I’m in first grade. My teacher snaps her fingers near my ear, snapping me out of a daydream. I’m in second grade. My twin sister tests into the gifted program at school. I don’t and I’m embarrassed. My mom tells me I’ll just have to work harder. I’m in junior high and I’m the teacher’s pet, except for the times I get in trouble for talking too much. I’m in college and it’s the middle of the night and I’m racing to finish a paper that I had three weeks to work on but couldn’t make myself start it until now.
Once I start writing, I write like a person possessed and the next time I look up, the sun is coming up.
I’m 24 and I accidently blow up the most important relationships in my life by being impulsive and blurting out a secret I wasn’t supposed to share. When the dust clears, I’ve literally moved to another country to escape from the mess I made. I put the plane tickets on my credit card that already has a hefty balance because while I am working two jobs, I have no money in savings. I’m 35 and I’m trying to write a dissertation but I can’t because I’m too distracted by chores and kids and books and the internet and I just can’t make myself write. I eventually have to relocate to a cabin in the woods and turn off the internet to get it finished.
I’m 42 and a doctor smiles at me from the Zoom screen and confirms what I’ve been suspecting since I started working from home: I have ADHD.
Like a lot of women who were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, I was never tested for the condition as a child. As far as I know, nobody ever even suspected I had it. Sure, I was a bit of a chatterbox and was prone to daydreams, but I was never hyper, never the kid who disrupted class or got into trouble. I mostly did well in school, especially in subjects that involved reading as I loved nothing more than getting lost in a good book.
But I also never did as well as I could have. I procrastinated. I spent all my time sucked in to the subjects that I liked and did the bare minimum for the things I didn’t think I was good at.
I always thought I was a procrastinator or a perfectionist.
I would get so frustrated with myself for the ways I made my own life harder. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t make myself get things done unless I was so hyper focused that I lost all track of time? I kept pushing myself to do better, to go farther, to get a master’s degree and then a PhD, all the while thinking that I was never quite as good or smart as other students in my program.
Since I’ve been diagnosed, so many things about myself make sense now.
ADHD can present as the fidgety little kid who can’t sit still in class and struggles academically. But it can also look like me: impulsive, prone to overspending, capable of deep thinking and hyper focus, perfectionism that looks like procrastination, low self-esteem stemming from internal frustration with our inability to make life easier on ourselves by just being more like everyone else.
In a lot of ways, I was lucky when I was diagnosed with ADHD.
After the roller coaster that was my 20s, I got therapy. I figured out ways to get organized and to give myself structure (I’m the queen of a to-do list and a schedule and am a calendar and email wizard). I figured out how to first like myself and then later love myself. By the time my ADHD diagnosis came along, I didn’t feel any stigma that might come with that label. I just felt relief. I really had done the best I could, for so many years. There was actually something that was making it harder for me to be the person I wanted to be and it wasn’t a lack of hard work or intelligence on my part.
ADHD may be a label, but it’s one that feels really easy to wear.
