Diary of a Slytherin Girl with ADHD (3)
Some days deserve to disappear. Others deserve to be kept. And then there are the ones I don't write down for the world, but for myself. Today I'm not really writing about one day. More about several months that slowly showed me that you can be good at your job, efficient, capable and willing to work almost to exhaustion, and still one day find out that there's simply nothing left to draw from.
In the end, I left the Hall of Campaigns. It took me much longer than I'd consider sensible today, because I kept thinking the problem was somewhere in me and that if I just tried a little harder, it would all somehow sort itself out. After all, it's very easy to convince someone who's used to looking for mistakes in herself first that she just has to be even more efficient, even better organised and ideally a little less tired. At the time I was somewhere between long-term exhaustion and burnout, but because I could still work, for a long time it didn't feel like anything serious was happening.
The work itself was never the problem. Visual magic, campaigns, copy, strategy and everything around public perception, I enjoyed all of it and I think I was good at it. I also had several years of experience, and when something caught my attention, I could spend hours on it without noticing time at all. Hyperfocus is a strange spell in that way. While it works, everyone admires how much you get done. What's less visible is that you forget to eat, you don't notice how tired you are, and you usually discover the limit of your own energy long after you've crossed it.
Then the witch I had originally replaced during her maternity leave came back to the Hall of Campaigns. Several years had passed in the meantime, I'd gained more experience and moved on professionally, so after her return she worked as my assistant. This is probably where I should write something very Slytherin about two ambitious witches fighting over a place at the cauldron, but it really wasn't that simple. I had no need to compete with her. I could see we had different levels of experience and different ways of working, but that in itself doesn't have to be a problem. People don't have to be equally good at the same things to work together normally.
But gradually I started to feel that something was going on around me. Some conversations stopped the moment I walked in. Some people started talking to me differently, and eventually I heard that I had supposedly said something so terrible that some of my colleagues didn't want to speak to me. What exactly I was supposed to have said, I never found out. And that's exactly where something begins that my brain has a huge problem with.
✦ You might also be interested in ✦
Because I need to know why. I need to know the cause of things, because once I know it, I can do something about it. If I make a mistake and someone tells me what exactly I did, I can think about it. I can find out that I really overstepped, apologise and do it differently next time. If instead I find out that something got twisted or someone understood my words differently, I can explain my side and defend myself. Both are completely fine with me. What I can't do is respond to an accusation whose content everyone knows except me.
Maybe I really did say something. It's actually quite possible that I did. I'm an extremely direct person, and honesty isn't always my best social trait. If I think something isn't working, I tend to say so, and I expect the same from others. I'd rather hear an unpleasant truth to my face than spend a week wondering why someone is looking at me strangely. But over time I understood that a lot of people don't work this way. There's a whole world of communication in the shadows, where things aren't said to the person they concern, but to a few people around them. And those people somehow know how to behave without anything ever having to be named.
I can't do that kind of magic. I don't know if it's ADHD or just my personality, but I've been running into it all my life. When someone tells me A, my brain usually works with the information A. But in the everyday world, A sometimes means B, the tone of voice means C, and the real problem is somewhere else entirely. The people around me somehow sense it and carry on according to an unwritten guide I apparently never received when I started at Hogwarts. And I'm left standing in the middle of the corridor, wand in hand, trying to work out why everyone expects a defensive spell from me when nobody told me where the curse came from.
The worst part for me wasn't even that people were saying something about me. The worst part was that I never got the chance to find out what. When I tried to understand the problem, in the end it was more or less waved away. But an unaddressed problem at work isn't a solved problem. It just keeps existing and slowly affects communication, relationships and the sense of safety of the people who have to function in it every day. I think this is one of the things companies underestimate incredibly. Toxicity doesn't have to mean someone casting the Cruciatus Curse on you across the open-plan office every morning. Sometimes it's much quieter. Gossip, unspoken conflicts, information passed on through several people, and problems that never really get opened because it's easier to pretend they don't exist.
On top of that, I'd been exhausted for a long time. It wasn't just work, and it wouldn't be fair to claim that one company or one person was to blame for everything. So much was happening in my personal life at the time that I often didn't know what to deal with first. Family, relationships, problems you can't simply switch off at five in the afternoon, and in the middle of it all a period when my grandad nearly died. Some of those things haven't gone away even today. The difference is more that today I understand much better that you don't have one special reserve of energy for work and another for your personal life. It's still one and the same magical energy, and when you use it up in one place, a new supply doesn't magically appear just because you've closed your work laptop.
And this is where I think my ADHD got mixed in too. Not in the sense that I burned out because of ADHD and we can elegantly close the case. More that some of its traits allowed me to keep going in an unhealthy way for far too long. I can work until I'm completely exhausted, and hyperfocus can turn me into an employee who gets an incredible amount done in a few hours. At the same time, I can't always tell in time that I'm already running on reserves. And when you add my need to understand every unresolved situation, you get a rather interesting self-tormenting incantation. Other people wave something away and move on. I'm still putting individual sentences together in the evening, wondering where exactly the problem started and what I missed.
Mental hygiene practically didn't exist for me back then. Or rather, it existed about as much as a unicorn in the accounts department. I knew in theory that it should be somewhere, I just never properly saw it. When there was a lot of work, I worked more. When I was tired, I tried to work more efficiently. When I had a problem, I analysed it until I felt I understood it. And when I felt I couldn't cope with my own life, my logical solution was, of course, to add a few more things. Brilliant plan. Ten points to Slytherin.
In the end I left the Hall of Campaigns, and only with some distance did I begin to realise how much the whole environment had affected me. I think for a long time I mistook the ability to endure for proof that everything was fine. But a person can be very efficient and very exhausted at the same time. You can love your work and still not be able to cope with the environment you do it in. And you can be a really good employee without being obliged to let yourself be slowly ground down just because you can still perform.
Today I also think a little differently about my need to know why. I still have it and probably always will. I need to understand causes, because they let me learn, take responsibility and also defend myself when I need to. But at the same time I'm starting to accept one rather unpleasant truth. Some things simply have no logical explanation, and some answers I'll never get. To this day I don't know what exactly I was supposed to have said. It used to torment me for hours. Today I'm more inclined to think that if everyone in a company hears about a problem except the person who supposedly caused it, maybe the biggest problem isn't the sentence itself, but the magical communication system around it.
So I'm learning something I've never been very good at. I don't have to solve everything. I don't have to understand everything, and above all I don't have to prove, down to the last drop of magic, that I can function absolutely everywhere. Slytherins may be tenacious creatures, but even a snake sometimes needs to crawl off somewhere, have some peace and, most of all, stop wondering why someone gave her a strange look by the coffee machine three months ago.
And that's all for today. Tomorrow I might be different. Maybe the same. Maybe stronger. But I'll always be me.
Mimosa Confiante
Mimosa Confiante
By day, I work somewhere between marketing, copy and campaigns; by night, I usually end up somewhere between fanfiction, cosplay and yet another “what if” that refuses to leave me alone. I write mainly in the Harry Potter and Mo Dao Zu Shi fandoms, most often Snarry, Snamione, HarryLu and WangXian. My healthcare background means that anatomy, medicine and far too much research occasionally find their way into my stories. Cosplay is another way for me to play with the characters I love, whether I stay close to canon or turn them into my own fanfiction and AU versions. In Diary of a Slytherin Girl with ADHD, I write openly about life with a brain that usually has far too many tabs open at once.
📖 More stories on AO3 and Wattpad · 📸 Instagram · 🎥 TikTok · 👉 More about me
Comments