Why So Many Women With ADHD Never Get The Help They Need
By Erin Stewart
I am not the kind of person for whom neatness comes easily. I can’t keep to a routine. Every surface of my house is piled with clothes, books, and papers (despite living with a minimalist partner). I start many things and rarely finish them. I find it impossible to focus on instructions. I imagine complex, faraway concepts, but can never seem to get the basics of reality right.
There’s always so much going on in my head, like a thousand different songs playing at once. I try to follow them all, but I can’t. I freeze in the overwhelm and feel like it’s all my fault.
My disorganization was more obvious when I was young and at school. It was easy enough to work on things I cared about, but impossible to dedicate time to the things I didn’t. When I was 14, I wrote a long essay about the plague. The subject — the decimation of entire populations of Europe, all without explanation — darkly fascinated me. I couldn’t learn enough. But proofreading my own work didn’t hold much satisfaction; it felt like eating the side salad after the main. Printing was also overwhelmingly cumbersome. My printer at home was broken, and the effort of saving the file onto a floppy disk to print it out at the library held zero appeal. So it did not get done.
