Three months ago, I had a bomb dropped on me.
But let’s go back further than that. There’s one particular thing I can point to in my past and say, “Holy shit! ADHD is responsible for that.”
High School
We’re going back to the late 80s, a time when ADHD was barely known to the medical community and basically not at all to the population at large. When I was in ninth grade, they put me in Advanced English. I tested that I belonged in there. I had the ability to do advanced-level work. The reality though was a major struggle to produce a C on the report card.
Tenth grade. They put me right back in Advanced English, despite my prior grade. Results? The same.
Naturally, this created strife not just between me and my teachers, but also me and my parents. Everybody knew I was capable. How did they know I was capable? Because when I DID do the work, I was doing A level quality. Why did I keep getting a C on the report cards? Because those A’s were offset by F’s and zeros for failing to complete or even do other assignments. I got through tenth grade with another C. But once again they put me in Advanced English for 11th grade. And, of course, it’s the same damn thing, if not worse.
But finally, my eleventh-grade teacher had the smarts to look beyond the stupid standardized tests, beyond the fact that I was capable, and look at the situation and say, “No. Put her in average English.” Now, remember: this had nothing to do with ADHD. It wasn’t a part of the conversation. No one knew it should have been. My teacher was simply putting me in an educational environment where I could finally succeed. An environment where the demand was more on the level of what everyone though matched my motivation level.
And holy cow. What do you think happened? I got a fucking A.
In hindsight (I’m not going to say how many years later) I can now see that ADHD prevented me from focusing long enough to complete what an advanced level assignment was looking for.
There are so many flavors of ADHD. Impatience is a common facet of ADHD. Some of us are very impatient. I didn’t have the patience and self-discipline to do what was required for these deeper projects and assignments.
There’s a difference between feeling impatient and being impatient when you’re ADHD. A non-ADHD person will feel impatient but be able to hang in there. An ADHD person will not only feel impatient; they’ll also mentally check out of the task at hand. When this happens, nothing gets done. ADHD people can tend to either get distracted and move on to something else, or they just plain freeze up. Thus the F’s and zeros.
Some of it is avoidance, a coping mechanism. But to the rest of the world, they interpret this behavior differently. People around me said, “Well, she’s just not interested in doing the work.” That was kind of true but the reality was I felt overwhelmed. So. Very. Overwhelmed.
Hearing that pushed me into a numb state to the point I feared having to repeat eleventh grade English in summer school. I wasn’t like the smart kids. There was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I be like the smart kids?
Those thoughts still haunt me to this day.
The Bomb
Fast forward to early 2019 and my eldest daughter was struggling. The initial reach for help was NOT for ADHD, and not even for me.
I have a teenage female in my household. You understand what that entails… She really is a carbon copy of me, much to her dismay. But she’ll appreciate that eventually.
Still, she struggles with anxiety and one day she asked for a therapist before we could verbalize that she was going to start seeing one. That was like hallelujah, she thought this was her idea. She had no clue we’d already lined somebody up.
We originally lined up a therapist because her teen angst went beyond normal to the point where she was bullying her little sister not only with words, but also physically. After two appointments, the therapist wanted a session with me. I’m thinking, “Okay, sure. This lady wants to get the adult perspective of the household because the teenager is going to present one side of the story.” So I’m thinking I’m going to go into this and finally hear the teenage point of view. I’m going to hear about how my daughter thinks her living situation is awful, she should be taken away, etc. Typical teen stuff.
Before the appointment, I took pictures of the teenager’s bedroom. I took pictures of the bathroom and the dining room table where she does her homework. I got to the appointment, talked about behaviors and showed her the pictures. Let my daughter complain about how “awful” her life and parents were. I was on a mission to help her find the normal I never could.
The aha moment for the therapist was showing her my daughter’s room. Yes, you can have teenagers with messy rooms, but this was something different. My daughter asked for a dresser because the one she had was teeny tiny. We bought her a six-drawer dresser with tons of space. A year later, it is still sitting there with only socks in one of the drawers.
She is incapable of sorting her clothes and putting her clothes away on her own. It requires too much, so she shuts down. (Remember the impatience mentioned above?)
The therapist’s face lights up. You could almost see the lightbulb above her head pop out of nowhere, as she says, “Your daughter has ADHD.”
My jaw hit the floor. “What do you mean? My kid gets straight As. I know my ten-year-old has it. That kid struggles like crazy in school. What do you mean my teenager has it?”
She explained that anxiety was a very common symptom for females with ADHD, and this was probably the root of it.
We went through the conversation and the therapist asked me questions about the whole household, the whole environment, and everyone else in the picture. I described similar stuff going on with everyone in the rest of the house. And there it was. The second lightbulb above her head.
“Holy cow. You live in a household where all four of you have ADHD!”
I was just… stunned. Absolutely stunned. My mind was blown. But holy crap, she was right.
The Truth Sinks In
I reeled for two weeks, going through what’s commonly known as the stages of grief. There was a lot of back-and-forth between disbelief and denial. I felt depressed, disappointed, and the very, very dangerous thoughts surrounding, “What if we had found this out sooner?”
You can’t play the “what if?” game. That just leads to bad places. I’ve tried to take more of a perspective of knowledge is power. Now I know something gigantic about myself, my husband, and my two kids. This explains so much of the household dynamic. It explains the root of all of the friction.
My husband is still mildly in denial, coming down kicking and screaming. He does not want to take ownership of this, but his argument is constantly losing ground. He’ll get there one day.
Just this past weekend, for the first time, he wrote himself a list of tasks he was going to accomplish and he did not let himself do anything else until he accomplished those three tasks. He wrote them on the bathroom mirror with a dry erase marker. For the first time in probably his entire life, he got everything done he set out to do.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you adapt and overcome.
This is something personal that I’m living through right now, this great life enlightenment. It explains so much of my past and present. When it comes to adjusting to healthy coping skills, I’ve learned that I don’t so much need a method that works with my brain so much that I need a method that works with my flavor of ADHD. I need a method that breaks down giant tasks into manageable steps. And it is that very lesson that I hope to apply in order to finally finish writing a novel that I started over 3 years ago.