ADHD Agenda
I remember, vividly, the first time I was handed a school-issue agenda planner the first day of sixth grade. It was massive, almost a foot in height, with one of those holographic plastic covers that were so popular in 2004 and made a sound like a bad DJ scratch when you ran your nails across them. I was excited by the possibilities its carefully laid out blocks of time promised; my future success lay in my hands, framed by dotted lines and inspirational quotes.
But a few weeks (or probably days) passed, and I found myself shoving the planner in my locker and forcibly forgetting about it — I couldn’t deal with the pressure it put on me. It’s not that I couldn’t keep up with my assignments — I’ve always been a very good student, “talented and gifted” institutionally — but I could NOT keep up with the planner. For some reason, despite my alleged gifts and talents, I could not remember to write things down or keep track of them on paper.
As I went through middle and then high school, I went through planner after planner, but I never kept up with any of them for more than a couple weeks at most. My grades were never really affected by the few homework assignments I missed or the tests that came up unexpected in middle or high school. At the same time, report cards frequently noted that I talked out of turn and was “a distraction to other students,” but I went to huge public schools and these things were always brushed off as my grades stayed in the 98% percentile. People said I was “excitable” or eager to share my opinions; no one ever questioned if these behaviors were symptomatic of something more serious — or wondered if it was hard for me to live with them. As a teenager, it didn’t occur to me to question them myself, despite the gnawing anxiety that festered in my stomach, eating away at me a little more with each passing year.
When I started double majoring at a small liberal arts school, the disorganization and anxiety finally started to undermine my status as a straight-A student and my mental health. I would forget a reading here or a French worksheet there, and I’d find myself sending a late email with a dull weight of embarrassment and shame — wasn’t I way too old to be forgetting homework? Didn’t my high school teachers warn me this wouldn’t be acceptable in college each and every time I handed in a late assignment? I had consistently bottled up and repressed any anxiety I had felt about this (or anything else) since high school; I was too concerned with burdening others with problems that seemed trivial and unimportant. I had a few “incidents” (formally known as panic attacks) in high school that caused my parents to raise concerns, but it’s hard to help someone who won’t help herself. I tried seeing a therapist a few times, but they all told me I was very self-aware and seemed to know how to manage my anxiety. No one ever dug deep enough to realize how good I’d just gotten at faking it.
But by the time I was going into my senior year and beginning to plan my thesis, I couldn’t keep up the façade — my anxiety and inability to plan ahead or stay organized began to take a serious toll on me. My advisor gave me no deadlines except final delivery, and the idea of creating a year-long schedule essentially by myself had me crying all over campus, flooded with panic over how — if — I could possibly pull this thing off.
As I approached, and then missed, the deadline for my prospectus (a 30-page proposal justifying my thesis and research, with a full outline and schedule), I started involuntarily throwing up from stress almost daily. Sitting on the cool tile of my bathroom floor and crying over how badly I wanted to write this thesis and how badly I was struggling, I realized I needed professional help.
I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and after only 15 minutes of word-vomit and knee jiggling, I was diagnosed with a textbook case of ADHD — for diagnosis, children need six or more symptoms from at least one of two categories, adults need to present at least five. I present 17 out of the total 18 symptoms across the two categories (Inattentive and Hyperactive-Impulsive).
Yet despite the fact that I had been given this diagnosis and a prescription by a doctor and finally started using a calendar, creating and sticking to a schedule I made myself, I just didn’t feel comfortable in my newly diagnosed skin. I still felt like a cheater; I’d heard people talk disparagingly about “lazy” students who abused study drugs because they weren’t smart enough to keep up on their own and I wondered if I was one of them, faking my way to a prescription through my knowledge of psychology.
So I did what any millennial in my position would do: I took to the Internet. I went on ADHD forums and read a million stories just like mine — people who weren’t at ease with their new diagnosis, who felt like they were cheating the system — and read a million more responses from people who had gotten past this self-doubt and anxiety and were able to show me how seriously dense I was being.
“Do you wear glasses? Do you need them to see as well as other people see?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that’s ‘cheating?’ Or is it just putting you on the same level as everyone else? Why would you resist or feel bad about making your life easier, if you can?”
***
It’s been a year and a half since I started medicating my ADHD, and six months ago I started a full treatment, finally addressing the underlying anxiety by going to a therapist. In these last six months, I’ve had three pieces published, risen from a production assistant to an associate producer and finished and submitted a book proposal I’ve been working on since graduation. Next month I start seeing my therapist every other week instead of every week. I won’t miss my appointments because I’ve written them all down in the planner I bought for myself. I still forget to add things here or change a time there occasionally, but the pages scrawled with purple ink and bold underlines remind me how much progress I’m making each time I start a new day.
