Neurodivergent
October 25, 2026
In eighth grade, my history teacher, Mr. Deards, showed us Dr. Strangelove, the Cold War satire that is really a lesson in game theory. Afterward he handed out maps of a forest with red dots scattered through it. I turned to my friend and said, “I don’t see any dots.” He said, “What do you mean? They’re right there.” I still couldn’t see them. That’s how I found out I’m colorblind.
By then I had been struggling in school for a while. One teacher noticed and told my mom I was in eighth grade but reading at a third- or fourth-grade level, and losing focus in class. She said I needed to get checked out.
For a few weeks I saw a woman named Barbara in New York City. She found that I had ADHD, dyslexia, colorblindness, and something called Irlen syndrome. With Irlen, the white space between words stood out more than the words did. On a page, the gaps lined up into rivers running down the text, and I couldn’t read past them. It looked something like this:
In high school I wore blue-tinted glasses for the Irlen, to help me see the words instead of the gaps. A religion teacher started calling me Elton John. Exactly what you want while you’re still figuring yourself out as a teenager.
I felt for my mom. How do you hear that as a parent? My grandparents grew up under communism, and when my parents came to the U.S., they were busy just trying to make it here. Mental health and neurodivergence were an afterthought, so for a long time we ignored it.
Still, my parents knew something was different about how my brain worked. When I played competitive chess as a kid, I could see the whole board in my head and play a game blindfolded, thinking 20, 30, 40 moves ahead, and win. But studying was hard. I wanted the hit of getting answers right on a test, not the slow struggle of actually learning.
It caught up with me in my junior year of college. I was at home with friends, talking fast, with a flood of ideas, and I thought it was just my ADHD. It wasn’t. I ended up in the hospital because I couldn’t control my emotions at all, and I was diagnosed with bipolar II.
I’m a kind person. But in that state I was aggressive and irritable. I couldn’t hold my anger. I thought the world was ending. I had lost touch with reality.
I took a semester off to decompress, and I learned to manage my emotions through DBT and emotional regulation groups.
Here’s how I’d describe it. My baseline is a sine wave. Stress is like weight on an iron beam: it bends, and if it bends too far, it breaks. When I’ve had too much stress, I’ve had a break from reality.
People like to point out that John Nash had schizophrenia. I’m not John Nash. But I am fascinated by neurodivergent people. Kanye West has talked about being bipolar, and whatever you think of him otherwise, he’s a genius with words. Ted Turner, who went to my high school, McCallie, has talked about living with bipolar disorder while he built CNN.
I’m direct when I speak, and sometimes I don’t understand why people don’t see things my way. I’m still learning, but aren’t we all?
My heart goes out to anyone who is neurodivergent. It’s hard to navigate the world when your brain plays tricks on you. I’m grateful to live in the U.S., where getting care is easier than my relatives could have imagined, though I’m still figuring it out.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is to never isolate. You’re not alone, and you can talk to people. I’m grateful for friends like Joel, who are there when I’m down and don’t let me act up. Pick friends who tell you the truth and don’t want anything from you.