New Publication!
Welcome, Learn About Us!
Writing about Code, Dance, Life, and More.
Overview:
Purpose
Hi there! I’m Joshua Mclean; you can read more about me here. Dancing Syntax is my new publication here on medium. It’s where you can find both my writings on code and dance, as well as contributions from other enterprising writers.
I’m a career transitioner with a storied past. Y’know that saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?” Well, my version of that is a twisted Rube Goldberg Machine, but hey, it’s working! Making changes in my life has been scary, especially in response to COVID-19 and healing trauma.
Deciding to write on Medium is not just to demonstrate my learning processes or show what I have learned, but to better record my progress and face those fears constructively with writing. Interested? Well, buckle up because it’s bellum contra te ipsum time baby, I’m going to war with myself!
Preclude to War
Today, I am setting my intention to contend with myself as a learner. I was born in 1994, just two months before the U.S prison population would jump past 1 million people, disproportionately affecting Black Americans. My mother, a single parent working two jobs, was determined that I’d get an excellent education, so she decided to homeschool.
That fed my curiosity well, and I developed a love for learning early on. There was just one issue, around four years old; I was diagnosed with ADHD. My mother was terrified of me slipping through the cracks in “the system,” so she treated the diagnosis as a fake label. A man even told her that such things would become my crutch if she let them. Thus, my ADHD went untreated for much of my life.
Redefining Self
The day before I wrote this, I went to my doctor’s office at 26 years old and completed the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1) Symptom Checklist. It’s a questionnaire broken up into two parts with 18 total questions. It asks readers to rate themselves based on a scale of Never-Rarely-Sometimes-Often-Very Often.
I answered “Very Often” to all but two of the questions, I was shocked at how closely the descriptions matched my experience. Growing up with ADHD felt like getting trapped in a room with the water level slowly rising. Early on, my behaviors were likened to those of any child, but that ebbed away as I got older. I felt that I was fighting a losing battle with my confidence and self-esteem.
Over the years, I’ve come to regard myself as anything but the quick-witted, badass, multi-talented, hyper-aware, and budding polymath that I know myself to be, but rather, a fraud. Just functional enough for others to have zero clues what’s going on (including myself), yet inattentive and struggling to perform tasks or conducting activities other people seemed to handle with ease.
Learning to care for me has been a journey. After graduating from the Software Engineering Bootcamp at Flatiron School, I felt that tackling ADHD and building better atomic habits are among the last few puzzle pieces I’ve needed to realize my potential and redefine myself altogether. It is my sincere hope that this publication also helps someone else find their puzzle pieces. I’m certainly not there yet, but I can see it!
What did you think about this post? We’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment about your own gripes with life’s lemons, ADHD, or just about anything else! Looking to find out more about Joshua? Read this story and follow him on social media!
Interested in contributing to this publication? Start a conversation with me at dance.syntax@gmail.com, I promise I don’t bite. 😁
