The ADHD of it all

Recently, I was diagnosed with ADHD. The path to seeking a diagnosis was spurred on by my sister about 2-3 years ago. Some background, my sister is a clinical psychologist who owns her own practice and facilitates testing for children and adults with varying degrees of neurodivergence. She is also my best friend and has literally known me since birth. We grew up in the same household for our entire adolescence and have been incredibly close into our adulthoods. My husband (who has a twin brother) frequently says my sister is my twin (we are 5 years apart).

So when she said on a random chit-chat phone call, “hey, do you think you had ADHD as a kid but we never got it checked out?” it holds a lot of weight. She doesn’t approach this from “I saw a TikTok and you also do this weird thing”, she is coming at the situation from a trained doctorate-level perspective working in the field.

Anyway, in true “there were signs” fashion, it would take me 2 plus years to mention it in passing to my primary care doctor. Immediately, they agreed and gave me referrals. 6 months later, I finally fill out a form online to inquire about testing. Thankfully, the testing facility, having tons of experience with individuals who struggle with follow through, did not let me slip through the cracks. They were on top of things and followed up to make sure I filled out the necessary paperwork. I did the testing and after a few weeks of waiting got my official diagnosis.

The tricky thing about being diagnosed in my 30s is that I’ve unknowingly been masking the symptoms of ADHD my entire life. I’ve been masking so well that my therapist even was a bit reluctant to accept the results. They trusted the doctors who tested me but in their opinion I didn’t ‘seem’ like I was struggling. I guess that’s overall a good thing. I’ve been able to survive 36 years without a diagnosis or any extraneous accommodations.

According to the testing facility, I qualify for workplace and educational accommodations. Would have been nice to have some of those in school or my corporate career. Now that I’m an independent artist who is self-driven and self-directed, outward accommodations are annoyingly unnecessary.

It’s a tough thing to wrap my head around. On the one hand it’s so nice to be like “okay, this makes sense why my brain is way faster than my mouth”. But on the other hand it’s almost like grieving the extra work and effort I was unknowingly putting in to simply exist.

I have had instances where I encounter someone with a newly diagnosed neurodivergence and it feels like they immediately latch on the the diagnosis as a crutch and an excuse for poor behavior or in some cases just straight up rudeness. Like how often have you been in conversation with someone who clearly stops paying attention halfway through and then they say “oh whoops, it’s my ADHD." or similar? I know I’ve had that happen to me a fair amount. I never want to judge someone for something they can’t help, but now knowing that I have the same diagnosis as those folks, I’m retroactively annoyed and frankly offended.

I can pay attention when I have to so why can’t you? I’m able to pull my focus to something that’s boring when I need to so you should be able to do it too. This isn’t fair though. Everyone is different. Maybe our brains work the same but I’m so used to masking and pretending to be like someone who doesn’t struggle that it’s second nature to me and the person who gets distracted mid-conversation is still learning those coping skills.

I know I need to be understanding to everyone’s differences and also try not to judge so harshly but part of me is like “well I masked this so well even my mother doesn’t believe the diagnosis, why can’t you just be better?” It’s mean and I know it. This is something I’m working on being better about. OH please believe that I would never say this to someone directly but having the internal monologue tinged with distain and a face that can’t mask my emotions is not a way to have covert feelings.