My ADHD Was Hidden Beneath Layers of Success, Until It Wasn't

I don’t twiddle my pencil. I’m not hyper. I don’t engage in reckless behaviors. I am a full-grown woman. And, yes, I have ADHD.

It took me three years to find out I had ADHD. Actually thirty-three, if you start from the very beginning. And then six more (and counting) to know what to do with it.

I’ll get right to it and start with the climax that marks the start of finding out I had ADHD:

I went nuts.

Now I never got carted to the psychiatric ward, but my mind was fully convinced that reality was just around the corner. I was so convinced, I’d developed a very specific visual: white gauze strapping my arms to their sides on a gurney in a sterile white room. 

What I mean by nuts is that my mind, generally a pretty likeable place where you might find birds chirping and lots of plants in brightly painted pots, became unrecognizable. It became a place I wanted to avoid - my birds silent, my plants putrid. 

I became perpetually nervous, the rapid beating of my heart all day what hearts are only supposed to do at the starting line of a race. I was struggling to get through my work days, uncertain of how much longer I’d be able to fake not being on the brink of losing it. My sleep was crap. Since my body was constantly worked up, my appetite waned; eating became forced. My thoughts raced. Everything was hard. Even figuring out how to spend my time became this big goliath of a task. I was wilting and scared as hell about it. Scared as hell, specifically, that the gurney and gauze were going to show up at my doorstep any day to wheel me away from my life.

Now that you have a handle on the low that led to my ADHD diagnoses, I’m going to start at the beginning.

A child of the 80’s and a first-born do-gooder, I was fortunate enough to thrive in the classic, straightforward classroom of my childhood. Because I liked learning and I liked gold stars and I liked all opportunities to socialize, there was never a moment for me when school felt dreadful. Luckily, my report cards revealed my school ease; I was an Honor Roll sort of gal.

Enters college: More of the same, plus a new path to earn success: 11^thhour victories. I became an epic procrastinator and, since the intended study sessions in the library I almost always abandoned at first opportunity to socialize in whispers with fellow distractors, I relied almost entirely on charged bolts of inspiration under my dorm room desk lamp within hours of deadlines. And I almost always struck gold.

There were no problems, World. 

I was still on track, competent and confident.

Enters first job: Still rocking through life, except now - with my job charging me with lots of event planning and orchestration of details - I started feeling like I had half a brain. It was taking me way longer to do stuff than it seemed my coworkers would take to do the same stuff. I took a lot home. I worked more hours. I couldn’t help but feel wildly inefficient, even though I was paddling underwater twice as fast.

Enters speeding tickets: Around the same time, on road trips to and from my hometown when I would return there to visit family on weekends, I got ticketed however many times it takes to be within an inch of having your license revoked. To slap my wrist prior to it getting to that, I earned a seat in a tutorial driving class. Except, I opted the alternative self-guided option: they sent me an instructional DVD with a paper test. I got the test back to them; I had to pay for a replacement DVD (because I most certainly lost my copy).

I’ll spare the smaller details, but here are some other highlights: 

*Despite having graduated college with a degree in mathematics, my checkbook-balancing deficiencies had me pleading on the regular with bank representatives to waive the overdraft fees.

*My go at serving tables at a restaurant was short-lived: I couldn’t answer questions about the menu under pressure and diners kept asking me for things while I was getting other diners things – the nerve.

*I once paid to have my car, which wouldn’t start, towed to the mechanic only to find out that I had simply run out of gas. 

*The era of cell phones had begun and in pretty much every single situation when I had need to use mine, it was almost always reliably dead: remembering to charge things was way above my operating level.

*I apologize to Mother Earth for the countless extra loads of laundry I did, necessary because of how soured my clothes would get left sitting in the washing machine for too many days.

*I was finding more and more spells when simple communication would fail me, like there was a barrier between all my juicy intelligence and words to share it. My fiancé and I developed language for this: When I got stuck, I’d just say, “I can’t find my words,” with a sigh.

*My wedding weekend was an absolute miracle. I still have no idea how it got pulled off. To everyone who helped pull it off and might be reading this: Thanks. The planning sure as hell can’t be credited to me. 

*My husband and I had a baby and once I left the little dude in his car seat in the parking lot while I grabbed something at the drugstore; I literally completely forgot I had a baby in the van.

*Speeding tickets. Did I mention speeding tickets?

So, while all of these realities were going on in the background, the foreground of my life had been very affirming: I was a woman who was educated, employed, married, and even keeping a small child alive. With flying colors, I might add.

When did I go nuts, then?

I mean, I suppose it was gradual. But if I had to pinpoint – in retrospect -- I would say it was the second kid and then definitely by the third kid (and then most definitely by the fourth). Doing the wife thing and the house management thing and the working thing and the one kid thing was what my neurological makeup could handle, still hard work but able to be managed while maintaining my usual musical, lush interior world. 

Layering additional kiddos, apparently, was when my “engine – despite its strength – couldn’t pull the weight of life any longer with all those flat tires.” (Those are not my words. They are the words of the ADHD testing specialist responsible for diagnosing me. The engine is my brain. The flat tires are the challenges my ADHD puts before me. The weight is all my responsibilities, including needy babes.) 

And for me, it wasn’t just that my vehicle’s speed slowed. And it wasn’t just that it was protesting with grunts, sputters, and grumbles. 

It fully blew out. 

My interior world went with it… to that overwhelmed, panicky, scary place. There was a growing disparity between what was required of me and what I was capable of, and fear was more than eager to fill the space. Not surprisingly, my feelings of competency, confidence, and self-reliance hit the road, too. I doubted myself more and more, trusted myself less and less, resorted to hiding more and more, and became smaller and smaller and smaller.

Except, and this is important to make clear, I didn’t have knowledge that that last paragraph was what was actually happening.

What I thought was happening: I was going nuts.

Now I’d like to point out that there are many different launch pads that can propel one to a place of impairing anxiety and bottomed-out wellness like mine at that time. And believe you me, in the beginning a couple of therapists and I explored every one. We poked around in my childhood for trauma, dabbled with the possibility of grief from some losses in my life, tried to make Acute Adjustment Disorder fit due to several cross country moves in a short period of time, and thought we’d struck gold with much of what I was experiencing fitting post-partum symptoms. 

It took a cunning ear from Therapist Number Three to hear the quiet whispers of ADHD through all my squabbling. It was she who suggested the ADHD testing, and – even though I was stubbornly resistant to this discovery of hers (No way! I did great in school! I was never out of control! ADHD is the picture of someone else, NOT me!) – that therapist stuck with it. She nudged me further and further away from denial and imprinted upon me that my neurological deficits might be exactly what was painting the dark picture of my days.

Fast-forward to now: Since that day in the ADHD testing office when the doc used car imagery to explain in layman’s terms that I had ADHD Inattentive (the kind without the H – that is to say without the Hyperactivity – which is much more nuanced and difficult to uncover), I’ve committed to learning about it like a Phd student. I have books and articles all around my house (and I’d show you, if only I could find them). My brain and I have become incredibly well-acquainted. I’ve devised, executed, and abandoned at different times innumerable systems to organize better, time manage better, file better, decrease distractions better, meal plan better… you name it. I’ve tried medications. I’ve stopped medications. I’ve tried them again. I’ve sharpened the fine art of self-care, waxing and waning the frequency of my massages, naps, meditations, outsourced house cleanings, journaling, babysitters, and exercise based on how my engine is handling my tires. I’ve seen therapists and ADHD life coaches and attended local CHADD chapter meetings. And I’ve definitely prayed.

And I’m happy to say that I’m not worried about the loony bin anymore. 

It’s also certainly not perfect. As my adult-ADHD-specialized psychiatrist recently said, “We’re not looking for a silver bullet here, but how bout we aim for a bronze one?” Bronze for me is that I finally can place my anxiety and depression and wilty, songless interior life – whenever they show up again – as biproducts of my cognitive challenges. I can see that I’m working too hard and my mind is bucking. And – pretty importantly – that I’m not nuts.

Most of all - and what I want to communicate with fervor here - I cannot believe it took me this long to find this out about myself. How could I have had the same brain my whole life and yet have no major life complications result from it until major complications started resulting from it? First 75% of my life: SWELL. Next 8%: WENT TO CRAP. Most recent 17%: HARNESSING THAT SHIT.

It certainly makes me want to be what Therapist Number Three was for me for other young women (ADHD inattentive is most common in females and, since it does not show up in behavioral or scholastic ways in school – at least in the beginning - is often overlooked). It makes me want to crack open every youngster’s head and help expose any invisible learning disabilities lingering in there. It makes me want to educate all teachers, parents, coaches, relatives about what signs might point to ADHD in the kids they hang with, even when nothing dramatic is yet going on.

Basically, I’d like for flat tires to be known entities by our young generation of vehicles… long before - like me - a blow out does the revealing.