I’ve recently had a massive revelation in my world, and in my normal spirit of oversharing and taking forever to get to the point, am going to tell you ALL ABOUT IT. (The hyperlinks embedded near the end will bring you to relevant articles, if you are inclined to read even more!)
For about as long as I can remember, I have disliked certain aspects of my personality. I wondered why I failed at seemingly simple things, like NOT constantly losing my shoes. I embarrassed myself in social situations (could I be any more awkward?!). Maybe if I just tried harder. Maybe if I just tried *one* more new way of organizing myself, or *one* more new mindfulness technique, I would reach a state of zen and all would be well.
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This is a common discussion in our house:
Jess: “Can we talk about x,y,z later? I’m really frazzled.”
Adam: “You’re *always* frazzled.”
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This is true. I am always frazzled. But I just thought that if I just could force myself to try a little bit harder, I would get my shit together and wouldn’t be frazzled. But it never happened.
My shit refuses to get together.
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| I don't actually know why I have this photo. |
These feelings have, not surprisingly, seriously impacted my self-confidence. Maybe that's surprising? By standard metrics, my life is wonderful. I have a PhD. I have a great job. I have a great husband and 2 great kids and a great house and I live in a great town. I have wonderful friends and my body is mostly functional and healthy.
I spend a lot of time laughing and smiling – even when I’m expressing something not-good. “I feel like my life is totally out of control! HAHAHAHA!”
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You may be thinking “oh, you are just over-reacting. Other people may exude together-ness, but they aren’t really.” Allow me to demonstrate to you some of my failings:
The scattered teacher
Almost all of my teacher evaluations said I was enthusiastic and approachable, and other good stuff. But also, at least ½ of them said my lectures were all over the map and hard to follow. I needed to come to class more organized and prepared. I needed to present things in a more logical, linear and less spider-webby fashion. (Note: I tried. I tried so hard.)
The lost jacket
One Christmas, my mom bought me a new snowboarding jacket that I coveted. It was beautiful and cozy and I was so happy. But then I almost immediately lost it. How could I lose an entire jacket? I looked everywhere. I didn't dare ask my mom if she had seen it, because this would be the zillionth time I had lost something, and I didn’t want to admit I had been so careless as to lose such a precious thing. So I took the money I’d had saved in my bank account and bought a new, identical one.
A few days later, I was wearing the new jacket in the kitchen after coming home from school when my mom opened the door to, naturally, the coat closet and lo and behold, there was the original one. It never occurred to me that someone might have picked up my jacket and put it in a logical place on my behalf.
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| The benefit of having 2 identical jackets = twinsies snowboarding with my friends! |
The out-of-place talker
When I was a professor at UMass Boston, I attended an event one day that consisted of experts from around the city coming together to brainstorm practical solutions to environmental injustice in the city. Climate change was disproportionately impacting low-income neighborhoods, and my colleagues hosted this meeting to address the problem. I sat at a table with about ten people who actually knew about this. I know this because we all introduced ourselves before we started the brainstorming activity. I told everyone upfront that I knew I didn’t know enough to contribute and was just here to listen and learn.
This was really true: I know about the science of climate change itself, but knew almost nothing about other neighborhoods of my new city that weren’t on the Red Line, and certainly very little about practical infrastructure-based methods to combat these impacts. Yet, I literally could not stop myself from randomly interjecting things, even when I immediately regretted what I said because I sounded like an idiot.
I have a long list of examples in my head of times when I have inappropriately interjected something in a professional context and then felt so ashamed when my colleagues looked at me like I had just started doing cartwheels in the back of the room.
The inability to find words
Multiple times a day, I struggle to remember words. I often have to reverse-google them: “what is the thing called that a boat ties up to?” Oh, that’s right, a pier. I often find myself getting really irritated when Adam or the kids ask me a question because it takes so much mental effort to remember the right word to answer them. (For some reason, this irritation doesn’t happen at work, just at home). For about a decade, until yesterday, I thought this was a sign of early dementia or a brain tumor or something. I didn’t want to ask my doctor or anyone else about it for fear of confirming this frightening suspicion.
The agitation of changing plans
I also thought perhaps I was mildly autistic, as I sometimes get more upset than I logically know is reasonable when plans change or things don’t go as I had anticipated. I often have to run through plans in my head multiple times before I do something simple, to help me be able to do it. For example, if the kids fall asleep in the car, I’ll plan out exactly how I’m going to get the kids out of the car and where I’m going to put them inside to continue sleeping. If Adam helps, but does things differently than I had planned out (parking in the “wrong” place, for example), I have been known to freak out.
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| I often spend a very large amount of time looking for my shoes... |
The inability to complete things (at home)
I have my shit together at work, more or less. Sometimes I forget meetings, but I don’t miss deadlines and I do a good job. (Unfortunately, if there are no deadlines, things generally do not get done until my guilt overtakes my ability to procrastinate). But at home it’s worse. I am forever starting projects and not finishing them. I start a worm bin and then forget about them and they get all desiccated (sorry, worms). Instead I get a spinning composter but only add stuff to it. Adam points out that perhaps I should pull out the finished compost and use it in the garden. I freak out and yell at him for badgering me about this, because I know this and I already feel mildly guilty; but it just seems like too much work to figure out how and then to do it, so I don't.
When we work on a project around the house together, Adam says at least once “Can you please just finish what you were doing before you start something else?” or “Why can’t you ever put stuff away?” or “Why are you pulling weeds? I thought you were putting that tool back in the shed and then coming back inside.” Well, it’s because I get distracted and suddenly I have to do the next thing rather than finishing the first. Partly it’s because if I don’t do the second thing when I think of it, I’ll forget. Partly it's because the first thing got boring.
The complete overwhelm of minor tasks
I also often can’t do seemingly simple things. “Just login to your bank account and pay this bill that came in the mail.” Doing this requires (1) finding my laptop, (2) not getting distracted by email or one of the 17 tabs I have open while navigating to the website, (3) remembering my password (but usually trying until I get locked out and have to reset it), (4) and remembering what I am doing once I get to the website. This is all hard and exhausting for me, and can take an hour. It takes Adam 5 minutes because none of these things are problems for him.
The forgetful friend:
Countless times, I have been in a conversation and asked a question, like “what do you do for work?” that I had learned a few minutes before because the person had just told me. Typically, the person looks at me with obvious concern, probably wondering if I suffer from dementia. This usually happens at parties, conferences, or other loud and busy situations. Unfortunately, it also happens with good friends, and I feel horribly embarrassed that it probably seems that I just don’t care enough to pay attention and remember what is going on with them. Sometimes, I avoid reaching out to friends to get together because I’m so embarrassed that I can’t remember what we talked about the last time we’d seen one another.
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| One thing I like about myself: I can be creative and artistic when I have the time. |
I could go on about my failings, but I’ll stop there. I’m guessing you won’t be surprised to hear that I suffer from sometimes-intense self-doubt, depression and anxiety.
So, what to do about this?
I’ve been in therapy on and off for much of my life. Each of the times I went to therapy, it was focused on trying to work through and combat these symptoms. But there was always some external stress that these problems could be attributed to – divorce of my parents, peer pressure, teenage angst, sexual assault, becoming a mother. If I could *just* work through my feelings about these problems, I’d be all fixed up. Each time that doesn’t help, I try various antidepressants on and off. This helps a little, but never completely.
AND THEN.
I am scrolling through Twitter, which is what I do while I sit next to my daughter as she drifts to sleep. I stumble into this thread. It’s as if the author is reading my mind.
I read the linked article.
Holy shit.
I so very obviously have ADHD.
I burst into tears. I text the article to my mom. She reads it and writes back: “Well, OMG…get to a psychiatrist immediately!!!”
Maybe I am not just broken. Or, I guess I *am* broken, but in a way that makes sense and has an explanation. It’s not a character flaw I can fix by just working and trying harder. I keep failing, over and over, to be the way I’m "supposed" to be, because my brain works differently.
Suddenly, so much frustration and guilt and sadness and shame is lifted from my heart and placed in a neatly labelled box in my head.
I am so relieved.
Each of the above, plus a bunch of other aspects of my life (working on 14 different things at once, or alternatively getting into hyperfocus mode when I’m working on something I enjoy or have a deadline [writing, data analysis, etc.], being pretty darn effective in emergency situations) can be linked to different aspects of ADHD:
The scattered teacher: non-linear thinking/executive function problems
The lost jacket: people with ADHD lose things
The inability to find words: retrieval problems
The agitation of changing plans: interference in compensatory systems (see #9)
The inability to complete tasks at home: shocker: also an ADHD symptom!
The complete overwhelm of minor tasks: distractibility makes stuff hard
The forgetful friend: poor working memory
This post could be a bad idea. Maybe it would be better to just keep this personal medical information to myself.
But, the incredible relief of having figured out exactly why I am the way I am, combined with my impulsive behavior means – HERE YOU GO WORLD!
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