually when I apologize for going on like that, people laugh it off or say it’s okay. No one has ever suggested that I wasn’t oversharing.