This is long post, so sorry guys. I write too much, a lot is going on atm and I need to process.

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I'm 35f and I've gone back to college. In the UK, colleges are where you go after you leave school and you generally start at 16 , so me being turbo old there is kinda weird but the students have been really kind to me - thanks Gen Z! Best generation. :D Never let anyone tell you any different lol.

I didn't get to be a teenager the first time around, my teenage years 20's got eaten up by PTSD and survival. I've had undiagnosed and very severe ADHD my whole life as well as PTSD and other assorted co-morbids (depression, anxiety and such). I was severely abused at home. I'm probably also a touch Autistic as well, but I don't meet the true criteria for it and that's fine. I'm a woman so my issues have been invisible - you know the drill. I've been severely disabled by my ADHD, and I overcame severe physical disabilities too. The physical disabilities I did to myself really, due to ADHD making me not look after myself until I stopped being able to walk properly (also drug abuse takes a serious toll on the body, various serious self harm things).
When I got diagnosed and medicated last year, I put in so much effort that I don't need a cane to walk with anymore and even better, I can keep up with my classmates, lol. This is probably one of my biggest achievements - it's incredibly rare to be able to come back from that.

I'm looking at these young people now, and when I was their exact age I was homeless (my house / family was too unsafe for me to stay around) and I was doing drugs to cope with my reality. I got thrown into psych wards and mistreated in those too. It's really weird to realise how young I actually was, now I see these teenagers, and I can really see how cruel people had been to me for me to end up in that situation. When you're young you feel really old, but when you're old you see youth for what it really is. It's really messing with me how abused I was.

Sigh, therapy time again probably :)

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I'm doing Chef training. I'm medicated atm but it's still not enough (I suspect it will never be enough). I just got taken off Concerta XL and I'm on Elvanse now and I'm adjusting to that (so I am under medicated atm). It's a bit rough to start a new ADHD med right at college start but such is the cruelty of life I suppose.

In my panic during my first practical lesson, I forgot how to dice up an onion. I'd just been shown the way we would be dicing up onions and I forgot it immediately. I felt so dumb, like I wanted to cry, and one of the girls was copying me and I said "oh no, no don't do that! I don't know what I'm doing atm!" but the tutor didn't hear that bit and said I was "throwing them under the bus". I don't think he meant it in the worst way, but it really hurt. I suspect he does not want to hear "excuses" (to me they are explanations but people don't take it that way for some reason).
Emotional Rejection / Dysregulation issues are HARD and our tutor is a real Chef, so he's got a way of stabbing you emotionally that is very specific to the profession, and very painful. I need to get tougher somehow. I don't know how to get tougher. Does anyone know how to get tougher? :(

I really hope that I can do this course because right now I feel like such an idiot. I know I am over-thinking how much my mistakes in that lesson matter, but it does not stop me fixating on said mistakes. I cut my other vegetables wrong too - though ultimately it's fine, we turned it all into a soup. It was our first lesson, we're all going to do it wrong (and we did), he knows that and I know that but I am being really savage to myself about it all the same. It's like my age means I have to be better or something. I should know better - but I can't explain to anyone that I didn't get to live life normally like they did, because it's really extreme. I can't meet the (neurotypical) standards the tutor blatantly thinks I should naturally be at I think. To make it worse I'm vegan lol so all I do is work with vegetables and I forgot how to dice an onion. Fucking ADHD, seriously. It was the overwhelm I think, my brain just short circuited.

I was also too freaked out trying to learn where everything in the kitchen was, and it kicked in the "I can't see a thing even if it's right in front of me" issue, so I also felt like a real idiot running around the place unable to find things that were right there.

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I feel like I am slower than everyone else somehow (it seems to take ages for me to do things in general vs everyone else and I don't know why), and I keep missing weird things I should not have missed. I am being so careful to listen to everything the tutor says, but I somehow still missed that I had to have two bowls for the soup prep: one for waste, one for chunky offcuts that we could turn into a Mirepoix (a rough cut of veggies often used as a base for various dishes), and then a third tray to demonstrate our cutting techniques. I got the waste bowl and the tray ready, but I think I threw the chunky offcuts into the waste bowl and then couldn't really fish them out due to onion skins etc making it less than ideal. How did I miss that other step, he even demonstrated it and stuff I don't get it :( I had the two bowls out in front of me even, you know?

My soup didn't taste right compared to the others. I think it's because they took all the carrots before I could get to them, but it still makes me feel like I failed. I think that us not being allowed to use other things for that first lesson hurt my style, because I would have fried off the very watery vegetables in order to make more flavour and reduce overall water. My soup was very watery. Apparently I didn't make enough Roux (it's a thing to thicken the soup in this case), but he didn't let us measure things because it was a test of sorts I think, of our instincts.
Realistically it was out of my control, but my brain keeps going "Chef thought poorly of me because I'm old and should be able to do this", "Chef thought poorly of me because I made a mistake and another girl trusted me to know what I was doing when I didn't, and he said something mean about it". On my first day :(

I keep not knowing the names of vegetables - like you know the ADHD thing where we can't recall information properly because our brain can't access information correctly? OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP. I didn't know what a turnip was - wtf, I eat it all the time. I didn't know the names of any of the vegetables other than like a carrot, and I eat them all the time. I'm vegan lol, all I do is eat vegetables in one form or another.

I feel like I'm some ultra-dumb, next-level fuckup but I'm not (I hope) - I'm smart in here guys, I just can't show it in any meaningful way. I just really really have problems :( The tutor knows but he's not brought it up or anything, but man, Chef is a tough cookie. He's the veteran of 1000 kitchens, master of 1000 recipes sort of Chef. He's been a Chef for longer than I've been alive.

I really want to do this. I really want to make something of myself. I dragged myself all the way up from ADHD drug abuse hell, beat my body back into working condition, so I could get a job and become one with society, only to finally get here and not know how what a fucking Courgette (Zucchini) was.

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I don't have much more to say, just that I'm making myself feel bad in some sort of perpetual loop. It's likely a very mean hyperfixation.

I am really proud I managed to get to college this late in the day, what with all the judgement and stigma you get for doing that, and I'm also really proud I managed to get a room full of 16 year olds to like me, AND they feel like I'm not weird for being there.

Those are the things I'm proud of. Could someone please magically make the "you cut an onion wrong, you stupid idiot" bit stop for me? I'd really like that right now.