How’s that late-stage ADHD diagnosis treating me?
Don’t ask me that during the week it took me to refill my ADHD medication. I barely remembered my name.
But anyway, now that I am properly medicated and have focus again, I want to share a realization that sat me down and has kept me sitting.
When I did wear garments, I was trying to turn them into compression clothes.
At first, I would have said it was my millennial generation’s obsession with layering. I always wore a more form fitting layer under my shirts that unfortunately had to go once garments came into my life, and I honestly missed that comfort layer. I just felt better in my body with my pre-garment layering situation.
Of course, I soldiered on with garments, because obedience…until my body evolved with childbirth. With a belly and extra weight, I saw what a good bra and the right shape-forming underwear can do for a lady (except make me not fat – it’s fine that my body has fat).
And while a predilection for excessive layering is certainly a good start for garment wearing and changing bodies can throw a wrench in the works regardless, it’s really the ADHD underpinning this whole story (AuDHD, we’re circling each other in a will they or won’t they multi-season storyline, so stay tuned).
The first time I put on garments, following the initiatory and endowment, it was like putting on loose basketball shorts on under my dress. Horrid. The typical elderly volunteer at the distribution center who had helped me buy my garments sized me to my standard size clothes. Like a cat with an unfamiliar collar, I wasn’t sure how to exist or function with roomy underwear.
Three+ size reductions later, plus a shift from mesh to cotton to the Carinessa style, that fabric was skintight to my thighs and not moving an inch on my waist. Still, I always wanted them to be just a little bit tighter. A little bit more form fitting. A little bit more of that feeling of resistance pushing against my skin. When I moved to nursing garments, I felt that need for resistance even more.
I like the feel of a stiff, sturdy article of clothing “holding me.” It’s calming. Long before I ever knew about compression clothing and their potential value to neurodivergent people, and long before my body shape changed with childbirth, I knew I felt better in my body when my innermost layer of clothing was providing some resistance.
So while I have gratefully sidestepped the medical issues most associated with garment wearing, the neurodivergence connection has me floored.
At the moment, I have more questions than answers.
Does neurodivergence “count” for altering garment wearing in the same way we would say that people with UTIs can and should alter garment wearing so it can work for their needs?
I mean, yes, obviously. But also, can you imagine that conversation with a Bishopric member in a temple recommend interview? The roulette wheel would surely be spinning.
And then there’s the internal shame. That little voice that says, “but aren’t you just looking for an excuse to not wear garments? Can’t you sacrifice just a little more?”
Given the absolute slog it’s been just to get garments to be sort of compatible with women’s physical bodies (yay skirts and shifts options!), are we even ready for women’s neurodivergence-related garment issues?
I hope the answer to that question, someday, or better yet now, is yes.
Photo by MissLunaRose12 at Wikimedia Commons
4 Responses
NEURODIVERSITY:
I love this!
I can really relate. I am probably ASD AND perimenopause. Perimenopause, Menopause, and ADHD are all about “losing executive functioning” (among other things) – so a lot of women get a later diagnosis ADHD based on how their executive functioning “isn’t” functioning anymore. So I am trying to scaffold now becoming functionally AuDHD in 6 months, 6 years – I might even have a solid case at “arriving at AuDHD” now and be in ignorance about it.
GARMENTS:
Pressure doesn’t usually do it for me. But what would it have been like to have fake-velvet garments that acted like a gigantic blanket of softness? I wrap myself in a fake-fur solid-weight blanket every chance I get:)
NEURODIVERSITY AT CHURCH:
We are not ready for women’s neurodivergence at church – in any arena.
On a fundamental level, “women’s neurodivergence” = “women not meeting standard expectations (they diverge from them)” and hence “threaten the system”. Like the immune system, the organization can’t always tell the “benign threat of pollen” from the “actual threat” of a germ. Neurodiversity is one of those church threats generating the immune system wave of destruction.
Even if it is the benign lack of “executive functioning” going on – the church organization is not willing to pay the updated cultural infrastructure costs to allow women to have executive functioning/emotional labor limits. The church organization hides it well by deflecting those care tasks into becoming a “family decision” and “family culture”. Those situations where the family can’t make up the difference, they are covered by the “disability clause” in the Proclamation (in theory). But dragging ADHD/AuDHD/ASD into the medical deficit framework of how our culture talks about “disability” doesn’t provide accommodations (just “let’s resist shaming these people sometimes”). But that even gets wonky because ADHD/AuDHD/ASD are “hidden disabilities” in general at times – especially for women. So we have to “prove we are handicapped enough” and risk getting shamed for what we don’t have/what costs us differently then most women.
I never considered that my going slightly crazy in garments might have something to do with neurodivergence. But remembering back to wearing them, it really fits. They were just always touching me and I hated the feel. I am like the author of OP and like something firm next to my skin. So, I also layer and the Clarissa garment version didn’t exist back when I decided they just do not work for me. All they had for women were slimy, silky, baggy. And being a child sex abuse survivor, the not being in charge of my body and getting to choose what I wear was terribly triggering. I needed control of my own body. Wearing the garment was like being back trapped with my abuser and I got suicidal.
So, I know I am neurodivergent and ADHD but have never been officially diagnosed. Only, unofficially by having a psychology professor tell me, my daughter’s psychiatrist, say, yes absolutely I agree that you were raised by an autism spectrum mother. Stuff
Ike that, many times. And I have a Master’s degree in mental health, I know the diagnostic criteria. But I have never needed the official diagnosis. I know my issues and have learned to kinda cope. I refuse to be on the common medications for ADHD because I have seen the side effects in my family. My ADHD granddaughter goes from bubbly, silly, unfunctioning off her meds, to angry semi functioning on her meds and she hates what they do to her and she has lost all her friends over the anger issue. My daughter’s teeth are severely damaged from her meds. So, me, I have pretty much learned to mask or work around symptoms and …….. coffee. See, most of the ADHD medications are stimulants. And coffee has no dangerous side effects when I take enough to improve my brain functioning up to “medicated” levels. So, why get a doctor’s official diagnosis when I don’t like the prescription medications and coffee works for me.
Well, WoW. But my garment issues already drove me out of “worthy church member” status, and I just am not going to try. I could not satisfactorily explain that I cannot wear garments without being suicidal. My bishops could not understand my issue and all my trying to explain just bounced off their thick skulls. I can be a good Christian without being a “worthy” Mormon. God is fine with that and if the Mormon church isn’t, then it is just their loss.
So, if wearing garments bothers you, for any reason, then find underwear that works for you. The men at the top of the church are not psychologists who understand the issues of neurodivergence, ADAD, or many other things that cause garments not to work for a person. They have a one size fits all church. And if you don’t fit, they see no acceptable excuse and you are just evil. So, me, I have accepted that I just don’t fit in their religion and that is fine because God isn’t a one size fits all God. God made us all different, so he knows about those difference and He accepts us a He made us,
I was warned ahead of time to ignore the official sizing and go at least two sizes smaller. I went straight to cotton, no way did I want anything slippery, so from the start my garments were a pretty close fit. And as such, I actually found them not too uncomfortable when new, but started to bag with age. I did petition for stretch cotton which is a massive improvement. Loose and baggy would have driven me to distraction. I’d say we’re all ASD in my immediate family, though only our now adult kids have an official diagnosis, (one diagnosed as a child and the other sent as an adult for diagnosis by their employer).
Yes there’s a definite lack of inclusion or consideration of neurodivergence in a church setting. I cannot tolerate being crammed into an over full classroom and so no longer attend RS (it was moved from the chapel to increase unity, all that meant was the extroverts get to enjoy things and don’t miss those of us who no longer attend).
To concentrate on a sacrament talk I have to close my eyes. And as a short person the pews and chairs at church are just that bit too big for me to sit comfortably with my feet flat on the floor. I like to sit by a window, so I can look outside, and I move my legs/feet and /or twist my scarf a lot, particularly if a speaker is making me agitated.
I have an ADHD sibling (no official diagnosis) with an ADHD child (diagnosed as an adult) who was recommended cacao as a drink by a member therapist (because not coffee). Not to be confused with cocoa apparently, though they both originate from the same bean..
Fascinating. I have had the exact opposite response. I am extremely sensitive to compression or tight fitting clothes. Even jeans not made from 98% cotton (no 20% polyester here!!) are literally unbearable for me. As a thin women without curves except in my knees and calves I felt like I was being eaten by a boa constrictor starting at the calves. I literally felt I was coming out of my skin in garments. Add in the extra seams, need to adjust under pants, forced wearing of your bra over top when I first went through, and after twenty years I ended up in therapy because I would lay on my closet floor in tears of shame unable to get dressed because I couldn’t make garments make me hate myself less. The inability to comprehend a woman could also have a small pelvis and long legs, or a very long torso and tiny shoulders exacerbated it to unbearable measures. When the new v-neck tops came out and as a natural 30D the smallest size swamped my chest and shoulders but felt constricting on my waist I tore it off in a curse filled rage that now even my “God directed” underwear was shaming me for not caving to the standard Utah mommy makeover that would be required to make that top fit. It was in that moment that something inside me broke. I am no longer willing to believe I am the problem because underwear based on men’s underwear from 70 years ago or apparently constructed on male fantasy doesn’t fit me. I ended up in therapy just to cope with the existential crisis of needing to be able to choose how I dress. And for me that is the opposite of what a loving gift from God should represent.