I got a 73% on my last test. Not because I didn’t understand the concepts, not because I didn’t study or had difficulty with the subject material. It’s where ADHD continues to prove how much of an inconvenience it can be.

We’re doing review algebra. The stuff they’re “reviewing” is actually all new to me, so I’ve been faced with the challenge of trying to understand new concepts that we only breeze over for a day or so. But I’ve done well so far.

Skip to the test. I have test-taking anxiety which means I am 10x more likely to get distracted or stumble over something.

I knew the concepts but out of 60-something points I only got 44, +1 because I answered a bonus problem correctly. All of the problems were ones that I did perfectly as far as the steps go. But what made me lose points was that in certain problems, I put the wrong sign down in front of a number and turned a negative to a positive. On another problem, I forgot to include a sign at all. In some, I forgot to put the variable down next to the number but included the correct exponent, or vice versa.

And so to that, people go “so why don’t you check over your work?”

I try. I show all of my work but as I’m looking over it, all of the numbers and whatnot register as a giant blob in my head and it becomes difficult for me to be able to separate one term from another while checking to see if I did the thing correctly. I end up getting lost in my own writing, end up looking at the wrong terms, etc.

My math teacher circled every little thing I did wrong and it was all silly little things and then I have people tell me to “pay closer attention at my work”