Who Told You You’re the Antihero?

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It’s a Thursday night, a bit past midnight. For the first time ever, I’m at a listening party. I’m in good company, as we sit in a circle, with friends new and old, all Swifties, united for “Midnights,” despite the midterm mayhem. I subtly lean over to read every song's lyrics, absorb its stories, and weave them into my world. The melodies overlay memories I’m reliving, summer crushes, shattered dreams, forevers that last two years, nevers that last two seconds. Here, nestled in Leverett’s G-Hutch, hidden under the stars, I’ve never been more sure that I’m exactly where I need to be, a feeling that’s always been my golden snitch.

This year has been messy. I’ve lost confidantes, found allies, disappeared, reincarnated, broken, and healed. For all the wax poetic I do, more often than not, I feel like I’m doing it all wrong. I watch as the world marches onwards, as the people around me, floating and jiving, form a perfect scene without me. I belong somewhere, but not there.

Long before “Anti-Hero,” the Taylor Swift song, existed, I’ve felt like I’m an antihero. It’s that I’m not heroic, exactly. Rather, I’m not conventional. I’ve never been conventional. I oscillate between the effervescent Anuksha, charismatic and charming, sweetly optimistic, bouncing with a hint of god complex, and the antihero Anuksha, self-identifying as crazy and dramatic, before someone else can say it to me, as they do, sitting in the dark for hours to escape the overstimulation, hypercritically analyzing and reviewing actions and behaviors, worried I’m a bad person. I’m a lot, easy to like, hard to love.

My whole life I’ve felt misunderstood, outside of very select spaces where people proved me wrong, grabbed my hand, had my back, proved to me that they were ready to root for an antihero, camped out even after I’d reminded them they don’t have to do this. They’re why I’m here. Aside from them, everyone’s always had their own story to tell about me, where “antihero” would have been, frankly, generous based on how I was treated. I figured why I didn’t and would never fit in was straightforward: high school in Florida, where racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia never cease. At Harvard, I thought I’d find my people, once and for all catch the snitch and never let go, no longer searching for belonging. And yet, three years in, I still feel more like a villain than a hero. I’m texting my best friend, “maybe i’m entering my villain era idk,” with her trying to negotiate that I’m at least an antihero or a vigilante. Reframe my self-loathing tendencies with a little Thesaurus.com.

Charlie King ’24, who was unaware that they were autistic, grew up believing that “there was something inherently evil and wrong” with them. They once felt that their experience of resonating with the psychopathy label because they “connect with empathy differently,” was niche, though they’ve since heard from others that it’s more common than they once thought.

“No matter how hard I tried, I was always the bad guy,” King says.

Within the neurodiversity umbrella, a number of its conditions are described as an all-encompassing experience. For me, my ADHD is fundamentally intertwined with my being, my perception, my identity. Especially, and often with “co-morbidities that color that [experience] even more,” as King notes, there’s no easy or concise way to neatly describe any singular neurodivergent reality, no matter how hard the DSM 5 tries. For King, they wish that people understood, neurodiversity “is a lens that applies to everything, and you really cannot separate it from every single thing that you do.”

“There is nothing I can do wherein I am a person without autism,” King states.

To a certain extent, speaking for myself, to resent my ADHD is to resent myself.

In its diagnosis, neurodiversity is at best described reductively, typically within a framework that implicitly demands the individual smooth and shapeshift themselves into the scene, become painted on a canvas of unwritten principles.

For example, as King explains, even ADHD itself is a misnomer, because though “the symptom that was most seen in the diagnostic pool was sort of an inability to concentrate” by researchers and observers, that symptom barely scratches the surface. In reality, the disorder is infinitely more than the singular symptom of attention issues. It’s a fundamentally different neurotype, with great minds from Da Vinci and Einstein suspected to have had it, along with autism. We praise them for their work, their history, their legacy, their creativity, their neurodiversity; meanwhile, we ostracize neurodiversity when we hear its terminology or recognize its unfamiliarity.

“It is our duty in our broader equity work to understand the impact of neurodiversity, its relevant intersectionalities, to create a more just world,” King states.

Mainstream understanding simply doesn’t center neurodivergent individuals for themselves. Instead, it feeds into the villain narrative, of how specific symptoms burden others. What are villains if not those fighting against the world?

“The validation by other autistic people that we can't navigate the world is what has quite literally saved many of us, myself included.” King tells me. “the world is not prepared to take an equitable lens to neurodivergence and disability justice point blank.” If nothing else, “understanding that other people are also on the same side of feeling misunderstood, feeling isolated is validating.”

Even as dialogue surrounding mental well being rises, it still feels surface level.

In my experience, it feels as though most people empathize insofar as I’m not a burden to them, which isn’t hard, nor is it real empathy. When I slip up, when the antihero is all I can be, and I acutely feel the discomfort. When relatability morphs into pity, my worthiness is withdrawn.

It’s hard to be the bad guy, especially when you never truly ever were the bad guy. It’s “a really hard way to grow up because not only do you have such negative input from other people, but you have negative self input,” as King relays.

So now, as a junior in college, I still bounce from space to space, finding pockets where I’m not an anti-hero, just me, in listening parties with my fellow disabled Swifties and company, conversations with a six-year-old swinging on Mather gate, lo-fi iPhone karaoke on long walks back to campus after late-night lab socials.

I’m not scared anymore of people giving up on me, walking out on me, or even simply forgetting me. But, I don’t want little kids growing up to think they’re an antihero or a villain, when in reality, it’s the world that turned its back on them. I’ll still be a seeker, and when I catch the snitch, I’ll remember I’m worthy, of like and of love, of community and camaraderie, of advocacy, of justice.

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