The ADHD Spiral
At 35 years old, I was diagnosed with ADHD. It didn’t go well.
This was a diagnosis that I had expected. After months of research, I had finally mustered the nerve to sit down across from a psychiatrist and ask to be tested. After a lengthy conversation and answering a 200 line questionnaire, he confirmed my suspicions. I have ADHD.
At the time, I had just started a work-from-home job that was incredibly demanding and had very little oversight. This was the first time I had worked in a role that didn’t deal directly with customers. With no one watching over my shoulder, I realized that I was really struggling to keep up, often missing vital information that was being shared in meetings and finishing week-long projects the night before they were due. I had spent nearly a year trying to figure out why I was struggling so much in this new role. The internet led me to the belief that I might have ADHD.
In the back of my mind, I thought there was no way I could have ADHD. I mean, how can a person go through half their life and not realize their brain is broken? Am I really that stupid? Or am I leaning on ADHD as a crutch to absolve myself of my own personal responsibility for my work performance? Wouldn’t someone at some point have noticed that there was something off with me?
Even though I was absolutely certain that I would be diagnosed with ADHD, I was not prepared for what happened next.
I began to spiral. Hard. I couldn’t help but think about all the times I started things that I didn’t finish, or the times that I flew off the handle at people who didn’t deserve it for the dumbest possible reasons. I wondered who I would have been if I had been diagnosed as a child. Would I have dropped out of college twice? Would I have fathered a child in high school? Would I have held 8 different jobs since the age of 18? Would I have been the type of person that set goals and then achieved them?
Should I be angry with my parents for not noticing? They knew that something was wrong with me, (I had tremendous behavioral issues as a child) why didn’t they have me speak to a psychiatrist then?
In the weeks following the diagnosis, I started taking medication and keeping a journal of ways that I felt the meds were helping. I also started noticing things about myself that I had never noticed before, or at least had never thought of them as unusual.
Things like forgetting the words to a song I’ve been singing along to for years, or making myself coffee in the morning and forgetting to drink it, or forgetting to get my wife a card on her birthday. I began to notice just how often I would tune out of a conversation, completely missing what was said to me. I began to notice all of the little ways that my wife had been picking up the slack for years on things that I would forget to do.
Those first few months were really hard. I became kind of depressed, wondering what life would have been like if I had known about the ADHD all along, or if I didn’t have it at all.
As time went on, the hurt faded, and I am happier and more productive now than I have ever been. I’m also very aware of the ways that ADHD hinders me, and I’m really trying to find ways around the obstacles that my brain creates for itself. Sometimes I’m successful.
I know that my experience is not uncommon. I know that there are many people who are diagnosed later in life, who probably go through similar stages of grief and anger, wondering who they might have been. People don’t often talk about the negative feelings that follow a diagnosis, so I wrote this article in hopes that it helps those folks feel less alone.
Remember, we have ADHD, but ADHD does not define us. I believe that my undiagnosed ADHD made me a stronger and more compassionate human, and I believe that’s probably true for you too. My therapist told me to forgive the person I used to be, and focus on the person I want to be.
I hope you’ll do the same.
