The Heroes of Our Own Stories

“You are the hero of your own story.”

It’s a quote that I loved and would requote often enough that my best friend thought I was the one who came up with it. Though Joseph Campbell said it first, my main character charisma characterizes the way I live my life because as I’ve alluded to in a past op-ed, it’s a trait that I believe I owe to my ADHD.

It’s a trait that I pride myself on, and one that allowed me to become fast friends with Seo “Ryu” Ryu, Ewha Womans University ’23, through a virtual conference. As our hour-plus-long call deep-diving into ADHD was winding down, I asked her if there were traits or aspects of her ADHD that she appreciated. She was glad I had asked, because if I didn’t, “We would only be talking bad about ADHD,” which, as she says, “is so not true.”

Neurodiversity Celebration Week was merely a few weeks ago, and April is Autism Acceptance Month with April 2nd marking World Autism Awareness Day. It’s within this context that I want to take the time and space in my column to shed light on positive aspects, traits, and experiences with neurodivergence.

As an important disclaimer, this piece is not meant to romanticize neurodivergence nor speak for the multitudes of identities and experiences that neurodivergence, or even more broadly, that neurodiversity encompasses. Rather, I want to provide more holistic insights into neurodivergent experiences, especially because my column has largely focused on challenges and obstacles neurodivergent individuals face.

Even within my own experiences, as someone with an ADHD and anxiety comorbidity, while I see my ADHD as a core part of who I am, I most definitely would not say the same for my anxiety, though I understand them both as contributing to my neurodivergence.

“I love your analogy, like you said, we're the main characters in the TV show,” Ryu tells me. To quote her, we both “always have something to talk about” and hear from our friends regularly that our lives are so dramatic, to which Ryu and I respond, “I know!” I love to joke with my friends that I handle mundane problems in “creative” ways because truly every moment in my life feels so important, that it’s practically cinematic — plenty of material for a sitcom and a stand-up special to boot.

After joking about how she once read ADHD described as “being high all of the time,” Ryu describes what she appreciates about ADHD, “We can find beauty in everything.” People with ADHD, she says, “see some – I don’t know, leaf, and then we just appreciate it so much.” She adds: “The emotion we feel is a lot more exaggerated than how other people feel, and the ADHD people tend to have a very strong creative side.” For Ryu, this creativity is channeled into a variety of areas, including her passion for art.

“It's like a coin. [ADHDers] appreciate everything, and they feel the beauty around them too much. And that really helps them with the creative side.” But “whenever the negative emotions come by, they’re blaming themselves or maybe [experiencing] depression. It also hits really strong. But it's so fun!” Ryu summarizes. The rollercoaster that is ADHD has brought us to countless interests, which as I know for me, are related to my hyperfixations, and, we’ve both found ways to hack traits like ADHD hyperfocus towards our own successes.

The constant quest for the next interest, the next challenge is a trait that Arash Oboodi ’22 and current GSAS Ph.D. student can relate to. “When I feel like I've accomplished something, my mind immediately wants to try something else because, like I said, I'm hyper-competitive and I'm always looking for a challenge. And when I'm not being challenged, I'm just incredibly bored.”

Oboodi, who has Asperger Syndrome and ADHD is extraordinarily talented in a variety of areas including math, pattern recognition, and poker. From a young age, he has been obsessed with math and patterns, which has helped hone his world-class poker skills. To scratch the surface of his poker accomplishments, he’s had a few instances where he was the number one online poker player in the world and has won the Full Tilt Online Poker Series, the Inaugural Event for just under $200,000 when he was 21, launching him to the top at the time.

Oboodi’s journey with poker is simply a legendary one. He began playing the game at 16 years old, illegally for money back when ID verification wasn’t around yet.

“When poker became mainstream, my brother started playing as a senior in high school and I, like every other little sibling, tried to emulate everything he did. So I picked up the game as well. And coincidentally and conveniently enough, the game was just all about quick math, pattern recognition, some intuition — and also it gave me an opportunity to have fun and compete.” Moreover, he describes the game as incredibly convenient for him because, at the time, he had panic disorder with agoraphobia, which limited his ability to go outside. Thus, poker gave him “an opportunity to make money without having to get a traditional job at a time where [he] didn't know whether [his] condition would improve.”

“Once you get used to the game, honestly the math becomes second nature,” he tells me. “It's all about picking up patterns at that point, like what would Person X do in this situation? What would person Y do in this situation?” Accordingly, he believes that “many intangibles” of poker “correlate with the core symptoms of Asperger's especially,” and would “definitely attribute some of [his] success in poker to the symptoms affiliated with Asperger's.”

As you may have picked up from my column, Harvard is, in a sense, as Oboodi explains, “a haven for neurodivergence. I say that despite the fact that a lot of the students here are probably undiagnosed and are neurodivergent in their own right, whether they just don't care to know or whether they're just unfamiliar with it.”

It’s all the more reason why your understanding and empathy towards everyone is crucial towards fostering both acceptance of neurodiversity and an even better Harvard community.

After all, we’re all entitled to being the heroes of our own stories. Maybe, in both big and small ways, we can be each other’s heroes too.

​Anuksha S. Wickramasinghe ’24 is a Neuroscience concentrator and Crimson Editorial editor in Mather House. Her column “Adhdventures” appears on alternate Wednesdays.