Jimsy Jampots #179 - I've got ADHD
In which I get diagnosed
Things I think
I have a conversation deep in my WhatsApp history, from around this time four years ago. In it, I say “Gosh, getting diagnosed with ADHD is very fashionable right now, isn’t it? Feels like every tweeter and their dog is suddenly seeing their whole lives in a different light.”
At the time, I only had one close friend who had been diagnosed with ADHD and so I knew very little about it. I didn’t, for example, know that neurodivergent people tend to find and make friends with each other, like badly emotionally regulated packs of wolves - it would have put a very different spin on the fact that so many people I knew were getting diagnosed. I also didn’t know really what ADHD was, thinking mostly of that stereotype of eight-year-old boys who were unable to sit down and stay still in classrooms rather than grown adults struggling to remember to put the bins out. I didn’t know that many people - women especially - present with symptoms that can be misdiagnosed for years as things like anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. And I definitely, definitely didn’t know that if ADHD was fashionable then I should be on the cover of Vogue, because I’ve apparently had severe ADHD all this time.
About a year after that initial, ignorant text, I sent another: “The more I read/hear about ADHD, the more I’m like ‘oh….shit’”. A friend at work was talking about her husband: he had ADHD and when she would talk about the quirks of his brain, the more I realised I shared them all. I’d always thought they were down to my long-diagnosed anxiety and depression - all of my peers who had the same struggles also had anxiety and depression, so it made sense for that to be the shared cause - but the husband wasn’t anxious or depressed. He just had ADHD. And, as the continued wave of diagnoses keeps showing me, so did almost all of the aforementioned peers.
I was diagnosed at the start of August. Diagnosis was easy for me: our work healthcare changed and now neurodiversity care is covered, so it took months rather than years. If I hadn’t been able to go through private healthcare, I probably wouldn’t have done it at all: I was absolutely terrified of being made to wait for years and jump through multiple NHS hoops only to be told that I was actually neurotypical and my problems were due to me being a shit human being rather than my having a justified reason for struggling.
And I do struggle. I think I hide it pretty well, but I do, and with things that seem to me to be really basic. Bills are a huge fail point for me: anyone who has read my book knows the two-year struggle I had with sorting an admin error with my energy bills, and I eventually only sorted it (with one phone call!) after it was passed to a debt collector. I am currently totally unable to pay my nursery bills on time: it takes multiple phone calls, mentions at the door and threats that the kids can’t come to nursery next month before I pay it, usually on the last day that it’s due. I am consistently late with birthday presents and I don’t know why: I plan to do it, write it on my to-do list, sit at my laptop with every intention of buying something, then get distracted by a train of thought and three hours later I’ve learnt all about the plots of the films in a horror franchise I’m never going to watch and bought my children new jumpers for winter, but still not bought a card or gift for one of my very favourite people. My beautiful book writing spreadsheet has been made since February, but somehow I’m still only 11 chapters in to writing it. My house is a storm of chaos at all times, and I can’t blame all of it on the kids. I project an air of competence on the outside, but underneath my life…and myself…feels like a mess.
So, I sought diagnosis, feeling a bit like this was my last chance to find a solution to the problem of me. We didn’t even get halfway through the session before the nice woman with the excellent glasses assessing me told me she was pretty convinced I had ADHD. At the end of the two hours, she told me that people were marked on Inattentive and Hyperactive scales out of ten, and if you scored above five then your ADHD presented with that type. I got nine out of ten on both. I never did half-arse anything.
I’m not keeping the diagnosis a secret - partly because I don’t think neurodiversity is a thing to be ashamed of but mostly because I’m incapable of shutting the fuck up about anything - and the reactions fall into one of two camps. Most people are surprised. I think they share the same wrong ideas about what ADHD is that I used to, and so they look at me - a seemingly focused, fairly high-achieving, well-behaved woman who literally organises others for a living, and is bloody good at it - and wonder why I think I have a neurodevelopmental disorder categorised by problems with concentration, organisation and hyperactivity when I seem so on it.
And in the main, despite what I’ve said above, I am on it. I developed extremely good coping mechanisms to make sure I was on it, without really understanding why. I started bullet journaling 8 years ago and took to it like a particularly giddy duck to water, not knowing at the time that the method was initially created by someone with ADHD to help them cope with the way their head worked. I wrote an entire book about how much I love to-do lists, for fuck’s sake, and could have done a dissertation on the merits of different productivity planning apps in the early 2010s. I have multiple Google calendars, as well as IRL calendars, and am the queen of making conditionally formatted spreadsheets to organise projects, whether that’s revision, a podcast, a book plan, pregnancy, or moving house. I have regularly refreshed cleaning and chores trackers, and a Notes app full of plans and things to remember. You should have seen the invoice tracking systems I had when I was freelancing! It’s no wonder I am good at production now: I’ve been doing it to try and keep my life together for years.
So, I can understand why people are surprised when I tell them I have ADHD. What I wasn’t expecting was the reactions of people in the second camp - people so unsurprised by it that they were, quite frankly, sarcastic assholes. My therapist responded with overblown shock - “Oh my god, I am so surprised!” - then laughed and asked “How did you not already know, from the everything about you?” Before that, one of my similarly hyperactively-brained friends had read my book and sent me a message saying “Even if I didn't know you at all, I'd already be pretty convinced you had ADHD after page 12. Way too relatable so far.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that the people in the second camp tend to be the people I feel safest around, and so am more myself around. I used to think that I was shy, and so would be on ‘best behaviour’ around new people until I warmed up - it was the only reason I could fathom that explained why I could have a polite, small-talk laden conversation with someone at the start of a relationship and slowly, as I trusted them more, let more and more of the real me show until our conversations bounced around like ping pong balls thrown hard into a cupboard and covered everything from the weather to Wittgenstein’s theories of private language to homoerotic Captain America fanfiction. Turns out, masking is a whole thing, and I mask my hyperactivity massively.
It helps, I suppose, that it’s all happening inside my head rather than making me whizz around the room like Road Runner but have no doubt, it is hyperactive in there. I’m constantly thinking about multiple things at once, usually while music plays in the background. I’m not great at sitting and only doing one thing - I watch TV and play mobile games, I do a jigsaw and listen to a podcast, and I’m more likely to concentrate in a meeting if I can embroider through it. I can force myself to focus on what someone is saying - mostly - but it’s hard, and I end up with a list of segues to bring up once they’ve finished speaking. I thrive on multiple projects with hard deadlines at once, on always having just a little bit too much to do. My brain works fast, and I spend a lot of time trying to slow myself down to cope with the world outside of it.
I know this newsletter is jumping around a lot, and I’m sorry. I’ve been writing it for weeks, trying to wrestle it into shape. This thing feels so big, and I have had so many thoughts and feelings about it that keeping them straight and trying to make them make orderly sense is proving tricky. But then again, maybe it’s extremely fitting to have a newsletter about ADHD read like I’ve just thrown a handful of alphabetti spaghetti on a page of paper.
Also, it’s really hard talking about these things! They are things I’m ashamed of, and that I’ve been hiding for years. People tell me they admire how open I am about taboo subjects such as depression, suicidal thoughts and miscarriage - to me, those aren’t taboo. But the things my mum wrote about me in the ADHD pre-assessment forms - how I forgot to get travel insurance before we went on holiday so had to scramble for an EHIC when my baby cracked his head open and we had to go to Spanish hospital, how I leave something behind every time I go to her house, how she often has to remind me to do basic admin she’s asked of me - makes me want to cringe into a ball under a blanket and sob with the ignominy of it.
The actual day of diagnosis, I did exactly this. I don’t even really know what I was crying about - like I said, I was fairly certain I had ADHD, it hadn’t come as a surprise. But still, it was a lot. There was shame that I’m such a forgetful klutz that it is apparently medically diagnosable, relief, such relief that it’s not merely that I’m a useless and terrible human being, but there is an actual, tangible thing that is different about my brain, and there was sadness. Sadness for the little girl who learnt to dial herself down so she could please her parents and teachers, for the preteen who had to dampen everything about herself down so she didn’t get bullied, the teenager who spent all her energy trying to concentrate in class and was so tired she’d fall asleep at her desk while revising in the evening, for the young woman who left her nice, structured home life and support network to follow her dreams and immediately fell apart because of it. My assessor thinks that although you can have ADHD and depression or generalised anxiety disorder, for me the symptoms of the latter two have been caused by unmanaged ADHD. How different would things have been if I’d always known this about myself? How much better could they have been?
The only reason I sought diagnosis was to try medication to help me function better, but unfortunately my blood pressure is currently too high and they won’t start me on meds until my GP and I can get it sorted (apparently, giving stimulants to someone with high blood pressure isn’t a good idea?!?!). So while I wait, I’ve been trying to get some control over the situation by researching the crap out of it: I checked out every library book I could find, read articles, pored over helpful Instagram accounts, and attended four group-coaching sessions for people with ADHD designed to help us understand and manage our brains.
I wish I could say it was all hunky-dory now, but…it didn’t really help. I didn’t relate to the people in the coaching sessions - in fact, they left me feeling like an imposter for not having alcoholism or a drug addiction or a list of failed jobs and relationships behind me because of my ADHD. I think I had a bad run of books: they were either written by people I found deeply annoying (not because of their ADHD, sometimes people are just annoying) or contained nothing useful to me. So much of the advice is around how to make sure you do stuff, and I’m good at getting that shit sorted (mostly) or figuring out a way around it - for example, I confronted my shame over nursery bills and asked for help, so now have a group of friends with calendar reminders for the first week of each month to nag me into paying my them.
No, what I need help with is the other stuff - how to stop rejection sensitivity dysphoria driving me insane (I spent the tail end last week fretting about how I’m so “leave-able” after an aside from a friend made me worry she was annoyed at me and going to ditch me as a friend, which brought back a lifetime of pain from people I care about being able to easily abandon me), how to cope with always feeling everything all the time, how to occasionally slow my brain down when it is rushing out of control. The advice I read covered none of this, and while the memes and online accounts would validate that this was a normal thing to struggle with, they offered no help. I’d go through each one searching desperately for advice, a magic trick that would make me be able to do normal things like a normal human being, and be left grasping at thin air.
I’m aware that this letter is, so far, extremely negative. I sent it to some friends to read yesterday and one pointed out that I’m being particularly harsh on myself in it, and also harsh on ADHD in general. I honestly don’t mean to be. Well, I mean, I do mean to be harsh on myself, I suck, but not because of the ADHD, and I don’t feel badly about ADHD as a thing. It’s just a fact of life, right? A thing some people live with and others don’t, like an allergy to nuts or a fondness for the music of Phil Collins.
And I know there are upsides to it, too. My dopamine-seeking brain means I am an absolute machine when I want to be - remember when I was doing food blogging and making videos and doing a newsletter and a podcast and writing a book and painting and also having a busy social life and working a full-time job all at the same time and everyone wondered how I was coping? Well, ADHD. That’s how. Give me all the things and let me bounce between them, let me achieve them, give me the dopamine boosts, and I’ll be the happiest girl around. Even now, if I have the time and mental space, I can bash through in a weekend what it would take most people months to do. It’s just unfortunate that adult life tends to mean mental space is in short supply.
My ADHD also does me well at work. It helps that I work in the games industry, which neurodiverse people of all types seem to flock to so I’m essentially surrounded by people who think like me. And although ADHD seems very counter towards being a producer, whose job often means organising other people and making plans, I’ve recently realised that I am great in a crisis which makes me wonderful on a live service game like mine. I thrive in one, in fact. I always thought I needed to be slow and methodical with things in order to calm my anxiety but it turns out, nothing calms my anxiety more than being thrown right into the middle of a big complex fire with no safety nets. I did this at the start of the year, jumping into a project that was struggling and also one of the most important things my company has done in years and honestly, it was great. It was stressful and hard and I had to step up, but I loved it, and I did really well at it - to the point I was promoted, and given a new team where fires to fight are a more regular thing. It also explains why I thrived at The Pool: spending my commute finding ideas to pitch, pitching them, writing one and uploading it in a few short hours, getting immediate boots of validation from social media as soon as it’s uploaded, then making podcasts and videos all afternoon? It was chaotic, and I did really well on the pace of it. It was giving my stimulation-craving brain everything it needed.
ADHD is also probably the reason I’ve been able to have such an exciting, varied career - I pick up things fast so have been able to jump from sports to children’s charities to AV production to journalism to games production, with a side hustle of writing books, with relative ease. I pick up things quickly so have a great breadth of knowledge - bad for my house, which is full of stuff for hobbies that I’m pretty good at but not an expert in, but great for my personal development. This interest in anything and everything and ability to get a fairly good level of understanding of it quickly also makes me a useful person to have around, and a pretty interesting person to talk to. Multiple times someone has casually mentioned a topic or idea they’re looking at and I’ve been able to offer them different perspectives, and links to articles, books, videos and conversations about it due to that time I fell into a research hole about it once. I’ve helped with at least two people’s book proposals because of it.
And sometimes, I love the way my brain works. The first thing I asked when I initially enquired about medication was if I had to take it constantly or if it was something I could deploy only when needed because when my brain is doing well, it does really fucking well. I am so frustrated that I’m unable to get myself sat down to write my book, constantly distracted by life admin and my own brain, but I know that when I do and I start hyper-focusing I can write 4000 words in an evening. A big part of my job is running meetings and teams, and my ability to bounce between serious, getting-shit-done mode, empathy queen and class clown means my teams are always happy and supported even as they’re working extremely hard or in stressful situations. I can switch between my teams and projects instantly; I thrive on the variety and balancing it all. I love how much I can juggle, how fast I can think. My brain runs weird in a way I like, and as a result I’m both creative and logical, and on good days I am brilliant. I don’t want to change that. I just don’t want to be so paralyzingly ashamed of not being that good all the time.
Although getting a formal diagnosis was, I think, a good thing for me, it’s realistically changed nothing. ADHD is something I will have had my whole life - I didn’t get it when I was diagnosed, it was already there. The only thing it’s changed is that now I know it’s there, it’s a reason for having the struggles I do, an explanation as to why I can work and think in a way some people only dream of alongside failing to do things like renew my car insurance and make sure I brush my teeth twice a day. Not an excuse - I still want to find ways through it, I want to be able to cope with all the life admin I find hard - but a reason, which will hopefully let me apply little less pressure when beating myself up about it.
But that in itself is enough. It’s been really confusing and hard to feel like I’m really high-achieving and great in some ways, but bad, stupid and lazy in others, and feel like I have no control over it. It’s been hard to understand why other people seem to hold me in high regard when all I can focus on is that I can’t get my dirty laundry pile under control and frustrating for them, I imagine, when they’ve tried to understand why I feel so low about myself with all the good things I manage to do and be. This dichotomy - that I’m great in some way and fail entirely, fundamentally in others - has been a problem I’ve been trying to solve for years. But it’s not a problem to fix.
I’m not a problem to fix.
I’ve just got ADHD.
Things I’m doing
I don’t know if any of you fine folks are planning on attending Comic Con in the ExCel Centre in London this Saturday, but if you do, I’m part of a panel at 2:45pm on the centre stage. It seats 800 people! I am terrified! Come and say hello!
Love, Amy xxx
I'm in the second camp. If someone had asked me I might have suggested you were a kind of spectrum autistic/adhd. Hopefully you can get meds? Help? to ease up on your problems. Sorry if that's the wrong thing to say.
My partner has recently been diagnosed at 43 and I recognise so much of what you're saying from the conversations we've had about his ADHD. He's found both the diagnosis and the meds super helpful - although the medication has been more helpful for focus/getting things done than the rejection sensitivity. I'm so glad you've been able to get a diagnosis and hope you'll be able to get any support you need going forwards xx