Apparently, October is ADHD Awareness Month.
Who knew?
I’m aware of ADHD every damn day but even if I knew that this was ADHD Awareness Month I guess I forgot it… you know, because I have ADHD.
This year, the Centre for ADHD Awareness, Canada is highlighting the fact that people with ADHD often have other mental health conditions that can sometimes mask and/or contribute to our symptoms.
Personally, before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I thought I had a recurring situational depression. I was never medicated for it because it “wasn’t that kind of bad”* but I had some really low and difficult times.
Once I was diagnosed with ADHD (but not yet medicated) and did my research, I started to see how the issues I faced might have more to do with ADHD than with depression. (I mean, I was experiencing the same symptoms but ADHD made more sense as the root cause.)
Once I was medicated for ADHD, it was CLEAR that it had been the root cause. My underlying mental message of ‘you just aren’t trying hard enough’ practically went away and it got a lot easier to start working with my brain instead of against it. And I spent less and less time feeling depressed.
Medication didn’t/doesn’t cure my ADHD but it makes it a lot easier for me to live with it. It gives me a little space between my impulse and my actions more often. It helps me to follow through on plans more often. It helps me to observe my own processes more often.
It helps me to understand that my brain works differently but it isn’t broken.
I’m not one of those people who sees ADHD as a superpower overall but it does come with some useful features – I’m an excellent brainstormer, I’m able to see things from all kinds of different perspectives, I can make huge tangential leaps and connect very different ideas, I can find patterns in all kinds of unexpected things.
Sure, it also means that I struggle with life admin and with getting started on things and with breaking projects into tasks and with all kinds of other stuff but my medication can help with a lot of those things. And the fact that I have been diagnosed and medicated takes away a lot of the self-blame and shame that comes from struggling with things that other people find easy.
My diagnosis means that instead of feeling stupid for not being able to process information in some contexts, I can, for example, ask a trusted friend, “My brain just won’t process this, can you help me figure out what I am missing?”
Recently, I was trying to describe how ADHD feels and I came up with an analogy that seemed to click for a lot of people.
Have you ever tried to get something off a shelf that was a little bit too high for you to reach?
As in, you could *almost* reach the thing, perhaps even brush your fingers against it but you couldn’t actually take it down?
And perhaps, on a day when you were particularly limber or maybe felt athletic, you could stretch a little further or jump a little and fluke into reaching the thing but you can’t do it every time.
You might end up telling yourself that you *should* be able to reach it every time but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes the conditions are perfect and you can reach it but mostly you are limited by your height and the length of your arm.
That’s what it’s like trying to do a lot of ordinary things while running the ADHD operating system in your brain.
Sometimes, under perfect conditions, you can do the thing. Mostly though, you have something preventing you from doing it and you don’t know what it is. You assume the problem is in your level of effort or in your lack of determination or that you are just not bright enough to figure out how to do it.
This is compounded by the fact that almost everyone else can easily reach that item. People who seem to be the same height as you, people with similar arm lengths, they can pluck that thing off the shelf and they are puzzled about why you *won’t.*
Learning that I have ADHD was like someone confirming that except under extraordinary circumstances, I actually could not reach that shelf. That there was a difference between me and the other people who were reaching for those items and that that difference had nothing to do with my efforts (or theirs!)
They weren’t working harder than me. In fact, with all my metaphorical jumping around and stretching, I might have been putting in way more effort without getting the proportional results.
Getting medicated for ADHD is like being given a stool that lets me reach the shelf more often. I still have to remember to bring the stool and I have to make sure other factors (like sleep, stress, etc) don’t affect my balance on the stool, but at least I have a way of improving my odds of reaching that item.
Some people still imply that people with ADHD weren’t trying hard enough in the first place, that we are somehow cheating or taking the ‘easy’ way by using a stool.**
They also complain that ADHD is overdiagnosed, or to continue my analogy ‘Everyone is asking for a stool these days!’ (Doesn’t it sound ridiculous when you think of it that way? Everyone is asking for the help they need! Oh no! We might end up supporting someone who needs it slightly less!)
I’ve also heard complaints that people with ADHD use it as an excuse for not doing things they are capable of…or to use the analogy, they use it as an excuse for not retrieving things on lower shelves, too. And, I’m sure some people do that but it’s probably in the same proportion as neurotypical people who make excuses not to do the things they are able to do.
Most of us just want to reach what we can and to use the stool to reach the next level of shelves without making a big fuss about it.
And, many of us are hoping that society can move away from the idea that the only way to succeed in life is to be able to reach the stuff on the top shelves with ease.
Even before I was medicated, before I could count on reaching that top shelf on a semi-regular basis, I was still felt (and was) successful in a variety of ways. Now that my meds give me a step-stool, I’m not using all my energy to reach the shelf. Instead, I can pour that energy into my tasks, which is a lot more satisfying.
I’ve written a fair bit about how having ADHD affects my work toward my fitness goals and how it affects my overall wellness and I will definitely be writing more about that in the future. The short version though, is that having ADHD is a thread that runs through all of my experiences. It affects how I see the world and how I experience it. I have to take my ADHD brain into account, in positive and negative ways, in everything I do.
And, let me tell ya, having to think about your thinking all the time is pretty damn tiring.
See you back here next week when I’ll be writing about the challenge of getting my ADHD brain to relax.
If you want to find out more about ADHD, here are few resources that I like:
Jessica McCabe – How to ADHD – https://www.youtube.com/c/howtoadhd
Rene Brooks – Black Girl, Lost Keys – https://blackgirllostkeys.com/
Dani Donovan – ADHDDD – https://www.adhddd.com/
*I don’t know now if that was my Doctor’s opinion or my opinion. I do know, however, that my internalized ADHD chorus of ‘You just aren’t trying hard enough.’ contributed to my acceptance of that opinion. I thought that if I just tried harder I would feel better. Sigh.
**To them, I say, if sheer force of will could have overcome ADHD, I would have left it behind me long ago. Well, I would say that AFTER I say, “Don’t even START with me about that.”