Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?
My relationship with my daughter has taught me the most about myself.
She is neurodiverse in ways that are more complex and more consequential than my own ADHD, and living closely alongside her has shifted my thinking about the old nature-versus-nurture debate. There is, I have come to believe, a limit to how much any of us can — or should — moderate ourselves simply to fit the world around us.
That does not mean there is no need to change. We all have behaviours we can work on, weaknesses we can accommodate and areas where support makes life easier. But contentment surely comes, at least in part, from understanding what is fundamental to who you are: playing to your strengths rather than spending your life trying to suppress them, while finding ways to manage the things that make life more difficult.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about my daughter is that where we clash, it is often not because we are opposites. It is because we are alike.
We are both sensitive and thoughtful, sometimes to the point of overthinking. We can be inventive and impetuous, creative and observant, non-conformist and indulgent. We care intensely. We love intensely. Some of those characteristics are strengths in one setting and vulnerabilities in another. The same quality that makes someone imaginative can make ordinary life harder to organise; sensitivity can produce empathy but also make the world overwhelming; refusing to conform can be liberating and exhausting at the same time.
Being her father has therefore made me examine characteristics in myself that I might otherwise simply have accepted without noticing them. It has also made me much less certain that the object of life is to become better adjusted to whatever happens to be considered normal.
Perhaps the more important task is to understand the person you actually are — and to build a life in which that person has the best chance of flourishing.
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