Do I have ADHD...?
...or is life just too fucking busy?
Lightbulb moments
This is a question I am pondering a lot at the moment.
I recently went through an ADHD assessment with one of my children, and as I chatted to a friend who had gone through similar with her daughter, she made a very throwaway comment to me: ‘well it can be hereditary and clearly you’re neurodiverse’.
Exsqueeze me?
I tried not to react - I didn’t even know how to react - was it worthy of reaction...? I muttered something low key like - ‘why do you say that?’. The response was; ‘well you’re either doing a thousand things at once or you’re hyper-focused and you cannot stay still. You are an extraordinary individual and totally bonkers’.
Ok.
I reflected on that for several days, not knowing entirely how to feel. I had always thought I was very much bang on ‘normal’. [acknowledging that ‘normal’ is not the appropriate word with its implication that neurodiversity is ‘not normal’, but it’s the one that came into my head. I’ll resist the urge to further over-explain].
Me? ‘Normal’? Who am I kidding.
Later that week I received the online assessment for my daughter. As I worked through the questions with her, it wasn’t so much that a lightbulb went off in my head, more that a kaleidoscopic light show erupted.
There is never just one lightbulb in my head.
As I scored ‘maximum’ on each rudimentary question on the attention deficit side, (not so on the hyperactivity), I found myself drifting into adult ADD assessments, and so here I find myself six months later, on the waitlist for a one-to-one psychiatry appointment having being flagged as ‘highly likely’.
I have no particular desire to ‘label’ myself at 51 years of age, yet the way my brain works presents me with some not insignificant challenges, and if I can access any support or learn ways of managing it, then bring it on.
I am fascinated by our individuality, and note the challenges everyone faces on a very long sliding scale, from anxiety to overwhelm, from hyperactivity to what I call ‘paralysis’ - when I become so overwhelmed I cannot do anything at all. Is it helpful to understand more to enable us to put strategies in place? It often feels that the more we learn about the brain, the less we actually know, but I’m eager to explore (obviously).
How does my brain behave?
Ok here’s a small insight, although I can’t really do it justice:
Whilst on an online course on Sunday, training as a Tea Sommelier (case in point), I was pretty focused as it is intense and interactive, however I still managed to book a ‘in-person’ dog first aid course, cinema tickets, design an invoice on Canva and converse with several people on Whatsapp at the same time.
When the tutor translated some words for tea in Japanese (Gyokuro meaning ‘Jade Dew’, Chado - ‘the way of tea’) I immediately started googling Masters degrees in linguistics. I love language and am fascinated by words, so in between tasting my Kukicha and Karigane I had lined up several degrees I can’t afford to pay for and have no time to embark on.
I can almost hear Jim Carrey’s ‘SOMEBODY STOP ME’ ringing in my ears.
Looking at my ‘open’ tabs on Google Chrome as I write this article is like revealing the clothes purchases you make after too many glasses of wine. All things in progress, none of them completed. My naughty little secret:
A writing retreat in Ireland
Parentmail
A writing retreat in Scotland
Canva x 4 tabs
Several Substack articles
British Gas
Local cinema website
Amazon
Dermatology clinics
How to contact the local newspaper
Diploma in animal care
Thorpe park tickets
Driving theory test
Online organising tools
MA in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
ADHD support
...I could go on.
It’s very normal for a member of my family to come in and find me in the kitchen with the dishwasher open and half emptied, a cup with a tea bag sitting next to a recently boiled kettle, random vegetables chopped up, surface cleaning in progress, mail partly opened (in the days when mail actually gets delivered) and shopping still unloaded in bags whilst I’m simultaneously doing an Ocado order, drafting my 35th Substack of the week, Whatsapping about five people, logging onto Parentmail, booking a swim and paying a gas bill. And as for my internal monologue...
I find it almost impossible to complete one task before I finish the next one. I am late for everything. I get totally overwhelmed with the amount that is bursting out of my mind. My to-do-lists stress me out because they’re so messy and overlapping, hastily written on the back of proverbial fag packets.
I know it makes me not always the easiest to live with 😬. But is this just me? Or is this just modern life?
When I work with my sister, I turn my laptop away so she cannot see the amount of tabs that I have open, or notice that I’m opening several more whilst I’m supposed to be going through our accounts. But she knows. Oh it’s all there in her slightly raised and knowing eyebrow. Others say they find me exhausting. Believe me I exhaust myself. No wonder I’ve got Chronic Fatigue.
Look on the bright side
It’s not all bad though - far from it. I also absolutely love my brain. It sparks with a level of creativity that is an absolute gift. I delight in learning and discovering. The thoughts that build up in my mind burst out of my fingertips in writing; forming words, articles, books. I get such a buzz out of the fireworks of my synapses connecting and igniting, setting off glorious chain reactions.
In this writing community, I have discovered so many wonderful ‘creatives’ that operate in a similar way. I literally want to hug them all. Many of us are undergoing assessment, and there is no doubt that so many women in particular have had this revelation suppressed for years. But, I ask myself, is this actually ADD in my case? Or is life just too fucking busy?
Are we bombarded with so much relentless ‘noise’ that our brains cannot manage it, and hence they scatter? Adding into that the trauma factor, makes this a very interesting question for me.
When I was a child, I was dedicated, studious, top of the class. I had no problems sitting still, I was not disruptive or fidgety. Was I ‘masking’? Nobody even knew what ADD was, let alone masking. When ADD started to come into more common parlance, it was laced with judgements about the ‘badly behaved boy’ in the corner and scare stories about Ritalin.
At the point that I became a parent and life accelerated into hyperdrive, my daughter contracted meningitis and my brother died in traumatic circumstances, introducing a trauma narrative into my previously ‘vanilla’ story. So does busy life + trauma = scattered brain?
It think it most certainly does.
As I’ve started to explore my own way of being, I am increasingly interested in this perspective. I spoke to a psychologist friend recently, as well as my GP, and there is definitely a view that ADD type presentations can manifest through life experience. This is where I think I probably lie.
Crash and burn
I listened to the most extraordinary podcast this weekend - told by a woman who was on a domestic flight with her family in India when she was just 10 years old. One minute she was bickering with her brother about who was getting the window seat, the next minute, her grandmother (who was back in the UK) was chatting to her. She was so confused, she figured that she must have fallen asleep and there was some kind of surprise family reunion at their destination in Bangalore.
It turned out she’d been in a plane crash which had killed her mum, dad and brother, and left her with life changing injuries. Her grandmother was speaking to her from her hospital bed back in the UK several days later.
32 years on, she still has no recollection of the crash. She suffered burns, and has lived her life with the visible scars of the accident, but those 4 days between accident and repatriation have been erased from her brain. Now that is extraordinary.
If our brains can erase an entire plane crash, then what can they do with the every day?
I don’t think we are programmed to work in the modern world as it currently stands. There is a reason why ‘slow living’ is so sought after. As I run around after teenagers in a way that is even more consuming that running around after toddlers (don’t shoot me - that’s for another time), I cannot help but wonder at how we made this bed that we lie in - and that is from my comfortable non war-zone Western existence - not in crisis, away from the horror of the daily news.
I have always loved my mum telling me about her first office job. She had an ‘in tray’ and an ‘out tray’, and I mean an actual physical construct, not an electronic equivalent. I remember those in my early jobs! She might get up to 3 things placed in her in tray in a day. If she didn’t manage to complete them, she would promptly leave at 5pm, and come back to them the next day. No expectation to continue, no concept of anything overflowing. You did what you could do in that time, and then left, went home, had dinner, went to a dance...enjoyed life. No expectation.
The demands of work and life now, whether you are a parent or not, are utterly unprecedented. It’s no wonder we crash and burn.
So do I have ADD? Well that remains to be ‘assessed’, but whether or not I have Attention Deficit Disorder in UPPER CASE, I certainly have attention deficit disorder in lower case. Either way, I hope to be able to find ways to make this way of being more manageable, and also to enjoy the glorious and vibrant connections with those who understand.
Maybe I’ll do a Masters on the subject. I’m sure there’ll be one. I’ll just do a bit of research..
Does this resonate with you?
Have you experienced similar or perhaps even been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD?
I’d love to hear how fellow creatives feel about this subject, and to learn from you. I am just at the fringes of this exploration.
Love and lemons 🍋
Em xx
Far too many tabs open in our brains.
You are a lovely nutter!
I’m going through some thing very similar, my sister went through the process and said ‘hey have you considered it you might be adhd’.
I started with rejecting the idea, then another friend got diagnosed and said ‘hmmm I think you should consider what your sister said’.
But with time and learning about adhd from a different perspective, not from my teacher perspective, I’ve started to connect with it some more.
I’ve even started dipping my toe in asking friends ‘so I’m exploring adhd’ and one even replied ‘I thought you already knew’.
Like yourself it’s more for tools for my toolbox, things that I thought was clumsiness or my dyslexia but weren’t responding to the tools I’ve been told should work are starting to have some answers.
I feel similar to yourself in that I don’t know where I sit with it all, my brain is bonkers and it seems not everyone is like that. But I’ve also noticed a lot of friends getting diagnosed lately, are we ‘weird’ thinkers attracted to each other? Or is there something more to unpick.