[redacted] Memoir, Plant under a Rock

I feel like I should not write about this but I am going to any way. Imagine a plant yet to sprout. Now imagine a rock on top of the plant and the plant being forced to adapt and try to grow around the rock. I always felt like there something keeping me from reaching my full potential. Something that wouldn't budge. I underwent some testing recently and now I understand what that unmoving thing was. It is my rock. I am its plant.

First and foremost none of this will make sense unless you know I have ADHD. I learned this in second grade, and because I had felt overburdened for years before, I had always assumed this was my rock. I knew I had a rock but I never paid attention to the particles within. I had had experiences like being bad at spelling and having a slow processing speed, finishing after other people. Once when I was in first grade, we were learning about nouns, adjectives and verbs. I got called up to the front of the class to write down a verb. I was just about to when the teacher quickly informed me of the definition of a verb. Verbs were the only things I understood and I felt that my chance to show my understanding was being stolen from me.

Sensing that my rock was a little more than ADHD, my parents scheduled some testing for me over this past summer. When the results arrived, my mom sat me down on the living room rug. I could feel the hairs poking my legs as she began to explain the results. After drawing a graph that looked like a hat and telling me where my strengths and weaknesses would line up if I was in a room with 100 people, I finally understood. I learned about my weaknesses and why I was experiencing this heaviness. The evaluation revealed that I had trouble with the three R's (reading, writing, and arithmetic). It also revealed that I have more "problems" than was thought, but because of my high intelligence they were hard to spot. It made sense; I had often been told that I was brilliant although I did not really feel like it. Apparently, if you take all the results of the tests, my IQ is in the 95 percentile; however, if you take out the timed portion, I am in the 99 percentile. When I found this out I almost fell over, I was so surprised.

This report helped me understand the particles in my rock: ADHD, processing speed, fluency in math, reading and writing, having trouble with "simple" tasks, organization, not "chunking" by logical connections, spelling, and others' failure to understand. Now I have a better understanding of what my rock is made up of but I also have an idea now of how high my plant can grow. I no longer have to grow around my rock because now I can grow through it.