My brain is not a race car with tricycle brakes.

It's ADHD Awareness Month, and I want more.

It’s ADHD Awareness Month, a time when the familiar analogies (a brain that’s like a race car with the brakes of a tricycle!) and questionable origin stories of ADHD enjoy an extended parade.

This year, my wish for ADHD Awareness Month is new metaphors. New imagery. New language.

My wish is for words and sounds and constellations that actually embody and move and shake and drift off like ADHD itself.

What would we say about ADHD if we were not in the mode of explaining it to others? If awareness wasn’t “here, let me tell you how to think of me” but instead “Watch me move. verve. expand. diverge.”

The trouble with awareness is how it slows down so much to make sure everyone is keeping up.

Maybe everyone is not going to keep up with us, at least not all at once.

Maybe we make ourselves smaller to squeeze ourselves into the old analogies.

Sometimes the tools of awareness become their own mask. I’m tired of having so many layers on my face. I’m looking for the language I spoke and wrote and dreamed in before I learned to translate myself for the world.

(Does awareness always involve some level of compromise from the group that longs to be understood?)

(I think I would prefer ADHD Expression Month.)

The other day Google suggested a search to me:

Am I neurodivergent or just weird?

And I laughed and thought—yes.

I like that it’s a question that diverges initially, but then its possibilities end up converging in my mind. How much of my divergence works this way? Arrows shot in opposing directions, only to circle back with the answer, chorus-like: all the possibilities can be true.

We are so often asked to be just one thing. We are so often expected to be clean and legible as a condition of being seen, even loved—not just in the space of neurodivergence, but in an ocean of identities and ways of being.

Awareness is easier when we are just one thing. It’s easier to talk about race cars than to try to generate the particular electricity of hyper-restless-longing-bottomless-pit-of-feeling in someone else’s arms and chest. But I don’t want to have to keep making this easy for you, especially when the truth of ADHD is more complex for me.

I wish for something less like the platitudes and compromises of awareness, something more like a willingness to suspend disbelief. As in: I trust your experience and how it patterns the world so differently for you. I am willing to imagine the particular electricity. I will do more than voyeur along the edge of this rabbit hole—I will risk falling in with you.

I know I’m asking for a lot. To borrow from Sylvia, it is the old brag of my heart: more, more, more.

When I tell people I have never truly felt satisfaction, they think I’m speaking in the abstract. Like this is not the honest-to-god reality for me. Like Google suggesting I can be only one or the other: neurodivergent or just weird.

But abstraction is another kind of mask. The one where you’ve swiped your hand across your face before the paint has dried. Maybe that’s why poetry was my first home as a writer: Here I am, but blurred. Here I am, but slant-rhymed. Here I am, but oh—look, an image instead.

This month I want to language against abstraction. Against and beyond the old analogies. I want the ocean, the rabbit hole, the more.