Reading (and Writing) While Neurodivergent
I was the girl who sat in class reading a book under her desk while ignoring her math teacher. It made me extremely popular with math teachers, but the feeling was mutual. ADHD is a life-long condition, but smart girls who read instead of disrupting the class were not diagnosed with ADHD when I was a child, so I remained undiagnosed until age 28. I never had any reason to suspect that my ADHD brain impacted my reading until I started writing. My first reaction to some critique partner feedback would be “But no one really cares about this, right?” Then I realize that yes, many readers do care about these things, because we read in different ways. One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is that first words and pages don’t matter to me. I need a certain amount of context until characters, settings, and events start to “stick” for me mentally. The first few pages are a reading warm-up, allowing me to sink into the world of the story and start to experience it. A recent, very stark ex