It’s taken me 20 minutes to start this blog post. Five minutes, to scroll through Facebook despite having already looked at it three times this hour. Another 10 minutes of poking through old files before I can remember that the file I really want is on my old, water damaged laptop, which lies dormant in my desk drawer. And then a final 5 minutes of me trying to figure out how I want to start this, and realizing I should shut off the podcast I’m listening to so my brain can calm down.
I lost my job right before COVID started, February 2020, through no fault of my own. I hadn’t the slightest clue that mere weeks later, the entire planet would be grinding to a halt. Mentally, I was still living in the old world, where I had a job and focus and people relying on me.
By April, I was a shell of who I once thought I was. With no deadlines to meet, no alarms to wake up for and no schedules to follow, I realized how easy it was for my brain to unwind from its neat little yarn ball I’ve meticulously wound over the years. ADHD crept in like a naughty kitten and slowly pushed that yarn ball around until it was a mess of knots and loose ends. I couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t my phone. I was exhausted 80% of the day, but that 20% I would burst into doing something, cleaning or scrubbing or reading until I burnt through that little bit of energy. My notoriously bad memory had reached new peaks; instead of simply forgetting memories from years past I was losing words of simple things, like “spoon” or “delicate.”
Last year I started to piece together what was happening to my brain, with a hefty shove from my therapist. An ADHD-focus psychiatrist and I, after several sessions and lengthy evaluations, came to the conclusion that my desire to people please and always follow the rules kept me on task for so many years, masking my disorder until I no longer had a schedule to follow or had nobody to please professionally.
(I had to look up the word evaluations through inputting similar words into thesaurus.com because my meds for the day have yet to kick in.)
And I remembered throughout my entire life all of the things I had started and never finished. It was my mental tiredness that was always putting me on the shelf on weekends. How any setback caused me to give up completely and forget I had ever tried to do something in the first place. How many times I fell asleep in class, no matter how much I slept the night before, if I wasn’t being directly stimulated or included in the learning. It all made so much sense. And that really made me sad.
I shudder to think of how I’d still be suffering now if life continued on as usual and I found another job and kept masking. Worse, I think of how much more successful I’d be now if I was drugged appropriately as a kid and given accurate tools to manage my ADHD. Maybe I would have been made fun of for getting extra time on tests and assignments. I could have turned into an antisocial kid who didn’t know how to mask, and just succumbed to depression far easier. I’ve felt my mind run away with all the scenarios that could have taken place.
ADHD is not my friend, my enemy, my partner or my adversary. Being disabled is not my superpower, nor is it my Achilles heel. Quite frankly, I wish I didn’t know ADHD at all.
I feel robbed of a life by ADHD as much as I am grateful for how things turned out. My somewhat decent grades and lower middle class upbringing meant I only applied to state schools, like the one I met my husband at. If I wasn’t so adept at balancing several things at once, I wouldn’t have been the third best field hockey goalie in Suffolk county. I’d also probably be a way worse cook. I don’t know what would have happened, but I will never stop wondering about what could have been.
And if I forget what I was wondering about in the first place, maybe that’s not so bad either.