Page 18 of The Casanova Complex

This is the never-ending cycle of frustration with myself, my spicy brain, and my inability to do things that come so effortlessly to most people.

I was undiagnosed for most of my childhood, until my freshman year in high school when I realized just how truly debilitating my ADHD was.

It was then that I saw how much harder I was having to work to do something as simple as staying on task in class or completing the assignment once it was assigned instead of waiting until the last minute to start it because I couldn’t focus. How just because it seemed normal to me because I’d been doing it my entire life didn’t actually make it normal. I always assumed that ADHD was just procrastinating and the inability to pay attention, but I learned it was so much more. All of the little things like hyperfixating on a new hobby or a new TV series I’d discovered until I could almost recite the lines myself. Or the endless organizational systems that I’d discover and spend hours attempting to set up and implement into my life and abandon after the first three days. The endless cycle of starting but never finishing. Or how I could immediately notice when something was off with one of my friends or if something was wrong with a situation… I thought it was just intuition. My gut is trying to tell me something, but later I learned it’s something called pattern recognition. I learned that my overstimulation and moments of high emotional sensitivity were all just a product of a neurological function that I didn’t give credence to until I discovered how much it affected my life.

It was then, when I got an official diagnosis and was put on medication, my life changed.

The medication helps a lot, but it never fully quiets my endlessly restless brain that continually has a dozen different tabs open at once.

Once it wears off, my ability to retain things drops to a nonexistent place, and then I get frustrated at myself.

It’s not like law school isn’t going to be hard enough on its own. Add in a neurodevelopmental disorder that makes you feel helpless—love that for me.

It’s without a doubt going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s going to be the most rewarding too. It’ll be like climbing the world’s tallest mountain when I finally have my degree in my hand and pass the bar.

I did that shit despite my brain sabotaging me at every turn.

My phone vibrates for the third time in the last five minutes, so I shut the casebook and pick it up, swiping open the notification.

Six messages.

All of them from the only person I want to see or speak to even less than the guy I’m newly forced to partner with.

DICKFACE: Come over tonight and let’s talk. I miss you.

DICKFACE: Merritt baby this is so fucking dumb, I fucked up. I know I did and I swear to god on everything I love I’ll make it right.

DICKFACE: Just give me the chance to fix it.

DICKFACE: Fuck Merritt just talk to me.

DICKFACE: Whatever. I’m so tired of this bullshit. Remember, u did this. This is all on u. Not me.

DICKFACE: I’m sorry @3 I’m drunk as fk

I resist the urge to toss my phone across the room and settle for tossing it onto the bed beside my forgotten casebook.

Jesus, he’s such a fucking dick, and I have never been more thankful that he’s my ex and no longer my problem.

Truly, I know how to pick guys. I swear, whatever intuition, or radar, or whatever the hell you want to call it that girls are supposed to have in order to choose the right guy, the good guy… yeah, mine is horribly, irrevocably broken.

Apparently, the only guys that I know how to pick are ones who don’t actually want me.

I thought he was a good guy. He was patient and understanding when I couldn’t drive up to Lafayette to see him or had to cancel last minute because of stuff at home with Elliott or my dad. He said all the right things, paid attention, and made me feel special. Until he didn’t.

Until I found out it was all a lie. He was a lie. I realized it was love bombing to get me exactly where he wanted me. He never really cared about the things I liked beyond the surface.

I hate that I gave that idiot over a year of my life just for him to cheat on me with his “best friend.”

Yep, the one he swore up and down he was a hundred percent “just friends” with. That they’d been neighbors and best friends since they were in diapers, and she was practically family.

So, not only is he a lying, cheating, massive piece of shit… he’s also into incest.

Because I walked in on him fucking her.

I thought I would surprise him at his apartment one night when he got home late from an out-of-town trip with his boys. Drove two and a half hours just to walk in on my boyfriend railing another girl.

He couldn’t even deny it because I saw it with my own eyes.