u/tellmeajokefunnyguy

Maybe I'm being crazy here, but having ADHD by definition is already enough to claim that destiny is not neurotypical.

I might be wrong but from what I know, Destiny has been essentially untreated for his ADHD for decades and only very recently even considered taking medication for it, no?

ADHD is often just kind of shrugged off as "talks-too-much-and-doesn't-concentrate"-itis but it's often a leading cause for massive childhood trauma and a VERY common cause of creating comorbidities that impact your life in extremely negative ways.

Whether it's due to being different in a way nobody acknowledges or from struggling when trying to keep up with normal-people standards in work, chores, planning etc...

Just off the top of my head, here's what ADHD people often struggle with that most people are ignorant to.

Some are direct, common symptoms of having ADHD; some are very common comorbidities.
(For those who don't know, comorbidities are conditions that occur with higher-than-chance rates in people with a certain affliction. As an example, someone with severe eczema might be at a higher risk of depression due to how their perceived attractiveness and quality of life go down. Keep in mind that I'm speaking out of my own experience and may be more deterministic than is appropriate.)

Executive Dysfunction: Arguable one of, if not the worst.

Extreme struggles with doing the things you know you are supposed to do, but can't bring yourself to start or finish.

There's a reason this guy never created a J6 video, despite how much he thought about and planned for it, and I'd be willing to bet money this has something to do with it.

This can keep you from "small" things like personal hygiene, all the way to hindering you from staying in contact with people you genuinely like, because even replying to a text starts to feel like in insurmountable wall of a task.

A lesser version of this is having task initiation problems, where you generally suffer the same thing but it's tied to actually starting them, after you get to that point, you are generally fine to continue until it's finished.

Reward Dysfunction:
ADHD Brains are essentially in constant need of novelty, urgency and challenge, especially when combined with their own interests.

I'm not saying it's definitely the case, but one could argue this is one of the reasons as to why Destiny prefers talking to people who he can have intense disagreements with over people that just agree with him on most things.

Circle-Jerking is generally boring and repetitive to people with ADHD unless there's a novel aspect to it. (a common one would be reaffirmation after learning helplessness from a lived-in situation, like abusive parents, dealing with a chronic illness or a psycho ex)

Poor Impulse Control: I don't think I need to explain this one.

Emotional Dysregulation:
People with ADHD can start out their life as very emotionally intense, easily irritated, impatient, quick to be frustrated etc...

This, paired with other symptoms and a constant feeling of having to manually do what other people can just do without even thinking about it can lead to the next stage where things 180 from intense to flat.

the trauma-buildup (yes trauma can be persistent emotional papercuts rather than a big event) and "emotional callusing" creates the inverse condition: emotional flatness. This is often also a shared symptom of -

Major Depression / Dysthymia as a comorbidity : Long bouts of extreme lack of motivation and emotional flatness in the case of the former, Dysthymia makes these symptoms persistent regardless of phases and leads to, one of the most common yet extremely underdiscussed comorbidities of untreated ADHD.

I could go on and on and on, but TL;DR:
ADHD causes a cascading effect of negative symptoms reinforcing each other over and over in a death spiral for years because you're normal enough for people not to think you're mentally ill, but mentally ill enough to never find yourself being normal or fitting in perfectly. I think a lot of the issues that people find in Destiny is just them being mad that he isn't acting neurotypical all the time and, in many cases, getting self-conscious over it or projecting onto him.

With such things in mind, having normal connections, normal hobbies, normal work ethics (like not playing a game while debating) and similar becomes much harder for people with ADHD - especially those who went untreated for a long time.

Pretending like they're mentally more stable than people with BPD is, in my opinion, ableism caused by the fact that BPD has symptoms that are seen as much more obvious and immediately off-putting to some people, especially with hindsight.

In reality, they have so much symptomatic overlap that occasionally people with one get diagnosed with the other, and are both heterogenous, meaning that severity in symptoms is so varied that you can't even reliably compare one BPD / ADHD person to another.

Both are conditions that heavily affect and hurt those who have them, but ADHD becomes a lot more internal and hidden with age or better masking abilities (also much much MUCH harder to treat with conversation-only therapy and impossible to just grow out of)

I believe it's very realistic for someone like him to develop a high tolerance for emotional intensity and conflict, which makes him more likely to enter and stay in volatile relationships.
(Not to mention that he likely just empathizes with people that share a similar type of trauma a lot more than one might expect. )

Seems like whenever those relationships become public and messy, outsiders retroactively interpret the pattern as intentional selection of “unstable partners,” when it may instead be a byproduct of what he normalizes and tolerates in real time due to his own neurodivergence.