Arlette Deepalika Overman – Born 1966
Below – aged 10
Born to an Indian mother and a European father, Arlette was the only child of unusual parents, who not only had an age gap of 11 years, but also a cultural gap between very different continents. Sent out to India in the Second World War, Arlette’s father didn’t make it to Burma due to a catastrophic accident, he literally got blown up standing on a landmine. After amazing care he recovered enough to go round the world on a banana boat and then to become a Sikh and live in a community in what is now Pakistan.
Arlette’s mother was from a middle class family from Calcutta, university educated she made her home in Delhi in her 20s and there she met Arlette’s father whilst she was training at drama school. In the meantime Arlette’s father had had to escape Pakistan due to partition and had ended up a freelance writer and amateur actor, producer and lights engineer in Delhi.
Together they moved to the UK in 1963 and Arlette was born in 1966 in Kingston Upon Thames.
Arlette was sent to a boarding school in Bath with high hopes from her parents. Academically she was apparently 2 years ahead of herself and was considered gifted. Unfortunately there she suffered a great deal of misunderstanding, but battled on, we now know her problems were related to ADHD, probably alongside some autism, dyslexia and dyscalculia. Her initial giftedness seem to have cancelled out her disabilities and she masked her way through school with a smile and a skip, but deep down she felt she was misunderstood and different.
Failing to get any meaningful academic credentials, she focussed on music and scraped her way through a 3 year diploma course at the Guildhall School of Music and drama. Having been asked to retake her second year, she managed to come through with a third class degree, but to top it all her father died shortly before her finals, leaving her mother bereft and Arlette heavily weighed down with responsibility way beyond her immature years.
Arlette now realises that her mother must have also had ADHD. Thinking back they coped admirably after the death of her father, but it took its toll on them both and specifically Arlette and her career path, which never really took off. She married young and now fully understands that her husband has been the great support of her life.
Having nursed her mother, who lived with them, with frontotemporal dementia right to the end, Arlette found a niche for teaching music to young children and settled into a job, she thought was for life. Somewhere deep inside she knew she had not fulfilled her potential and sometimes felt very sad.
Aged 56 Arlette attended a compulsory talk on ADHD as part of her work and for the first time ever began to realise why her life had been so unhappy, unfulfilled and misunderstood. Impulsivity set in and following a burn out she decided that the phoenix was going rise from the ashes and she was going to make a difference in the world, somewhere, somehow, she was going to help prove that ADHD and other neurological diversities are something to celebrate, without them the world would be unbearably dull.