Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
The summer after my freshman year, I rode a nearly empty bus to a rival school to spend three weeks retaking Algebra I. I had technically passed, but my end-of-grade test score was so low that CMS sent me to summer school. At 14, I already felt embarrassed.
When I walked into the classroom, one of my teachers was an Indian woman. Almost immediately, she told me something I would remember for the next 19 years: in a decade of teaching summer school, I was the first Indian student she had ever had.
A few days later, during a practice test, I caught myself staring at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if I was thinking or just zoning out. The other teacher, a football coach who also taught math, noticed.
“The answers are down on the paper. Not in the sky somewhere.”
For years, people described me the same way: he’s smart, but he’s lazy. Eventually, I started saying it too. In fifth grade, I made the honor roll with straight A’s and one B in math. Instead of feeling proud, I stood with my red ribbon, watching the kids with blue ones and feeling ashamed. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that a smart Indian kid should be good at math. I wasn’t.
What confused me was that school sometimes felt easy. I loved history. Dates, political arguments, and odd facts all stuck with me. I got a 5 on the AP U.S. History exam and a 4 on the European History exam without much effort. But when I saw an algebra problem, my mind just shut down. Everyone told me the answer was simple: try harder.
I was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) at 18. Before that, I thought ADHD was just an excuse for kids who couldn’t sit still. I could sit still, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate.
In college, a neighbor with ADHD told me that without medication, he struggled to get up for class, follow conversations, and even do work he cared about. I immediately saw myself in his story.
After waiting twelve weeks, I saw a psychiatrist in Greensboro. She was Indian, which I found a little funny. I took a written test, we talked about school, and she looked over my history. Then she told me I had ADHD. The diagnosis felt almost anticlimactic. I had spent years wondering what was wrong, and suddenly I had an explanation. After that, I spent most of the next decade trying to prove her wrong.
I didn’t really tell my parents. I joked about it and made it seem less serious. I worried they wouldn’t believe me. My dad always said our family came from people who could do anything if they tried. My mom still jokes that I could have been a doctor, lawyer, or engineer because I was smart enough, just too lazy. That joke says a lot: ability is there; effort is what matters.
But what do you do when you know what needs to be done, want to do it, sometimes even need to do it, and still can’t? For most of my life, I thought the answer was simple: you just aren’t trying hard enough.
In 2016, I worked on a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. I drove my own car all over North Carolina, and every quarter I had to submit a mileage log to get reimbursed. I was owed almost $2,000. The paperwork would have taken about fifteen minutes, but I put it off for three months.
At first, I told myself there was still time. Then I lost the receipts and had to recreate the trips. Each day I waited made the task harder and made me less likely to start. Soon, the spreadsheet felt like it was following me everywhere. I became convinced I would get fired. I felt guilty doing anything fun because that Excel sheet was always waiting for me. I even skipped my best friend’s birthday — not because anyone told me I couldn’t go, but because I was punishing myself.
Spoiler: I was the only one who thought this much about my mileage reimbursement.
This is what ADHD feels like for most of us. I can turn simple tasks into huge problems and then get mad at myself for being afraid of them. I still do this. I can wash, dry, and fold laundry, but then leave it in a basket for a week because putting it away suddenly feels overwhelming. Where does this shirt go? Am I hanging it right? What if I have to redo it? It sounds ridiculous, and sometimes it is, but that doesn’t make it feel any less real.
That is the part of ADHD I have been afraid of. That’s the part I’ve been scared to share with other Indians. Saying “I have ADHD” is easy enough — I can even joke about it. What’s harder is admitting what it really looks like. I’ve lied about why I was late because saying I couldn’t get there on time felt humiliating.
I’ve ignored texts from people I care about, then avoided them longer because I felt guilty. I abandoned projects I cared about as soon as the excitement faded. I’ve watched others sit down, read something hard, finish it, and wondered why that felt impossible for me. Stop making excuses. Maybe there’s some truth to that. Sometimes I am lazy. Sometimes I make bad choices.
ADHD doesn’t take away my responsibility for my life. The problem was that I spent years treating every failure as proof that something was wrong with me. I couldn’t separate “I made a mistake” from “there is something wrong with me.” Admitting I needed help felt harder than anything else.
My wife started teaching me that asking for help did not have to be humiliating. She saw the unfinished projects, the chaotic routines, the moods, and how time could slip away from me. She helped me organize my work and build routines without making me feel stupid for needing them. She gave me something I had tried to replace with shame for years: accountability without shame.
Medication helped too. So did getting enough sleep, exercising, eating better, therapy, meditation, and learning to build systems instead of waiting for willpower. None of this cured me. I still hate having ADHD sometimes. I still hesitate to call it a disability. I still catch myself thinking that if I were smarter, tougher, or more disciplined, I wouldn’t need medication, reminders, calendars, routines, or anyone else’s help.
I turned 33 this year. The number itself doesn’t make this essay more important than if I had written it earlier, except for one thing: I finally know myself well enough to put it into words in a way that might help someone else with an ADHD mind.
Maybe some Indian people will read this and think I am making excuses. For years, I assumed they would, without ever really giving them the chance to prove me right or wrong.
Here’s something I usually leave out: I have failed classes. I dropped out of school. I have lost jobs and friendships. I have disappointed people I love. I take responsibility for those things. ADHD explains some of them, but it does not erase them. That distinction took me years to understand. An explanation is not an excuse, and responsibility does not have to mean self-hatred.
Sometimes I think back to that 14-year-old Indian kid in summer school, staring at the ceiling while everyone else seemed to know the answers were right in front of them. Maybe he didn’t need someone else telling him where to look. Maybe he needed someone to ask why looking down at the page had become so hard.
If one Indian kid who has been called “smart” and “lazy” in the same sentence reads this and thinks, “Me too,” then writing it was worth it.
I spent a long time believing that shame was mine alone. I don’t believe that anymore, and I hope anyone else carrying it can set it down too.
Dhruv Pathak is a writer based in St. Louis, originally from Charlotte. He writes to better understand human behavior — how it is formed and shaped by our world. Read more of his work over at athroughline.substack.com. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
