Late to the ADHD Party: Discovering My Quirky Brain at 37
How a mid-life diagnosis turned my awkward moments into revelations.
Getting diagnosed with ADHD at 37 is like getting handed the script of a movie you’ve been acting in your whole life but never fully understood. Suddenly, a lot of those awkward scenes make way more sense. Like that time in school when your math homework looked more like avant-garde art, or that meeting last week when you pitched an idea about flying staplers that no one else seemed to get excited about.
I’ve always felt a bit like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, or more accurately, a hyperactive, distractible peg trying to hopscotch through a chaotic, round obstacle course. Growing up, I’d walk into rooms and forget why I was there. Heck, I still do. I mean, how many times can a person lose their keys in the fridge before it becomes a sitcom trope? Chewing on this newfound understanding of myself, I now see that my life has been a perpetual game of “Where’s Waldo?” — only the goal was to find my attention span.
My brain is like a browser with way too many open tabs. At any given moment, I’m thinking about deadlines, dinner plans, that funny joke I heard, that one song I keep humming and random facts about cats. Sometimes, whole days feel like the opening sequence of an…
