Calliope

People always joke that he’s not acting, and I get what they mean and it’s funny, but he is still acting. It’s so difficult to not just play yourself when you have so much in common with a character. It can be helpful but it can be detrimental too. He doesn’t get the escapism the others get. You can’t so easily vanish into a character you see so much of yourself in and a lesser actor would just play a caricature of themselves. But Eric and Daniel are still distinct. There’s no point where you forget you’re looking at Daniel.

And he portrays Daniel with very thinly veiled vulnerability. You rarely see it, and then he lets the tiniest little bit and it is soul crushing every time. There aren’t these huge moments where he breaks down because the world has hardened him in a way that it hasn’t the other vampires. He didn’t have immortality to shield him. He had to build a shell around himself all alone.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.01: Detroit TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.

The sheer amount of support this post got genuinely means so, so much to me at this specific moment in my life. People providing comfort, people sharing their own experiences with ADHD and their own personal metaphorical interpretations of it; even the people just offhandedly chiming in with tags like "me" and "adhd mood" and what have you have validated me in a very meaningful way.

I was always considered a pretty bright kid. I got amazing grades throughout most of my childhood, and loved science. I always had my nose in a book, sometimes so frequently that I would get in trouble with my teachers for reading instead of working on my (finished) assignments. I even ended up in my county's tiny program for "gifted" kids after a while of my smartass consistently getting into the same argument with my school.

So, around middle school, when my performance in school began to falter for no real explicable reason, the possibility of ADHD flew completely under the radar. Even I, for most of my life, pictured a child with ADHD as someone who was overtly hyperactive, who wasn't motivated by school or academic subjects in the slightest, who failed every single class and struggled with rules, authority, directions. The complete opposite of myself. I've always been a huge nerd—I wanted to do good in school. And I always sat still and followed directions to the best of my ability. So, why couldn't I just do what I was supposed to, even when I really wanted to?

Why couldn't I just open up my computer and turn in my work?

The only answer that even kind of fit this nebulous presentation was laziness. It was simply a willpower issue. I had potential, but I wasn't utilizing it. I just wasn't trying hard enough—I just needed to sit myself down in front of the computer and get started. That was the burden I carried from then until my freshman year of community college(!!!); even when I finally figured out the struggles I was experiencing in school lined up with the textbook ADHD symptoms of executive dysfunction and task paralysis, it took forever to convince my parents, my teachers, and even myself that this wasn't just a matter of me not being motivated enough to do better for myself.

So, even though my therapist basically told me, during one of our sessions, "Holy shit, you haven't been medicated this whole time? No wonder you're struggling so much!" it's still hard at times to shoo away the internal dialogue of "it's your fault" and "you could be doing more" and "this isn't ADHD, ADHD looks like x, you're just lazy" when these were the best assumptions I was working with for a very, very long time until very, very recently.

So having a random vent post I made about these difficulties I'm struggling with resonate with so many ADHDers on this webbed site has really, really validated my personal struggles with the disorder. Seeing the notes skyrocket over the past few months felt like a ginormous truth-slap of "YOU'RE NOT ALONE" right across my face, lol.