💜rachel

I actually am not a fan of young, twink Hardy.

Eh.

Maturity just suits him so much better.

Heads will roll. (Judith Beheading Holofernes)

Caravaggio (1571-1610)

Valentine de Boulogne (1591-1632)

“In Understanding Girls with AD/HD, Littman and her co-authors explain that ADHD was first diagnosed in young, white boys, with a key indicator being hyperactivity. As a result, guidelines were written around how it manifests in boys, and research is almost exclusively focused on boys (1% is specific to girls, Littman says).

It also materializes much later in girls, which was problematic when the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnosis criteria called for symptoms to be visible by age 7. It recently changed the age (pdf) to 12, allowing more girls to be captured.

Dr. Patricia Quinn, one of Littman’s co-authors on the book and a pediatrician in Washington, DC, who founded the National Center For Girls and Women With ADHD, told HuffPo Parents that girls’ symptoms include:a tendency toward daydreamingtrouble following instructionsmaking careless mistakes on homework and tests.ADHD is a chronic neurobiological disorder which affects the brain structurally and chemically, as well as the ways in which various parts of the brain communicate with one another. It is highly heritable, says Frank.

Pressure to perform means many girls internalize their symptoms—disorganization or carelessness—as personal flaws rather than medical issues to be treated through medicine and therapy.

Girls with ADHD are significantly more likely to experience major depression, anxiety, and eating disorders than girls without. “They tend to have few friendships,” Littman says. “As a result of their low self-esteem, they often choose unhealthy relationships in which they may accept punitive criticism and or abuse.”

Had I been consistently loud/obnoxious/disruptive in class like boys with ADHD often are, my learning problems would have been noticed and addressed when I was young. Instead, because I had a high IQ and didn’t cause trouble for teachers, I slipped through the cracks up until my freshman year of COLLEGE. I nearly failed out of my first year of undergrad and ended up taking 2.5 years off to work full-time… It’s literally only now, at the age of 22, that I’ve begun re-engaging with higher education again. In high school I developed a serious eating disorder and suffered from terrible, constant anxiety (requiring years of CBT therapy and medication), all because I had absorbed these beliefs about myself. I thought that I was inherently flawed, careless, disorganized/forgetful, and broken. I can’t overstate the damage this did to me growing up, nor the effect this has had on my adult life. It’s incredibly upsetting and harmful to be told, throughout your entire childhood, that you “should” be able to do certain things, and that the only reason you can’t is because you’re simply not trying hard enough.

In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…

Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!” Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again. This vote is legally binding. Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a console– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument. Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message. So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking

We stopped charging late fees because so many kids were being prohibited from checking out books due to small fines, and most of those kids were dropped off by parents without any money to pay. So we just forgave all the late fees and stopped charging them.

If you fall asleep in the library, we don’t wake you up. The adult world language section is filled with sleeping Asian grandparents, delicately holding tiny imported books. We only wake you up 10 minutes before closing.

We have a digital creation space and teach free classes on all the programs and equipment. Available whenever the library is open.