Challenging stories

What story have you been telling yourself. Stories about your challenges. What labels or descriptions do you give them. Do you describe them with words of love or words of hate? Do you label them "impairments"? What are the themes and plots of your stories? What is the narrative you tell yourself?

All human beings tell themselves a story about themselves and how the world works. We are the authors of our lives, we get to choose what our stories say. We get to choose the plot, the scenes, and the settings. We get to choose the narration of the story. We might not be able to choose what challenges we face and we may not be able to choose what others say or do to us, but we can choose our lines and our reactions.

All human beings have challenges, talents, strengths, weaknesses, positives and negatives. We all have things we can do well and things we can't do. We come from different cultures and speak different languages. We all have different perspectives, different tapes, and different stories. We also share a lot of our experiences and borrow lines from others' stories. We have things in common as well.

We need to get better at accepting the beauty of our differences and similarities. We need to also realize that people with challenges, like ADD/ADHD, have differences and similarities. We ADDers are different from non-ADDers. We have a different brain wiring, which means we are going to see the world differently than non-ADDers. Being different doesn't mean we are bad. It doesn't mean we are inferior. It doesn't mean we are "impaired". It doesn't necessarily mean that we are less able than others. It does mean we need to learn to do things a different way than others. It does mean we are going to think differently and be creative in ways others are not. It means we are a minority and will have to fight to be accepted as we are. Accepted as a people group.