Who Needs Chairs? Definitely Not Bisexuals With ADHD
Who Needs Chairs? Definitely Not Bisexuals With ADHD
BY KAHINI CALCUTTAWALLA
My whole life, I’ve been incapable of picking a lane. No wonder I never learned to drive. Born on a cusp, a multihyphenate by nationality and profession, and bisexual to boot – clearly, I was put on this earth to sit on fences, and not on chairs.
Though the stereotype that bisexuals can’t sit on chairs might not be familiar to those outside the queer community, it’s long been an inside joke. (This bi chair, for instance, is especially designed to provide a diverse array of seating positions.) And if you have proximity to neurodivergent spaces, you’ve probably seen people with ADHD or on the autism spectrum who are similarly chair-challenged. Sitting, it seems, is a normie superpower, best achieved by people who prefer binaries.
Chairs are only the first link in the ADHD-bisexual cultural nexus. Could there also be a structural connection between sexuality and certain kinds of neurodivergence? Or to put it mathematically: if all bisexuals can’t sit on chairs, and everyone with ADHD can’t sit on chairs, do all bisexuals have ADHD?
While I discovered my sexual preferences around the age of 12 — technically pansexual, but who’s counting — it would take another 20 years to identify my ADHD. My perception of ADHD was outdated — the image of an ungovernable little boy bouncing around a classroom. The idea that I might have ADHD simply never occurred to me. Why would it, when I had no relationship to that unruly schoolboy?
Pop psychology has its pitfalls, including a tendency to categorize and pathologize any human quirk. Yet in this era of TikTok diagnostics, I began to see undeniably relatable patterns in ADHD content that would lead to my seeking professional guidance. The stream of childhood report cards bemoaning my great potential; the infamous “gifted kid”-to-burnout pipeline; the major depression diagnosis in my early twenties — all these seemingly disparate chapters in my origin story began to look more like puzzle pieces. Far from my assumptions about ADHD, I suddenly saw my own life and experiences being described in uncanny detail.
It’s not the first time that discovering my identity has really come down to finding the right definitions when the easiest ones prove inadequate. I had same-sex attractions from a young age, but I assumed that was totally normal for a straight girl. And I liked boys, so I was definitely a straight girl. It was only when I skinny-jeaned my way into the early ‘00s punk scene and discovered musicians like Billie Joe Armstrong and Gerard Way, that I learned the word “bisexual”. It was both a revelation and a homecoming.
The process of deciphering ADHD is less like a lightning bolt, and more like the interminable wait for the sun’s first rays when you’ve been trapped by a vampire.
The conditions that need to be met for identifying neurodivergence are highly individual, a real-time excavation of patterns, behaviors, and brain chemicals. However, like with sexuality, stumbling into a much larger community makes all the difference.
I started to see that people with ADHD were all around me, particularly women, often of color, who were diagnosed late in life. Most of them were brilliant, successful, and forthcoming about a condition over which I still felt shame and feared being seen as less-than. I spoke to a therapist who had ADHD herself and could immediately understand things that were unfathomable to neurotypical folks. “You’re textbook,” was her diagnosis. I was grateful she didn’t bother sugarcoating it.
Finding community is about realizing that more possibilities are open to you than you might previously have thought. It provides a necessary cultural context for people who aren’t otherwise represented in society or even in science. That’s how seemingly arbitrary stereotypes about sitting haphazardly on chairs or liking lemon bars become meaningful codes of bisexuality and ADHD.
Besides the similarities in the lived experiences of queer and neurodivergent identities, there’s an increasing awareness of the biological links between them, with some people embracing the status of “neuroqueer.” The LGBTQ+ community is 2.5 times as likely to experience mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse issues compared to their straight counterparts. These disorders also strongly co-occur within neurodivergences like autism or ADHD.
One study shows that more adults with ADHD are bisexual compared to the general population, with 30% of women identifying as non-heterosexual. While the research was conducted on people with ADHD and bipolar disorder (BD), assuming their novelty-seeking behaviors might lead them to seek out same-sex experiences, only the former group had such a strong correlation.
Another study shows significantly higher rates of autism in trans and gender-diverse people. If autistic is one of the most trans things you can be, as nonbinary journalist Jude Doyle puts it, then ADHD is certainly one of the most bisexual things you can have.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that I’m not alone in feeling that ADHD throws my sexuality into sharper relief. Being neurodivergent means thinking differently from most of the world, so that it becomes second nature to contort your mind into unfamiliar shapes. In this context, challenging binaries in other areas of life is just an extension of the self.
After all, I could like lemon bars because I have ADHD, and because I’m bisexual, and because lemon bars are simply delightful. We can reject the tyranny of asking people who exist on spectrums to choose, including when we ask it of ourselves.
On the margins and in all the spaces in between, the intersections of queer and neurodivergent cultures are coming to light, and truths that many people have known in their bones are finding some kind of logical expression. I can’t accept that the opposite of black-and-white is grey when it is so clearly a rainbow spectrum.
Neurodivergence is a spectrum, rife with comorbidities that cause “enormous frustration” to clinicians (which most of us could have told you for free.) Sexuality and gender have always been fluid and attention is in a global deficit, so maybe society could stand to take a few tips from the neuroqueer community. All I know for sure is that the sum of the individual experience is greater than its parts. As for binaries, they can go sit on a chair.
BIO: Kahini Calcuttawalla is a freelance writer and editor who covers culture, food, beauty, and anything else that catches her fancy. When she’s not writing under her own name or hanging out with her cats, she runs a content and ghostwriting agency.
