About Love, Rom-Coms and yes, ADHD (When You're Smiling And Astride Me - Father John Misty)

I think, oh dear lord, I think a lot.

I overthink and overwrite and overfeel.

When it comes to love, I've had the luck to experience it over and over and over and over and over again. Romantic love comes easy to me, I have had an amazing and outstanding number of infatuations throughout my life. Thank you, ADHD, for making this possible. 

I am someone who loves profoundly and deeply, someone who loves the sunsets as much as the pouring rain, and yellow socks. I love easily and softly. And have even learned to love how easily infatuated I am. This may come as a juxtaposition to many previous essays and texts of mine where I dwell about heartache and lost love, but this is exactly what it is to be me. A whirlwind of change, learning her baby steps towards steadiness.

True to the origin of the gossip material I intend to spill over eventually, I'll begin writing about the stories of many of my lifelong infatuations; a desperate attempt to continue to make sense out of life and remove the guilt of loving as an ADHDer. 

Starting with Rodrigo, my very early childhood husband, whom I married on a summer afternoon in his cousin's house where we would spend all our free time playing and watching cartoons and imagining wonderland scenarios to entice our adult audience. He was my first love. 

We met in the Yellow Room at the Pre-School we both attended, I think we were both four years old at that time. He was Nelson's, my best friend since year three, cousin, and we were part of the coolest group of friends on earth alongside Claudia, Maria Dolores, and I. 

Or so we thought. At the end of the day, we were just neighbors who attended the same school, and whose parents got along well enough to trust their kids to spend hours and hours in each other's homes. Some of my fondest childhood memories are with them, in their house, but what happened with Rodrigo was more special. 

He was my favorite play date; during lunch break, we would share our food; he loved the apple slices my mom would send me, which I used to call "watermelon apples," and eat them as such. I don't recall the first time we realized we were in love, but I remember the happiest day of my early lifetime when he brought me a wedding band and proposed. 

The ring was made of orange yarn, tying carefully a white-and-orange heart-shaped bead. We held the ceremony in the living room, with Claudia, the oldest of us, as the officiator. I wore a white bedding sheet as a veil and dress and swore to love each other for eternity under the lights of beautiful white candles. For our wedding dinner, we had Oreos and milk and what I'm guessing was a generous serving of melted mozzarella cheese (his favorite food). When my mom came later that night to pick me up, she blessed our union and kissed Rodrigo on the forehead, welcoming him as her son-in-law. 

And that was all. We never kissed (we were children, duh) and never held hands together, but we knew that we belonged together for eternity, even if we lost touch soon after the wedding. Not that we ever got divorced or anything of that sort, but his parents lived in the United States, and after two years of going back and forth between countries, they finally decided to move to New York, forcing us into our first long-distance relationship.

It was easy; we loved each other; he would come back to visit during summer breaks, and everything was as normal as it had been the previous year. Eventually, they stopped coming back, and I guess that that was the end of our marriage.

As life went by, I felt like I did with him and many other boys and men. I was an easily infatuated person who would fall in love, profoundly in love, everywhere I went.

Until recently, I never really understood the logic of my proneness to be infatuated; no one around me seemed to have had a similar experience during their childhoods, and even now that I am twenty-three and still crushing over everyone, everywhere I go. 

Turns out that I've always been an ADHD girly who feels a lot of emotions very profoundly, and when I feel comfortable around someone, there's a massive chance of me hyper-fixating on them until I move on with life and forgetting that I ever even liked them.

I know now that navigating emotions as someone with ADHD can be a bit more challenging than it is for the rest of the population. It's been around seven months since I was diagnosed, and boy oh boy, I still have not learnt enough about the whirlwind of emotions I experience on a daily basis.

Lately, I've been over-obsessing about becoming the best love identifier in the world, I have set my expectations so high, that I don't even understand them, and I have played my cards in ways in which, unknowingly, I have hurt others. I change my mind to the speed of light, and talking to people has helped me a lot to get grounded and pause for a second and really think about whatever it is that I am feeling.

Yesterday, I had a revelation: I navigate relationships in different manners every time; people are not cut out of the same pattern, and trying to mimic neurotypical relationships is the worst thing I can do. I have this profound need for dopamine hits that I chase irrational dreams and run from one place to another, getting bored and excited and bored again in milliseconds.

What I truly want is peace, quiet, and steadiness. I've sinned of overcommitting multiple times, and pretending to want to do so right now is just another red flag of my ADHD taking over the best of me. 

My love life is sometimes a mess because I want everything, and when I get it, I change my mind and run. 

This time, I want to do things differently. I want to know the unknown. The quiet, the uncertain, the "who knows, and who cares", the "we're trying to figure it out", the "no emotional strings attached, but committed to making it work, whatever that means".

I am sorry that I hurt you and made you doubt my intentions, and how much I truly love you. Sometimes, it's not even clear to me what it is that I want. Mark my words, mark my words, sweetie boy, I will be there for you because I've always wanted to. And I may daydream about grand gestures, such as the ones portrayed in my favorite rom-com's, but when you smile, all noise is left behind and I feel safe and quiet in between your arms.

Thank you, thank you for talking to me, thank you for caring about me, thank you for taking care of me, thank you for choosing to let me be free next to you. All love stories are worth a try, specially those that make your heart beat steady, fill your soul and look nothing like what we were taught they looked like.