People who grew up with an absent father and an emotionally unstable mother learn to be strong too soon. We get used to solving everything alone, and somewhere along the way we start believing that even asking for help is an inconvenience to everyone around us. We learn to smile when nobody should be smiling. Underneath it, we just feel broken.
That's a big part of why trust is so hard for people like us. We live in this pull between wanting to be close to someone and needing to pull away the second it starts to feel real, driven by fear and abandonment. In ADHD, that particular tangle has a name: anxious attachment, and it doesn't travel alone — it usually shows up paired with rejection sensitivity, where an ADHD brain doesn't just feel a rejection, it amplifies it into something enormous almost instantly. Behind whatever strong exterior we're showing the world, there's still a kid in there who never got loved the exact way they needed.
I like sharing where this stuff actually comes from, so here's a piece of mine. My home was broken from the day I was born. My father was more interested in women and parties than being one. My mother carried her own childhood damage into hers, and she went looking for love in every wrong place she could find it. I was taken from her when I was five.
I'll tell this quickly, because it's a hard one to sit in for long. I was five. Her boyfriend dropped me off after school, and I walked into the house like any other day. I sat down and put Power Rangers on. I remember that part clearly — just me, the couch, the TV. She didn't know I was home. What I didn't know, sitting there, was that she was in the back room getting high, and she lit the curtains on fire trying to take her own life.
If rejection sensitivity is amplifying a small moment into a huge one, try naming it out loud as it's happening: "this feels bigger than it is because my brain does that." Just labeling it can slow the spiral down enough to think again.
When she came out and saw me in the chair, confused, just watching TV with smoke already filling the kitchen, something in her clicked back into place enough to start fighting the fire instead. I sat there and watched the panic take over her whole body. It was only once she realized she couldn't put it out herself that she got me in the car and drove us to my great-grandmother's house — the same house where my great-grandfather, the one I called Dah, lived too.
The rest of that day was watching her get restrained and cuffed to a stretcher. I still have the teddy bear the ambulance driver handed me. He told me, and I'm quoting this exactly because I've never forgotten it: "don't look back." At the hospital they treated me for smoke inhalation, and then somebody put an impossible question in front of a five-year-old: stay with my mom, who was begging me to stay, or leave her side and go somewhere I felt safe. At five, I knew something about that choice wasn't right. But it was normal — it was just what my life was. I chose to go with my great-grandmother.
That choice, at five years old, is probably the first time I learned that love could disappear in a single afternoon, that the people who were supposed to be safe could become the reason you're not. It's not hard to trace a straight line from that day to the adult who finds it easier to solve everything alone than to trust someone else with it, who pulls away right when it starts to feel real. I'm not done unpacking that connection — I don't think anyone really finishes that work — but naming it is where the untangling starts.
If any part of this brought something up for you, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 in the US — is there any time, day or night.
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