41 Isn't Too Late To Figure Things Out

I originally wrote this on medium, but the ADHD Hub seems like the place for it. I've made a few edits and updates since then.

A couple of months ago, something both terrible and wonderful happened. There was an amazing twitter thread about ADHD, and all the things that come with it. I read it with interest, because I wasn’t even really aware that adult ADHD was a thing, and I had so many misconceptions about it.

As I scrolled through the tweets in that thread, I started to cry. So many of what I considered to be my worst failings, traits and problems were being discussed by countless others, nodding in agreement, things that I’d never even connected. A whole self-loathing narrative I’d built for myself over the years about these perceived failings, (lazy, doesn’t care, forgetful, thoughtless, afraid of feedback), came crashing down and emotional flood gates opened.

I asked “Could I have ADHD?”

So I wrote my own thread. Not replying to the original … I was scared and nervous, and recounted my own experiences, that I felt this might be ADHD, and put it out there for my twitter friends to see. I was terrified, but people were accepting an supportive and so many people I knew I didn’t realise were dealing with this and had great suggestions and advice, and offers of support.

It’s been a time for throwing away a lot of my preconceived ideas about how my mind worked, and I now a month later, I’m writing this having reflected on things for a time.

“So much potential”

So many folks I’ve spoken to lament this one, and it was a common refrain during school for me.

I seemed to be a bright enough kid in school, but not necessarily the most productive one. I was the one that the teacher said marched to the sound of their own drum, the one that the teacher lamented “If only they’d apply themselves they could be so much more”.

My teachers thought that I was smart and perhaps I was in terms of brain smarts, but I soon became tired of the relentless protestations from them that I needed to try harder, to apply myself more, that I had so much potential. It was frustrating, because I wasn’t trying to skive off or coast through school, I was struggling!

I was trying, but it was so damned hard to keep focus. Reading texts was terrible exercise where I forced myself to keep my place with a ruler or bookmark, grudgingly feeding the words in whilst it felt like my eyes wanted to roll back in their sockets, and I became restless and twitchy. I was lucky if even 25% of it stuck, as soon as my attention moved on from one sentence it felt like it flitted away like a bird on a breeze. Absorbing information was terribly

hit and miss.

After a time, you learn to focus on meeting expectations, because apparently that’s all that matters in school. I worked towards what was needed in the moment to satisfy people, to force myself to work harder than I suspect the other kids were, to pretend like everything was normal, and I wasn’t struggling, when I was.

So often I found it so much easier to be “sick”, so that I could have a break from the constant struggle that school provided. I suspect people knew that I was faking it sometimes, but I didn’t know how else to deal, and if I was sick it gave me some breathing room, and perhaps an extension to get some work done in, and also removed some of the distraction.

I honestly really hated the class room with all the noise, and kids joking and laughing and not taking things seriously, while I was struggling just to tread water. I felt like they didn’t care and they had it easy.

The irony was my grades were OK for the subjects I enjoyed, and mediocre for others. At the end of high school, in spite of how bad I was feeling, I managed to get an OK score, by focusing in VCE on subjects that I was really interested in and carried additional weight to balance the poor ones. Luckily I generally did well in exams. Time pressure seems to help me perform.

I’d found other ways to make assignments interesting, but not without consequences. In English class, I was asked to write an essay on fame, so I put fame on trial in a court, with witnesses being called, one of which to my then enthusiasm was C64 Musician Jeroen Tel, whom I gave some wonderful enlightening dialogue about it’s perils and pitfalls. I idolized them at the time.

Unfortunately for me, the teacher thought it was a wonderful and inventive approach to storytelling, and made me read out the whole thing (all 8 pages) to the rest the class. I was mercilessly mocked by people for this, as you might imagine. At the time, in the moment, I was excited to write it and it showed, but it embarrassed me and I soon learnt to curb my enthusiasm somewhat.

“I have no plan, just a fire extinguisher and it’s now or never”

Assignments, tasks projects. Words I learnt to hate. A lot of things were just hard to figure out how to start, and that included studying, assignments and even personal tasks.

For an average run-of-the-mill neurotypical person, they can look at the pile of tasks, or a large task like writing an assignment, and can break it logically down to a sequence of things that need to be done. I am here, and I need to be there. Their brain spits out a series of directions like Google Maps, and says “Do A, then do B, and then arrive at C”.

My mind sometimes cannot literally figure out how to get started on something, instead seeing all of tasks as if they are equally important or not important at all. It feels like picking one is to the detriment of others, and I literally cannot prioritise them — they all need to be done now or never.

Sometimes I would force myself to pick something but it would be an illogical place to start, leading to the obvious (to others) critique “Why are you starting with that? It doesn’t make sense, you need X, Y, and Z first.”. Again, frustration that something so obvious to others eluded me. Head meet desk.

“Is that today? F…”

Often this resulted in me not starting at all, until a task either becomes less important to others (Yay!), or becomes a sudden terrible thing filling my world with dread. I suddenly have a task looming that is due, or worse, overdue, that my distracted brain has completely kicked to the curb, for want of knowing how to start.

If I’m lucky at this point, I can pull things out my ass and hit a deadline at the last moment, but often it’s driven by adrenaline, and the prospect that my failure to do so will create massive personal consequences — doing the thing becomes do or die, an emergency in the now to be dealt with. Usually this is a fear of embarrassment or failure which is it’s whole own can of worms I will talk about further below.

I spent many a day at university, starting at 3am writing a paper which was due 5pm that day, because it became the most urgent attention grabbing thing in my periphery, the dumpster fire most demanding of my attention. That I’d done nothing about it until the immediate urgency set in was something that perpetually frustrated me, and continues to frustrate me to this day, even in a work setting, as sometimes things literally have to be on fire for me to be able to focus on them.

“Sorry, I was just dealing with something important and lost track of time…”

That’s not to say I always lack focus, sometimes when something excites me so much, it’s the only thing I can see or do, and becomes a complete overriding fixation. When I’m like this, no amount of prodding is going to get me to shift my focus until I become bored or distracted with what I’m doing, or literally exhausted from putting all my focus and energy into it. So I leave a trail of abandoned half baked projects in my wake, that previously excited me but lost their lustre.

It’s amazingly easy for something new and novel to jump into my periphery like a demented squirrel and suddenly pow, I’m down some rabbit hole learning about an obscure topic, or completely engrossed in some task that my brain suddenly decided was interesting and important.

To me, interesting is the same as important.

That important thing can take many and varied forms; sometimes that might be the need to draw, or write poetry, or understand and learn about a fascinating topic, and at that moment it is the only thing my brain absolutely considers the most important thing.

A big consequence of this, when it happens, is that all of a sudden I’m completely oblivious to my previous obligations, plans or schedule (if I had them at all). Sometimes this was as simple as calling into a Video call to discuss something with a colleague. But all I have is now, and all I see is now, and not that meeting in 5 minutes I really, really, need to attend.

So suddenly I look at the clock, and it is ten minutes into a meeting that I haven’t joined, and I panic, feel stupid, dial in sheepishly, and apologise that I got waylaid on an important task. What I don’t want to say is “Sorry something else completely took over my focus, and it pushed your meeting out of my mind”. The task may not have really been important to anyone, except my brain in that moment, and it may never be important again.

“The most dependable non-dependable person I know…”