'All this time, I had ascribed my longing for being elsewhere to the mixed-race, dual-heritage experience. But with my newfound knowledge of ADHD, I was forced to re-evaluate.'
As a child, I split my time between Mum and Dad – a typical arrangement for kids of divorced parents in the ’80s and ’90s. I assumed my parents’ divorce was due to a classic case of crossed cultural wires. How were they to know that the expectations of marriage, imprinted onto their psyches by vastly different cultures – white British and Black Zimbabwean – wouldn’t match up?
This feeling of never quite belonging followed me everywhere, and I ascribed it to my dual heritage. But over time, this feeling turned out to be a major clue that eventually led to myI was “shy” and “too quiet,” though I didn’t mean to be. I simply had nothing to add to the conversations around me, and I struggled to feign interest where I couldn’t connect.I remember the tangibly torturous experience of having to say hello to my neighbor while looking her in the eye.
My experience in school is best summed up as, ‘Regularly getting in trouble despite trying to stay invisible.’ The same teachers who shouted at me in class for an interjection would also write in my reports that I needed to speak up more. When I was told off, I often didn’t understand what I had done wrong.But as one of a handful of kids of color in my school, I was never going to avoid my teachers’ unconscious biases.
I got a degree, but I floundered through academic life, barely scraping by with mediocre grades. I was unable to ask for help because the help I needed was both too elusive and too pervasive to articulate. Silence won over once more.
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