Member-only story
Are You still trying to “Fix” your ADHD?
Maybe it’s time to ask: why?
The joke goes something like this:
There are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who think there are two kinds of people in the world,
And those who know better.
We live in a ridiculously binary society: red or blue, conservative or liberal, pass or fail, win or lose, fixed or broken.
That last one has an especially poignant aspect to it for late-diagnosed ADHD. When I finally got my diagnosis, there was that amazing feeling of relief, because so many things that had been in the failed category of my life were suddenly shifted to the not my fault category. Of course I had trouble remembering things, over-reacted to criticism, had poor impulse control, feared being bored more than anything else; those were all aspects of a disordered executive function and problem with dopamine. Procrastination had always been an issue for me, usually labeled as laziness by those in authority, but now I understood: the issue was not my character, it was literally a neurochemical dysfunction.
Whew. Sound familiar?
There’s just one problem: while I’d successfully taken myself out of the failure category, I’d just replaced it with another binary: broken. Unable to do…
