Kaelan Saley - What/Why/How

Kaelan Saley
2/28/15

            For my digital storytelling project, I am going to choose my identity of a person with ADHD. Throughout my life, there has always been a constant battle with my ADHD, as well as with the stigma that surrounds the condition.

            My experience as someone with ADHD has always been a struggling balancing act. Even when I was a young child in elementary school, I had constant issues with both students and teachers. My teachers all known that I was intelligent ever since I started kindergarten at age 5, and they would always remind me of that. However, they all also had issues with my behavior and my inability to sit still in class, and how easily I was distracted in class. The students would tease me, and make fun of me because I would talk fast and stutter as a result of my condition. Living with ADHD at that age, before I was ever diagnosed, made it difficult to connect with other people who were my age, and I would always end up being closer with the teachers and staff at the school than with the students. After I was diagnosed and given prescription medication to treat it, I began to see an entirely new benefit to having ADHD, which was my ability to think faster and respond quicker than everyone else. At the same time, however, I began to see the increasing stigma against students who had ADHD in my own school. Other students who did not have the condition would treat myself and others diagnosed with ADHD as cheaters, people who used their condition to gain an advantage over them in school. However, that was never the case, and as a result, it continued to alienate me from the rest of the students.

            Another issue that I experienced with having ADHD that I plan to talk about is my dependence on my medication in order to succeed. Throughout high school, I would often find myself questioning if I had taken my medication in the morning before going to school. Often, I felt as if I needed it in order to do well, and if I didn’t take it, I would be unable to do well on anything that I would do throughout the day. Another struggle that I had was students harassing me, trying to buy my medication from me because they thought that it would help them do better on the SAT and ACT, as well as on AP Exams. Even though I never sold it to them, they would keep asking and trying to pressure me into selling it.

            Now that I am in college, I am able to deal with ADHD better because of the different community that we have here. The fact that people accept me for who I am and allow me to live with my condition has helped me become more confident as a student and a person. I have started to reduce the dosage of my medication in order to cut it out of my life, and my network of friends in college has helped me make progress in doing so because of their massive support.

            In my digital storytelling project, I intend to show the way that ADHD has affected my life through interviews with myself, my parents, and my childhood friends who have always supported me. In addition, I plan to use pictures of me as a young child with audio placed over it to tell my story.