How I Stopped Worrying and Figured out that I have… Adult ADHD?!?

I’ve always had a hard time paying attention. For me, focus is a five-letter word that goes in one ear and out the other, but it’s one that I heard a lot in school. I was always fidgeting, restless, shaking my leg, or looking around the room at other people because they were more interesting than the math assignment sitting half-finished, and mostly wrong, in my duotang.

I hated math. I hated it with a passion. I never felt more stupid than when I had to take that long walk of shame up to the chalkboard to solve a long division question in front of the class only to be told “that’s not right.” I tried so hard to be good at math. I remember sitting with my parents trying to figure out my math homework while these big, frustrated tears slid down my cheeks. Everyone else got it, why couldn’t I? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The numbers and equations looked alien and scary, and there came a point where I didn’t want to try anymore.

My parents were beyond supportive. My mom told me that it was okay, that I would make it through, and that I was good at other stuff. It was true. I could do cartwheels, backflips, handstands. I could tell jokes; I could do impressions. I could play advanced songs on the guitar by the time I was seven or eight. I was creative. I put on plays and made up songs. I was a good singer, so my parents put me in choir. I was in the school band. I loved to draw and did it constantly. I was a strong writer and I loved to make up stories. I loved art, all of it, and it was all I wanted to do.

I remember we had these journals in second grade where we would have to write about what we did on the weekend and draw a picture to accompany the written entry. I made up wild and elaborate stories and got in trouble for lying. I just didn’t want to write about how the only thing we did that weekend was go to Ikea to get a new tablecloth, so I elaborated. In the film industry, my embellishments would be on the same level as punching up a script. You make it tighter, funnier, zanier. I was doing some advanced-level shit in the second grade that I don’t think was appreciated.

I’ve gone off on a tangent. I apologize. I tend to do that.

I got in trouble for “zoning out” in class, especially math and science. I would just sit there staring through the chalkboard with this glazed over look on my face and my teachers had a hard time breaking me out of that headspace. I was busy daydreaming, or sometimes just thinking about nothing. It was one of the few times in my life where my mind was quiet and I had a break from all of these loud, racing, intrusive thoughts.

This is a common ADHD symptom and it sometimes happens because someone will say a word or a phrase that triggers a thought, which triggers another thought, which… you get it. By the time we finally come back to earth, we’ve missed almost all of what was said. I did this a lot as a kid and I remember my mom telling doctors about it, but not one of them suspected ADHD. Although, in hindsight, combined with some other stuff, maybe they should have looked a bit deeper into it.

In high school, things got worse. Math and science classes were mandatory and hellish. We had locker checks and my locker was always a disaster. My backpack was a mess. I didn’t have binders for some classes, just sheets of loose-leaf paper shoved into my bag that I’d have to file through like some manic secretary. I forgot homework assignments all the time. We had planners that our parents had to sign, but I never used mine, and I got in trouble for it constantly. I lost homework, lost books, and was just generally a tiny disaster shoved into a teenager’s body. I tried to be organized, but I could just never make it work. I was late all the time, despite living a ten-minute walk from the school. My locker was messy, my room was messy, my brain was messy. I struggled with depression and tried different medications, but nothing really helped. If I could sum up my teenage years with one word it would be: meh. I was utterly unremarkable.

When we got a computer when I was fourteen, I spent an entire summer learning how to code websites by hand instead of doing literally anything else. I was obsessed with learning about it and eventually could code 90% of a website from memory. That’s something that I recognize now as hyperfocus. ADHD brains fixate on a subject, a thing, a task, or sometimes a person, and turn our complete attention to it. It’s almost impossible to break us away. This often falls hand in hand with executive dysfunction. For me, this meant that it was hard to break my hyperfocus to do things like eat food, drink water, go to the bathroom, get ready for an appointment, clean my room or my apartment — you know, all of the basic things that humans need to do to survive. My brain could shut off feelings of hunger so that I could continue to focus on what I was doing. I hyperfixated and hyperfocused with other stuff too: books, movies, musicians, serial killers (in my defence, they’re very interesting, it’s just that nobody wants to hear you talk about Jeffrey Dahmer for four hours), types of music, and random subjects. I immersed myself in knowledge about these weird niche topics instead of getting my homework done.

It’s not that I couldn’t pay attention, my problem was that I just couldn’t focus my attention on doing the things that I should be doing.

Again, I excelled in the arts. I was in advanced guitar classes on the second day of eighth grade. I loved it, and my guitar teacher adored me. I loved classic rock, so we’d play Eagles songs, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin while the other students were still learning basic chords. I loved playing guitar so much that, again, I became obsessed with it and picked things up so quickly. I had an innate gift for it, and my guitar teacher never failed to encourage my musical ability. It was one of the only positive experiences I had in high school. I got bullied, but in that guitar room, I was a rock star.

I did go to college after high school because, in grade 12, I discovered criminology. I was hooked immediately. Totally obsessed. I ended up with 100% in the course and my criminology teacher encouraged me to continue on in the field. I found higher education difficult. I struggled with mandatory classes like psychology, statistics (which I failed), and was a pretty average student. There just weren’t enough criminology courses to maintain my interest, despite the fact that I always did exceptionally well in those classes. I got my associates degree and peaced out to go to acting school.

Looking back, I’m not sure if I felt a real calling to be an actor. I was definitely creative and I loved to perform, but I’m also very much an introverted, solitary creature. I can amuse myself for hours and I love to be alone. I always have. But, I applied to Vancouver Film School, got accepted, and went on this totally bananas journey anyway. Maybe I was bored, maybe I was searching for some kind of meaning or purpose, or maybe I was just a 23-year-old with ADHD who thought “This looks like fun! Let’s try it! I might be good at it!”

I loved it. I was fully engaged. I got to play and move my body in ways I hadn’t moved it since I was a child. I got to scream, cry until my lungs felt like they were going to explode. I got to run down the hallway in my underpants (it was for a scene, okay?). It was total chaos, and I thrived in it. I chased dopamine every. single. day. I got good grades and I found a family in those walls. I found people who understood me in ways that my high school friends just couldn’t.

My whole life, no matter who I was with (including my own family), I had always felt just a little removed from others. I always felt different. I thought differently, I was interested in weird things, I was always daydreaming, I found it hard to hold conversations, hard to focus on what people were telling me. As a result, I didn’t have very many friends.

In acting school, I felt fully connected. I felt like I was a part of something huge and important, and I felt important. I became much more extroverted. I was funny, I was loud, I was brave, I was powerful, I was soft, I was strong, I was beautiful. I was all of these things that I had always wanted to be but could never make it work — and everything was great until I got into the actual acting industry. I found myself shrinking again, distracted, frustrated, rejected. I had done so well in theatre school, but I didn’t understand why that didn’t translate into the real world.

I would have people in the industry tell me, “you’re smart, you’re witty, you’re gorgeous, you can light up an entire audition room, you’re charming, and you’re so funny… but you just can’t get your shit together.”

In other words, I had the contents of the “whole package”, I just didn’t know how to put it into a box — or, putting all of that stuff into the box felt impossible, so I didn’t do it. Hello, executive dysfunction! Sometimes, it wasn’t for lack of trying, but something was always missing or forgotten. As I continued along in my acting career, I started to feel angry and annoyed whenever I had to do something related to this thing that I paid so much money to do in the first place. Don’t even get me started on the guilt that came with that. Auditioning was a chore, finding acting classes required boring work that I didn’t want to do, I had trouble focusing on memorizing scenes that bored me (which was most of the stuff I was sent out for for film and TV), breaking down scenes was annoying and difficult.

That’s not to say that I didn’t get acting work and failed completely. I got theatre work, which, looking back, my ADHD brain loved. I was a good theatre actor. I was moving constantly, I learned how to quietly fidget backstage without disturbing my peers, I had highly structured rehearsals thanks to great directors, I got to work with my friends sometimes. I built community. I had people to hold me accountable, and I was working with material that was rich and interesting. Theatre was one of the only times in my life where I wasn’t constantly turning up late. For the entire run of the rehearsal and the show, I was the serious and dedicated actor that I always wanted to be.

But when it came to auditioning for film, it was a completely different animal that I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t want it and it didn’t seem to want me. Unfortunately, community theatre doesn’t pay the bills. So, I tried to focus more on getting steady film and television work, but the rejection was constant and intense. It’s hard not to feel like a failure when all you hear is “no”. Every actor hears no a thousand times before they hear a yes, but it felt like some of my friends were hearing a hell of a lot more “yesses” than I ever did. I stopped trying. I didn’t want to put my all into maybes. I unconsciously sabotaged myself, fucked up auditions and walked out thinking “thank God that’s the last one for today”, and eventually quit the business entirely with my proverbial tail between my legs.

I was a good actor, but I’m a great quitter. If they were handing out awards for quitting, I’d be at the front of the line… if I could make it there on time.

After that, I worked at my retail gig and became progressively more unhappy. Another symptom of ADHD in adults is this constant sense of being unfulfilled. No matter where I was or what was going on, I felt so utterly dissatisfied. I always wanted something new, something more, something bigger, something different. There was this itch that I just couldn’t scratch. I was late for my job all the time, I was unfocused, I made mistakes, I got yelled at by customers and my bosses. I called in sick when I wasn’t because I just didn’t want to go to work that day. I had horrible mood swings on the job that got me into a lot of trouble, and some days, there were so many customers in the store that I got overstimulated and would just go to the bathroom and weep for as long as I could without getting fired.

When I was 30, I decided to go back to school. Part of this is my ADHD just wanting something new to do, but part of it was that I had abandoned this massive passion of mine in my early twenties that I was actually really good at. I remember reading criminology textbooks for hours, I could memorize huge portions of the criminal code, and criminology class was one of the only times where I was completely and entirely focused for a three-hour lecture. For my brain, that’s a miracle. I realize now that this was probably hyperfocus and one of the reasons why I didn’t figure out that I had ADHD sooner was because I always chose careers, classes, and hobbies where I had an innate ability to perform well, or careers that I was interested in… until I wasn’t anymore. I type this as I look forlornly at my guitar that’s sitting unplayed (for years) next to my desk… that I insisted on bringing to Quebec despite my husband’s insistence that I never play it.

But this time around, school was different. I was better at it. It helped that I jumped straight into third year criminology where I got to choose fascinating electives. I was getting straight A’s for the first time in my life, but it was hard. I had to work fifty times harder than a lot of my peers to get good grades, but I was dedicated. I didn’t want to fail. My professors were giving me glowing recommendations, I was recruited for my school’s Honours program, I wrote a thesis, gave guest lectures. I continued to procrastinate, but I’m great under pressure.

I got into graduate school, something I never thought would happen. I won massive scholarships and found my real passion: research. Finally, all of those hours spent on Wikipedia in my youth were paying off, and I finally found a way to connect my love for the craft of acting (not the business) with my passion for helping people and for advocating for social justice issues.

But my ADHD isn’t cured. In fact, I’m only just starting to figure out that I have it at the age of 34. I still have to work so much harder than a lot of my cohort. Reading takes me forever because my focus breaks so easily. I experience executive dysfunction every day. I struggle to complete tasks. I take on too many projects, and I struggle to pay attention in class, especially in grad school where there are less electives that you have to take and a lot more dense and boring material that is considered required reading. I’m still struggling, I just know how to make it look easy.

I’ve spent the past while reading so much about ADHD and how it manifests in adults, and so much of it rings true, and has throughout my whole life. It’s like this light has been turned on and I can see everything in such great detail. I can make sense of patterns and behaviours in my life that I never recognized before. My issues with addiction and engaging in high risk, high reward behaviours make a lot more sense in hindsight. I wasn’t a bad kid or a bad person, my brain just doesn’t make enough dopamine and, thus, I chased it wherever I could find it. Sometimes that lead to me getting involved with bad things or people who hurt me immensely. I hurt people too. My ADHD has ruined friendships and relationships throughout my entire life.

My brain isn’t wrong or broken. It’s different, and that’s okay. It’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation. Sometimes I catch myself wishing that this had been caught in my childhood, but who knows what my life would have looked like if it had. I may not have been nearly as adventurous in jumping from job to job, I may not have connected with some of the people who have significantly changed my life for the better. I try not to mourn what never was and instead love and celebrate this version of me and my brain in all of its beautiful imperfectness. That might not be a word, but, fuck it. It is now.