The Myth I Was Born Into

Unravelling the Stories We Inherit: On ADHD, Poverty, and Breaking Free from Capitalist Myths

You don’t really get to be gifted and talented if you grow up poor.

Instead, if, like me as a kid, and then a teen, you have a heavy dose of undiagnosed ADHD, an inquisitive mind, a habit of asking questions, talking too much, questioning the rules, rather than being seen as even vaguely intelligent, or even a free-thinker, who might be in need of some support, encouragement, or intellectual nourishment: you are labelled precocious, a delinquent, a brat who doesn’t know their place. Or at least, that was my experience of school.

By the age of 15, I was expelled for what was seen as a long line of atrocious, uncontrollable bad behaviour, including a petulant, or just downright rude, disposition, and an inability to follow the rules. Nobody — not the teachers, the therapists, the social workers, the police — knew what to do with me. I might have had a clue, but I was never really asked. Nobody even thought to look for a neurological cause either: it had to be that I came from a rough estate, that my parents didn’t care for me enough, that I had fallen in with the wrong crowd. As such, my behaviour was labelled as something to be controlled and managed from the get go: shut up, stop talking, listen, sit down, pay attention, do as you are told!

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The reality was I was acting out, bored, reacting to a pervasive feeling of alienation and isolation — never feeling heard or understood — or fighting back against the kids who routinely bullied me for being weird, as well as having to manage yet-to-be-identified aspects of my ADHD such as internal restlessness, sleep issues, issues with focus, chronic understimulation (my school offered a very basic level of education — if you could even call it that — and lessons were physically painful to me), external hyperactivity, mind-wandering, social issues, and anxious thoughts and feelings.

I was quite good at fighting, it turned out. I just needed to wait for ADHD inattentiveness to morph into ADHD impulsive rage, via the magic of adolescent hormonal shifts. I was promptly labelled a trouble-maker with serious anger issues, which were entirely unacceptable for a girl. By 16, I was on the streets, pregnant, and without any qualifications. Up shit’s creek without a paddle, or so they say. Written off. Washed up.

In sociological terms, I’d acquired an impressive number of what they called markers of social exclusion by the age of 18:

• history of truancy and running away from home (tick)

• teen drinking and drug use (tick)

• expelled from school (tick)

• been through child mental health services (tick)

• attended “special school” (as they used to be so heinously called) (tick)

• been in local authority care (tick)

• been homeless (tick)

• teenage pregnancy (tick)

• criminal record for petty crime (tick)

• problems with authority (tick)

• history of abusive relationships (tick)

• issues with challenging behaviour (tick)

If you believe the statistics, I was destined for a short life, either on the game, on drugs, in prison, or dead before my time by overdose, suicide, or as a result of my so-called “risky behaviour” — like so many other lost souls in the cast of misfits and outsiders who became my family on the streets.

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And yet, that’s not what happened. Because despite the story I was told, the story that said I was a write-off, a little bit of that plucky little kid who refused to play by their rules remained. She wasn’t going to be written off by anyone.

That’s not to say their story didn’t partially become my story — the effects of which manifested in different, more internal ways, which I will explore elsewhere in time.

But one thing that remains startlingly obvious to me now, at the age of 50, is that kid knew her worth. That kid fought for what she wanted. That kid wasn’t going to be browbeaten by anyone, least of all the authorities who were so determined to write her off as a lost cause.

Maybe it’s something of my late Nan’s spirit that lives within me, the part which screamed: if anyone kicks you, kick them back, and, most importantly: nobody gets to judge us for being poor. But, for whatever reason, and no doubt it was that wild woman gene I directly inherited from her, that kid just wasn’t going to lie down and be told what to do.

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It got harder to fight as I got older.

I realised you couldn’t bang your head against the brick wall; they would just find a way to shut you up — take away your freedom, penalise you financially, take away your kids — the latter point became one of the most compelling ways to keep me with my head down, subservient to their demands for regulated “normal” behaviour and no back chat, via the absolute all-encompassing fear my children would be taken away if I did or said the wrong thing to the social workers who imposed themselves in my life, purely by virtue of the fact I had been in care and so (in their view) was incompetent and damaged enough that I needed keeping an eye on.

Having experienced care, I was determined the potential cycle stopped with me. So I lived on permanent edge, in a state of constant hyper vigilance, as I performed “mum” to the best of my abilities, and took their criticisms, their surveillance on the chin.

I also adapted to become ridiculously self-reliant, never asking for help, or admitting to any of my struggles, lest they be viewed as potential incompetency. Side note: the funniest thing is, my kids, although we never really had very much, and their fathers were all universally abusive pieces of shit, who never (thankfully) stayed long in their lives, for my part don’t seem to care that the house was always a mess when they were growing up (something I obsessed over when they were younger, feeling completely inadequate, because I struggled so hard with housework on top of working and caring for them): they remember the laughter, the fact I was always on their side, and listened to them, fought for them, and spent time with them. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self just one thing, it would be that. Don’t worry, you are doing a good job, just in your own way.

But… I digress…

Under all of this pressure to perform, I settled on another track, one which came from my parents, who, whilst working class and poor, instilled in me a rather middle class understanding of education.

If I was going to get out: I needed to use my brain. I needed to get educated. I needed to work hard.

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This is how, by the age of 25, I had changed from the radical feminist punk rocker who loathed the idea of selling myself out to capitalism and patriarchy, to the determined student who was going to change the world by getting a degree in social work.

Spoiler: ironically, it never happened, despite me gaining first-class honours, because of my record from when I was in care. I would have needed to have thrown myself at the mercy of the social care council, prove I was now an upstanding citizen who no longer shoplifted or broke into parked cars (stupid things I did when I had no other choice, that had no bearing on my adult life and I would have happily forgotten about if I didn’t have to carry that record around for the rest of my life) — and that kid — who would quite often step out of my shadow — grovelled to nobody.

I went back to cleaning after graduating, finally moving my way into supervising and then area management, thinking if I couldn’t go the professional academically trained route: maybe I could get out by sheer hard graft.

Another spoiler: it never happened, I got laid off, and eventually crashed. Then I became a writer, condemning myself to more poverty, but at least a little bit more soulfully aligned.

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The Myth I Believed

When I think about the story I was living in, the myth, two separate strands emerge; both of which were damaging in their own way. Both of which, while they diverged on key points, centred money and success as a doorway.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not so naive that I think you can abandon striving for financial security in a capitalist system; it's the oil that lets you move within it.

But for me, having experienced periods of absolute poverty, it’s not about materialism, per se — although material wealth brings comforts I haven’t always, even recently, been able to enjoy in absolute peace: a safe roof over your head, heating, water, enough food to eat. In a country (the UK) that possesses wealth, these factors are considered as an absolute human right; not that they are always given — even less so now, the government is thinking about cutting disability benefits.

But money, disposable income (something that has proven fairly elusive to me in my adult lifetime so far), brings something far greater: freedom. Freedom to do as you please. And it was that prospect of freedom which ultimately propelled me to try and work my way out — oblivious to my disability, and perpetually confused why things didn’t work the way they were supposed to for me.

The overriding myth then, was that prosperity granted the right to full personhood, as if it was something that needed to be earned by cold hard capital.

So engrained was this in me, I never took the time, or allowed myself to have anything, enjoy anything, until I had got there.

Note: by there I don’t mean I ever aspired to be rich. I didn’t aspire to have a country manor, or a city penthouse, or a bestselling novel, or international acclaim: I wanted just enough, really, a modest amount to live in an area that wasn’t deprived and full of crime, things that weren’t broken or breaking down, and, I think most importantly: freedom to be able to stop working so hard, to take time off once in a while.

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Two Damaging Strands

This, in late-stage capitalism, is sold to us as the ultimate aspiration of self. To win at capitalism is to be the best, the hero in your own adventure — if you don’t have family money, good luck with that, but if you do become self-made, you are a literal superhero (and Hollywood loves to tell these types of stories).

But the fact is, having ADHD made me not very good at navigating the mechanisms of capitalism, not with such a handicap in the first place, where I didn’t even have the means for basic life. And despite this being glaringly obvious to me now, it was something I didn’t realise for most of my life, because I bought into that myth where any failing was my own: a failure to work hard enough because I must be stupid or lazy.

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What were these two strands though?

Strand One came from my experience with education, social workers and psychiatrists — none of whom even suspected ADHD, but it was the late eighties, so I will cut them a little bit of slack (it was mainly thought of as a “male childhood” disorder then and had barely featured in the DSM even as ADHD as we know it today) — and that myth was the myth of a child so broken and willing to cut off my own nose to spite my face, I didn’t deserve access to the game in the first place.

It was this myth — parts of which still remain in me today, although I am forever fighting off listening to them — that told me the following:

• You are lazy

• You deserve everything you get (which is nothing)

• You have wasted your potential

• You are stupid

• You are out of control

• You need to shut up and listen

• You are doing this to yourself

• You are a waste of space

• You can’t even be bothered to try

• Who do you think you are? (You are nobody)

• How dare you (speak up or self-advocate; or at least that’s how I internalised it)

• You have a problem with authority and that needs to be managed and controlled until you learn the error of your ways

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Strand Two came from my parents, mainly my mother. That myth told me I was more than capable but I just didn’t want it hard enough, I was too busy going down the road to self-sabotage:

• You are clever but you are determined to fuck up your life

• You are stupid (yes, I know, right? According to my mother you can be both stupid and clever at the same time: the duality of stupid and clever then became a key theme for me for decades!)

• You don’t apply yourself

• You never finish anything you start

• You have always been like this and will never learn

• You are stubborn

• You are argumentative

• You will never get anywhere in life with that attitude

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Both of these strands positioned me as a write-off in the world of capitalism, unfit for nothing more than a life on welfare, or unskilled jobs. Despite the fact I rallied against this, tried and tried again to prove my worth, it eventually dawned on me where I was really going wrong, getting side tracked, was believing this myth to be reality in the first place.

Because the truth is I wasn’t designed to be “successful” in a world that demanded constant competition, constant performance, consistency, bootlicking, and ladder climbing. and that’s actually more than ok. Moreover, this was never supposed to be my path, given that I am, in every little strand of my DNA, genetically designed for a much more cyclical, feminine, way of living, that focuses on joy, wonder, and going the long, wild, creative, way around. I’ve come to understand defiance, in that context, is (always was) a sacred ritual: a reclamation of my true self. This was something I knew back then, as that sassy (so-called) out of control kid, always knew, but somehow forgot as time went by. Her voice was silenced under the mountain of rocks I placed on my own chest, in order to squeeze myself into a space into which I never quite fit. But she still lived deep within and never left. I only had to ask her, and then listen.

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So it is that at the age of 50 I am beyond burnt out, fed up with aspiring and chasing a dream that was never meant to be mine in the first place. Burnt out wanting, and feeling as if time is running out, resources are running out, and every move I make is “my last shot”.

In essence, I surrendered, stopped running their race, by their rules. It never got me anywhere other than exhausted anyway. They — that is to say the western world and its cynical capitalistic (read: patriarchal) values, which views everything as a commodity to be mined for profit — do not get to set my limitations or determine the skin I wear. That was always my choice to make, just as it is yours.

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As I finish, and I will have more to say on this for the next month, I want to ask you a few questions:

What is the myth you’ve been living?

Does it fit?

What does that little kid, buried deep within you have to say about it?

If she has other ideas, are you willing to listen?

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Until next time, stay wild,

Kat