Forced into a box

Hey, MisWired here. And today I want to have a little chat. I've been thinking about my insecurity and lack of motivation, and I've noticed some things about myself. As I've said many times before, I was diagnosed with ADHD relatively young, at 13 to be exact, and I never fully accepted it until halfway through my university life. And because of that, I was constantly fighting a part of myself, constantly trying to suppress it as it was not becoming of me. Due to that suppressing, I never fully was comfortable with myself, always putting up a facade because I never knew otherwise. It's kinda funny, because everyone tells me that I'm one of the most genuine people they know, and yet I hide a lot of myself out of fear that people wouldn't want to be around me. Somehow, I had convinced myself that I would never be loved, and that no one would want to be around me if they get to know the real me. What's even worse, I tend to have negative thoughts about myself, especially when I feel like I'm not living up to society's expectations, and I have a hard time asking for help, not because I feel like it makes me weak but I feel like I should have my act together at the age of 26. And the fact that I tend to hold in all my insecurities, all my fears, all my paranoias, doesn't help things much, at least for me from a mental health point of view. I guess all those years of people telling me that I wasn't living up to my potential ended up having a negative effect on my self-view. Even though I'm kinda working through them, the fact that getting quality help in Kenya is so gosh darn expensive, I feel bad for people who are going through the struggles I'm going through but can't afford it. People who for years have been belittled and criticized for being themselves, especially when they struggle with a mental disorder. I know I'm not exactly in the position to be saying this, but sometimes we tend to unknowingly slight people with the way we talk to them and about them. So hopefully I made sense, I know I tend to ramble on, but I felt that this was something that I needed to talk about.