ADHD are truthtellers

Never elevate anyone or anything above your truth again. This is one of the many lessons ADHD has revealed. #truthtellers

John the Evangelizer, a man who walked with Jesus, is paraphrased as having said that "your truth is holy, and your deepest truth is the holiest thing about you." Our holiness can only be known, experienced, by listening to and honoring our deepest truth. We feel our truth within the instruments of our bodies.

If all of our respective truths are holy, and everyone's truth is different, that's a whole lot of holy out there. By extension, if every human is holy, we are all sovereign and equal to every other human being. (And also equal with every other living creature, flora, fauna, etc. Everything.)

In my experience, young people with ADHD are deeply in touch with their truth, with the truth in their bodies...and, by extension, with their holiness. They know they do not want to go somewhere right now, they want to float, or be with their families, or go along in a moment. And that part of them, that truth, is closest to God.

For people deeply in touch with their truth, the external world's schedules and systems are too narrow. Inconvenient. There is a mismatch.

And so we try to override the truth in those little bodies - their holiness - by forcing them to fit within a system that is too narrow. And by judging them by a set of values that is too narrow. But they are simply incapable of going against themselves. It hurts too much.

Our cultural values stipulate that we collectively, consistently, regularly, override the truth in our own bodies in exchange for approval or status in the greater culture. You and I were taught to do so, and so we teach youngsters to do so, in order to be "safe" within this system.

But abandoning ourselves, or themselves, and our/their truth is never safe, for anyone. And they are largely incapable of doing so anyway.

In my opinion, we are a culture experiencing an epidemic of people that have abandoned themselves, and their truth, in exchange for approval or status in the greater society. External validation. "Power." We see this in our commitment to overdoing, overscheduling, prioritizing an external event over taking care of ourselves, and consistently living beyond our "means," which is the truth in our bodies.

We no longer know how to listen to ourselves and honor our needs, we judge our needs and live unsustainably by exploiting ourselves - using caffeine, alcohol, checking out, etc. And, we live unsustainably in the greater world by exploiting everything around us, the environment, etc.

The ADHD (and autism, trans, etc) population make us face our own relationship within the system, with how we are controlled by abandoning our own truth in exchange for a narrow approval by "others." In this cultural context it can be easy to confuse the inconvenience their truth with right/wrong, good/bad, etc. But, holy is holy is holy. And, it is the system that is too narrow, not us.

So, this was a gratitude, a love letter, to the truth tellers in our midsts. And a reminder that, while our system might judge their ability to fit in by saying there are those among us that are better, or worse, than others, I believe that we have so much to learn from them - about how to listen to and honor our truth, how to expand our definitions of success, how to live more truly.