Hyperactivity¿
“Can I do skipping for 5 minutes and then we can resume studying?” That’s what I said in every class to my home tuition teacher, every single day, from Class 6 to Class 10. I couldn’t sit still for long. I could if I really tried. But I wanted to move. Eventually my tuition teacher and I landed on a deal: I’d jump rope as a reward, every 30 minutes into our sessions, and then we’d get back to work.
To outsiders, looking at my okay-to-normal academic performance, it seemed like “he doesn’t need home tutors.” My tuition teacher herself sometimes said as much. But I knew I needed her. I needed her to give structure to my schoolwork. I needed her as a body double. I needed her to plan things out loud with me. I’m grateful my mom, who only studied until Class 10 herself, put me into home tuition early, and that everyone let me jump rope every half-hour without making it a thing.
Learning dis/abilities¿
Textbooks were genuinely hard for me to understand. I’d write, re-write, and write again, just to make sense of what was on the page. Alongside the usual classwork and homework notebooks, we maintained what I called “record books.” Today I know what those record books were actually doing: they were supporting my working memory. As simple as replacing every “this/that/it” with the actual noun, because by four lines down the page I’d have forgotten what was being referred to. They also had other supports, what I’d now recognise as cloze deletion cards, the kind people use Anki for today.
After Class 10, I was stripped of those home-tuition support systems. That was when I discovered mind mapping, and got hyper-focused on chemistry, organic chemistry specifically.
New Foundations¿
Life took various lows, and many of my other ADHD traits got louder, along with a new list of sensitivities: to light, to cold, and contagious yawning that wouldn’t stop once it started. Until then, my view of the world had been like the Tom & Jerry show, one where faces are never shown. So as I started undergrad, I set myself one main goal: look people in the eye.
To support my learning, I took Jim Kwik’s 12-week Recall memory masterclass. To live more consciously, I took Mindvalley’s Lifebook program. Both of these, taken in 2021, became foundations for the years that followed.
I think about my own development across distinct domains: My Career Life, My Social Life, My Love Life, My Emotional Life, and My Life Vision. Standing on those new foundations, I pushed hard on the first two (Career and Social), and eventually earned the “All-Rounder of the Year” award.
Then, during my gap year, while preparing for the Joint Admission for Masters (JAM), my first attempt at nurturing My Love Life acted as a mirror. It exposed a deep, neglected need for healing. I was still far from being the fully balanced human the “All-Rounder” label suggested.
I got an All India Rank of 197 and admission into IIT Delhi. I remember telling myself I’d get some interesting lines written on the palms of my hands (often thought to represent fate), because apparently folks from these top-tier colleges have their “lives changed” when they get in.
It wasn’t quite déjà vu. But life at IITD felt more like another mirror, this time held up to my undergrad, and to all of my schooling. After years of persistent self-doubt and countless physical tests on campus (including inconclusive MRI scans), I finally walked into the campus mental health services.
Four months of assessment.
The answer: Autism and ADHD.
It suddenly made sense why my undergraduate goal had simply been to look everyone in the eye. I began medication, psychoeducation, and trauma-informed therapy. Three incredible women guided me through 100+ sessions (and counting, since 2024) to help me understand my own brain wiring. I was, for the first time, truly getting an education. And I was finally beginning to nurture My Emotional Life.
I continued getting education from IITD.
I dropped in on some elective courses.
And I decided the little-known concept of ‘ADHD Coaching’ in India is the interesting line I now stand on, marking the start of another important category of my human development: My Life Vision.
A line from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous holds what I’ve chosen to share here:
“...so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.”