Me and ADHD
(I wrote this for ADHD awareness month which is in October but missed it, oh well..)
A good friend made this for me way over almost 15 years ago! It endures in accuracy to this day.
The other morning was a prime example of Vicki nonsense. First off I fell down my newly carpeted stairs, all good, nothing broken, just bruising this time. Moving sorely on, I had to get my daughter and her friend off to a drama rehearsal for 9.30am, miles away. I had to use the big car because I lost the keys for the little car on the beach the day before but that’s ok because someone miraculously found them in the sand and handed them into the local cafe. As I approached the big car, I notice the lights were on, wtf? I distinctly remember turning them off yesterday! Get into big car, battery completely flat, seems I had turned them all the way up, not off when I left it. OK, run to the cafe, get the key and head to the wee car, children and dog dragging behind. Get in, no petrol. Deep breaths, it’s fine, they will be 5 mins late but we will get there! Arrive and drop girls off 7 mins late, phew could have been a lot worse but my jaw is now locked. Decide to take the dog for a rejuvenating walk up Corstorphine Hill. He goes missing on way back to car, not sure when or where, as I was answering messages on my phone. Spend 25 mins looking for him, enrolling various members of the dog walking public and me and the dug now feature on various dog walking Whatsapp chats across Corstorphine (and it appears a facebook group I never knew existed). Wee shite turns up and we get in car to high tail it to work so that I arrive at 11 for my co-worker who lent me her keys yesterday in good faith because I said I would be in earlier this morning, I do not have my own keys as I lost two sets at the beginning of the year. I make it with 2 minutes to spare and sit back rubbing my sore neck and thinking FFS, why me?
Photo by Etta Lee Watson (Daughter age 10)
I actually know exactly why me. I was diagnosed with ADHD last year. It took two years to get the diagnosis and a good 5 years of thinking and joking about it and a lifetime of of wondering what the F is wrong with me?
I can already feel the collective rolling of eyes from many of you, as yet sanother middle-aged woman bangs on about ADHD like it’s a new fad, an idiosyncrasy to make us look interesting, like cold water swimming, or their rescue dog (both of which I do/have). I get it, blah blah blah ‘neuro diversity’. However, it's not that simple, it isn’t a fun wacky thing to have that creates funny stories and lets you off with being a disorganised, forgetful, lazy twat. It is a massive pain in the tits and can result in some really negative harmful thoughts and actions throughout life, particularly the ones where I truly believed the world would genuinely be better off without a useless piece of shit like me.
When I think about my life with an ADHD gaze, it’s like a movie projector of endless situations where life dominos happen that result in crisis after boring crisis. When I was little, I lost everything, gloves, shoes, money, bikes, endless hats, coats, you name it, I lost it. I had the word ‘disorganised’ on all my report cards, my teachers and friends parents used to despair of my lack of my ability to remember times, get myself ready to go anywhere and get out of the door and regularly said to my mum when I was there, how do you manage her? I remember night after restless night lying awake, heart thumping because I knew I'd lost another bloody thing and that I would get a row for it. My poor parents, particularly my mum, it must have been frustrating as all hell having me, someone who is clearly intelligent in lots of ways but bloody useless in others. A veritable flibbertigjibbet, a Will-o'- The Wisp, a clown.
Shit truly hit the fan when I left to go to university. All my structure was suddenly gone, I had to fend for myself, and I remember thinking how is everyone else doing this? How do they know what to do? I buried my uselessness in going out and being a party girl, so I had an excuse for being so crap at everything, eventually dropping out, which is one of my biggest regrets.
So far so poor me, right? I must add here that I had a very privileged and happy upbringing. I was luckily often paid out of my scrapes, and I always had the love and support of my long-suffering family, still do. God knows where I would be without that safety net.
All of this, however, left me with extreme anxiety, panic attacks and a very low sense of self-worth. The endless being late, missing appointments and meetings has been met with a lot of retribution over the years, and rightly so. I have lost friends and jobs and relationships. I have been defensive and quick to anger causing fights and bad feeling and I now know that I must have had what must of been a couple of break downs, beginning with when I dropped out of uni. To cope with this and my extreme feelings of utter highs, lowest lows and endless restlessness, I learned to self-medicate early on with booze etc. Some of the situations I found myself in as a result are less than savoury. Luckily, I have lived to tell the tale reasonably unscathed.
Image of said wee shite and the littlest shite.
I continue to spin around in my own wee ball of chaos but have more of a handle on some of the riskier behaviour. I also now have a family and have inevitably involved them in my chaos too, which really isn’t great. My kids have missed out on parties, outings, play dates and endless school activities Our house has been in such a disgusting mess that they refused to have friends' round for playdates/sleepovers for years, resulting in them going off and staying at friends' all weekend because they hated home so much. They have heard me, they still do, talk about what a useless human being I am and see me chasing my tail on a daily basis looking for keys, phones, clothes, leads, poo bags, dogs, cars, money, children, sanity, and have seen me lose my head because I can’t do things that I want to due to procrastination or anxiety and lack of self-esteem. God knows how much I have fucked them up and they are all beginning to display some of my traits, Lord Love em’.
It is exhausting. Not just for me but for those I love and those I work with. It is frustrating knowing that I could have perhaps done so much more with my existence, which I am now terrified I won’t get a chance to do because I am 51 and my time is running out. I want to do ALL the things, at once, now! I have found a happy balance between my work and life now that I both work for myself creatively as a photographer and have a brilliant job for a youth charity where they accept me warts and all. My life and house are full of broken dreams/hobbies that seemed so plausible at the time. I am still afflicted with the hatred I feel for myself daily and the impression that I am not just letting myself down, but letting everyone else down too.
A diagnosis and realisation that I am ADHD has helped with some of this. It is no silver bullet, and the reality is that it changes nothing on a daily basis. It does however give me wiggle room to forgive myself a bit, especially the younger me who really didn’t know why she was like that and thought she was broken. People were not so aware of mental health issues and neuro diversities like they are now. Although it seems like the world is full of this phenomenon at the moment, I think of that as a positive thing. Knowledge is power and there is room enough in this world for all types of brains if adaptations and awareness are made. I think there are lots of reasons why people are getting diagnosed more. Women especially of a certain age, as with myself, when Peri Menopause came a’ creeping round, the genie popped truly out of the bottle. Also, if your child is diagnosed, it's not too difficult to work out which tree(s) the apple fell from. Our brains are also so mentally strained with the amount of stuff on our plates, not forgetting social media and the internet these days, that there’s no wonder things are popping up to the surface. Also, a bout of covid and lock down, made many of us look at ourselves introspectively and think wtf is up with me?
I could go on for ages about all the things to do with ADHD that is thoroughly tiresome, such as the extreme feelings of, for instance in my case, failure that is almost a physical pain, I believe ‘they’ call it emotional dysregulation. Or the absolute exhaustion of having to return to the house 4 times before you have everything you need, or the guilt of leaving the dog tied outside the shops for an hour before a friend messages you to let you know, or forgetting an appointment you have waited ages to get even though you literally talked to your husband about going to it 30 minutes beforehand. Not remembering people's names or faces and having to bluff your way round it and not being able to focus on anything for a few days or even weeks makes so that you feel guilty and shit about work and yourself. OR and this is a big one for me, the feeling of being infantalised, that you can’t do anything well and are not to be trusted. It’s not so much the joking about it that is the problem, it’s more that it is probably pretty accurate and I just have to accept that.
I just want to be clear, I have had a great life so far despite all of this, there has been MUCH fun along the way and I have landed myself a wonderful family and amazing friends. I consider myself to be a very lucky person. But yeah, just give us ADHD’ers and the rest of the NDers a freaking break, a diagnosis maybe is ‘labelling’ but it is also fucking liberating, and it helps to know where you may fall short and where you excel (which is usually around getting things started and doing creative and fun shit) We are needed in this world to balance out those who have the much vaunted executive function and organisation. Our skills should be equally lauded in our society damnit, what a dull world it would be without us wee whirlwinds bringing the party. And for all of you that are reading this and saying but I’m like that, I do all of those things, think to yourself, do you do them with such alarming regularity that it affects your mental wellbeing, hinders your daily life, hurts your relationships, so much so that you often find it hard to function. If that is the case, I urge you to go get your own friggin’ diagnosis!
So yeah, be a bit more forgiving all you naysayers and not in my dayers. Give us this day our daily neurodiversity and let us forgive our trespasses and hopefully get forgiveness for those we trespass against! A f’ing men.