On Reddit, I follow the ADHD Memes subreddit, which is where I stumbled across this one. It sounded interesting enough in concept, so I impulsively ordered it from Target. This, though, is one of those times I should’ve reigned in my impulsiveness a little.
This isn’t to say the book is bad, rather that it’s nothing extraordinary. We get numerous different stories, yet they can all kinda be summed up with “probably ASD/ADHD and Strattera,” and “life sucked until the lightbulb moment when they found out they had a developmental disorder and then things got better.” There’s mention of other things, like learning disabilities or depression, but even their stories seem to largely have them take a backseat to the other developmental disorders.
In addition, while I’m all for furthering the idea that our brains are different and so it shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach for most things, the book seems to lean way too hard into it, acting like a developmental disorder means you should never have to do anything outside of your wheelhouse/comfort zone and you are almost entirely blameless if undesirable things happen that are tied in some shape or form to your disorder. Maybe that’s me reading too far into things, but it felt almost like propaganda with how often and hard it pushed that outlook.
Lastly, I know things are different in Asian communities, due I believe to societal pressures, but if you are sensitive to discussion of suicidal ideation or suicide itself, this is certainly not the book for you, because I felt like half of these stories had the person thinking suicide was the option at one point or another. It was pretty alarming, I must say.
In short, while there are some insights into how ASD and ADHD affects people, the stories run together quite a bit, they don’t branch out much into the other developmental disorders, and the way they talk about them doesn’t seem to be the absolute healthiest. You’d be better off looking for a more traditional book about these life experiences, I’d say.