BY LEIYA SALIS
Mornings at my grandparents’ house, a tiny remnant of the Shōwa era in Sendai, start with a flurry of activity. My obaachan, a 5-foot-tall woman from Hokkaido, is up by 4 AM, chattering on the landline while solving Sudoku, then cycling through plum pickling and sweater knitting, all before her 10 AM power nap. Her corner of the living room is an altar of ever-growing stacks: boxes of yarn, felt scraps, a tower of unfinished Sudoku puzzles.
Meanwhile, my mother begins her day with tar-like coffee, slick with oil, then holes up by the piano for hours despite carpal tunnel in both wrists. If not lost in a sonata, she’s scouring the internet, indulging in hyperfixations: Shohei Ohtani, true crime documentaries, and 2000s thrillers. She prefers her hobbies over people, finding humans mildly entertaining at best, cumbersome at worst.
And then there’s me: burrowed in unfinished manuscripts, unaddressed postcards, half-licked stamps hanging on to the edge of an envelope for dear life, forgotten “DO NOT FORGET” lists, and a freneticism both worsened and bettered by caffeine and cigarettes. All symptoms of what my mother calls our “family inheritance.”
I come from a matrilineage of hummingbird-like souls. Our wings buzzing about as we hover over each passing moment, energies shimmering with effervescence. We do not move forward, linear or chronological. We burst and flit, driven by a temporality that exists outside of the bounds of space-time. We start projects with enthusiasm, but will flutter off to the next one when our attention is left idle for too long. Our interests materialize instantaneously, rise to crescendo, then burst into nothingness. We’re curious, but poorly suited for fastidious activities.
I come from a matrilineage of hummingbird-like souls. Our wings buzzing about as we hover over each passing moment, energies shimmering with effervescence.
It wasn’t until my ADHD diagnosis at 26 that I began to understand the mikka-bozu quality that has defined the women in my family for generations. Growing up, I wondered why my grandmother and mother struggled to find places where they could fully be themselves. My mother could guide me through my most meandering writing. My grandmother mastered any art medium within months. Their ever-moving, nomadic minds never ceased to amaze me. Yet they both felt they weren’t capable enough and that their brilliance only deserved the small audience of our nuclear family.
I learned early what Japanese culture expected of women. The yamatonadeshiko ideal that my grandmother and mother embodied perfectly in public — graceful modesty, razor-sharp perceptiveness, and nonconfrontational palatability — was something that I, too, internalized early in my life. To be a woman in Japan is to quite literally, “read the air” — to be an omniscient navigator of the unspoken yet ever-present “high-context” social rules .
I trained myself to be quiet, nondisruptive, amicable. I wasn’t the hyperactive child who couldn’t sit still, but rather the daydreaming student in the corner of the classroom. Although I felt like a clumsy alien in sapien flesh, I dismissed my divergences as quirks on good days, character flaws on bad ones. Yet underneath the poised mask were two sweaty palms clasped into tight fists, jaws clenched from holding back the urge to speak up in class.
My breaking point came suddenly. What began as harmless oversights at work morphed into messier issues, each one requiring more apologies, more one-on-one meetings, more redos. When my workdays began to stretch into nights and the Pomodoro technique failed me for the umpteenth time, I found myself spiralling into a confounding depression. I had done perfectly fine in school, had never failed a class, and could count on two hands the number of times I had missed a deadline. Why couldn’t I send a goddamn email?
Although I felt like a clumsy alien in sapien flesh, I dismissed my divergences as quirks on good days, character flaws on bad ones.
Desperate for an answer, I found myself on a psychiatrist’s plastic stool, in hopes of pharmaceutical salvation. Instead, I received a diagnosis.
I doubted him. And the two psychiatrists who followed and gave the same diagnosis. But when a friend who had been diagnosed with ADHD as a teenager shared her experiences with me, it felt like hearing my own childhood played back to me: a chronic procrastinator wearing the mask of the model student, a sensitive daydreamer constantly playing catch-up. I realized that I had spent my life carefully pruning myself — swallowing impulsive comments, forcing my fidgeting hands still, channeling my racing thoughts into neat, acceptable responses — all while a neurological storm raged within.
I had learned to hold in, rather than pour out. Gaman — to control oneself through self-restraint — creates a perfect straitjacket, a silk gag tied by our own hands, muffling the voices of women with ADHD .
But there’s only so much you hold back. With time, the facade cracks. These moments of eruptive outpouring and the inevitable valve release are part of everyday life in my family. In my obaachan: her perfectly orchestrated domestic activities followed by restless flitting from napping to gardening to knitting to napping again. In my mother: performing social competence through work hours, only to retreat the moment she logs off — a withdrawal that the world sees as antisocial rather than necessary. In myself: restrained workdays erupting into midnight hyperactivity; projecting competence while battling chronic fatigue. Each of our minds finding moments of inevitable release from the binds of cultural silencing.
When I shared my diagnosis with my mother, she responded with a bittersweet knowingness. She described always feeling different — unable to hold jobs, falling behind in college, friendships evaporating. And she shared a revelation about my grandmother too — a 1950s clerical worker turned homemaker who, beneath her perfectly coiffed blowout and ironed aprons, silently struggled alone. Though both found acceptance in their husbands and children, they lived for decades wondering about the restlessness in their minds. For three generations, we’d been wrenching our wings, attempting to glide with a body made to oscillate, twirl and flit.
Now I find myself in an unexpected position: first in my family to have the tools to make sense of, rather than tame, our neurodivergent minds. I watch my grandmother simultaneously knitting, following television, and jotting grocery notes — all with a new understanding. My sister has joined this multigenerational reckoning, recognizing herself as another bearer of our neurological signature. During family visits, we now compare notes and share epiphanies, anointing ourselves with the salve of recognition. My diagnosis hasn’t just changed how I see myself. It’s given me new language that has allowed a reframing of our patterns, not as flaws but as expressions of differently wired minds.
I’m 30 now, four years post-diagnosis. I sit with my obaachan, 84, my mother, 58, and my sister, 25, our cups filled with hojicha. I watch my grandmother’s never-still hands creating beauty from what others might call restlessness. I listen to my mother and sister discuss their latest fascinations with the depth that only a brilliantly hyper-focused mind can bring. And I, with my laptop overflowing with infinite tabs, writing about them.
The women I love. The women I come from. The women I carry in me.
We are all tapestried and kaleidoscopic, hummingbirds in women’s bodies, learning to live in a world that hasn’t quite caught up with our ever-flitting minds.
BIO: Leiya Salis is a Japanese-Ghanaian social practice artist and writer based in Tokyo, Japan. Her work explores the intersections of identity, media cultures, and cultural belonging from a candid, multicultural perspective, celebrating a way of being that is creatively, spiritually and intellectually nomadic.
