For a while, maybe 6 months or so now, I’ve been realising I have a lot of ADHD traits. Seeing friends being diagnosed and sharing their experiences has made me see just how much I resonate with them, which does explain a lot of things. I always thought I was ultra chaotic, really shit because I have the concentration span of a flea sometimes, and that I just couldn’t tell a story properly (I jump from A to G to Z, circle through F and I, mention H then decide H isn’t that relevant, and then forget what B was, quite frequently) It turns out, maybe none of those things are my fault, maybe it’s actually ADHD. I’ve been wondering for a while about whether I should pursue an ADHD diagnosis and this post is, effectively, a bit of a brain dump of my thoughts around it.
Hilariously, at this point of writing this post I went to find a link to common ADHD symptoms, got distracted, read the whole page and then went downstairs to do something else, forgetting about this blog post-and if that doesn’t scream ADHD I don’t know what does.
Spending time with J, effectively not being on my own all the time, and feeling comfortable enough around him to stop masking things, has made me see my own symptoms far more clearly. Yesterday, for example, I went to pick him up, was too busy talking to him, didn’t listen to the sat nav, went the the wrong way three times and got really stressed at myself. He sees me doing the constant ‘right I’m doing this, no I’m doing this, no actually I’m doing that’ and never finishing one job, he sees me losing things (and is already at the point I can say ‘where’s my…’ and he knows where I put it) and I think he’s learning to be able to take in the important part of the story I’m trying to tell him, rather than getting ultra confused by it. Lets hope his patience lasts! I’ve often thought a lot of my chaotic behaviour is brain fog due to my Fibroymalgia but I’ve come to realise it’s not, it’s very clearly something else, it’s very clearly ADHD.
Honestly, seeing myself through someone else’s eyes has been a bit of an eye opener for me. He’s lovely about it all, doesn’t want me to change, accepts that this is just me-but I REALLY hate it, and it’s made me do quite an about turn over whether or not to pursue a diagnosis. When I started writing this post, it was going to be about why I wasn’t going to pursue a diagnosis, and I wrote part of it and then stopped. Now I’m finishing it, I think I AM going to be pursing an ADHD diagnosis, because I think I probably need to consider medication in order to manage life a bit better. The waiting list is long, really really long, and honestly if I can afford to do it privately I might have to make that investment in myself, but I think even getting onto the list is a step in the right direction in terms of taking control of things.
If you’ve got ADHD, whether you decided to pursue an ADHD diagnosis or not, and want to have a chat, please do get in touch-I think the more we talk about this stuff the better we can all understand it, and I still don’t understand a lot of it.
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