A Lady’s Guide to Her ADHD
Why is there a screwdriver in the freezer?
It took me thirty years to receive a diagnosis of ADHD, and only then because I had, a year prior, began treating my own patients and recognized myself in the screening questions. I took my self-report to a psychiatrist who concurred and started me on a stimulant medication.
There were clues — florid confirmations, had a parental figure been paying attention (they weren’t), struggles with executive functioning, completing tasks on time, even balance and coordination. I once fell upright into a trash bin; I was upright, and the trash bin was upright, and then I was inside of it.
If a normal brain is like a blank sheet of printer paper, my ADHD brain is that piece of paper scrawled with illegible doodles and crumpled into a ball. In lieu of any formal teaching my parents might have offered, I concocted my own schemas for how to behave in situations requiring mental or spatial organization. When ordered by a parent to clean my room, I ran around like a feral fox and tore every belonging from its spot, emptying out the contents of closets and drawers and bins into a massive pile into the middle of the room…
