A journey that I never thought I would attempt has become a reality.
I AM GOING TO COLLEGE!
I struggled in school. Academically and socially. I was the quiet one with just a few friends. Luckily, I went to a great high school and the kids were mostly from decent families. I was extremely quiet and shy and borderline nerdy, but I was never teased. I hung in the background and was overlooked and I didn’t mind it being that way. Academically, I struggled. I was a B/C student who knew I would only get my A in an elective class. I never understood why school was so hard for me but I accepted it and moved forward. When I graduated from high school, I was so glad it was over and knew college wasn’t for me. School was hard for me. Now that I had “done my time” I surely wasn’t going back voluntarily.
Jump ahead 12 years to 2014. This year I turned 30 and I finally got my answer. I finally knew why school was so hard for me.
I have ADHD.
I am told by my doctor that I have always had it and it went undiagnosed.
Looking back now, it all starts to make sense.
My comprehension is poor. No matter how hard I try to concentrate and pay attention, I just couldn’t do it. Read a book or text and take a test on it? Yeah right. My teachers must have thought I was the laziest student around! There was no way I could have read the material and still failed the test so miserably. I will admit, it even got to the point in my later high school years that I wouldn’t even read the assigned book if I thought I wasn’t going to understand it. I failed the test and moved on. I always did well on home work and projects so that balanced out the failed tests in the end.
Then you have the nice teachers who let you watch the movie in class instead of reading the book. Most students would do pretty well on that test, but not me. If I didn’t fall asleep, I couldn’t follow anything that was going on. To this day, I can’t follow movies without asking my poor hubby what the heck is going on. Lastly, one test I don’t think I will ever forget was an open book History test. I don’t remember which grade it was, but I will never forget how dumb I felt and how much of a failure I felt when I got that test back. A 30% on an open book test?!?!?! How is that possible??!!
Now that I have a diagnosis and treatment, I have the confidence I needed to go to college. I would love to go into the healthcare field, however, I am finding that a lot, if not most, of those programs require clinical hours and I can’t figure out how I would fit that in while working full time day hours. For now, I am a business major. I am tossing around a few ideas of which direction I can go. I would love to still incorporate the healthcare field so I am considering counseling or human resources but I have yet to decide. I still have plenty of time. At this point, I am just going to start with my core classes and see how that goes.
This is a huge step for me, but I am very excited and can’t wait to see what the future holds!
