The lighter side of ADHD
Why the hell does this keep happening? I still hear horror stories of how people struggle for half of their lives and nobody stops to think "this isn't normal, we should see a doctor" and it just infuriates me.
Please, if it is negatively effecting your life or you get into arguments about it and it's effecting your social or home life, see a doctor.
I would have loved to get my diagnosis and start taking meds before I dropped out of college twice. Would have saved a lot of pain and money.
I got diagnosed at 29.
My life has gotten so much fuckin better since it's amazing.
I also dropped out of college twice. First physics then composition (music). I got diagnosed at 38, started medication and went back to composition. Will graduate at 41.
Well, I got diagnosed with depression, started using wellbutrin, which turned out to help with ADHD. Later I was diagnosed with ADHD and currently hoping to switch medicine because I still have serious problems with deadlines. I do two weeks worth of work during the last 48 hours without any sleep. 🤦♂️
Diagnosed about 4 months ago, I'm currently 36. Things are somewhat better but we're still finagling with the medicine dosage though.
34 now, been on meds since getting diagnosed 2.5 years ago, I failed calc 2 because I bombed the exam (luckily I could rewrite) and scraped by a few I had zero interest in. Also still recall one prof in my last year emailing me asking why I hadn't turned in assignments, I totally did cost-benefit analysis on every course to see what was worth doing and what I could get away with and still pass, helped that 70-90% of your final grade was the final exam in a good chunk of my courses. Uni is where my maladaptive coping mechanisms come from, I binged, used self induced stress as a motivator, would pound a pot of coffee myself during exams, only developed a lot of these skills relatively recently with medication and 4 years of therapy. No wonder I still struggle with internalised negativity to this day.
In retrospect I don't know how no one ever suspected or suggested it to me, I'm moderate combined and it's caused me physical, financial and relationship issues in my past, I always just got called "aloof" or "head in the clouds", I masked hard but that caused my issues outside of work and school, only have so much energy. I'm also certain one if not both of my parents have ADHD which might contribute to the late diagnosis, ADHD behaviours are totally normalised.
It's me in this clown makeup and I don't like it.
College was really hard for me. A big bundle of distractions at a vulnerable age in my life. I about failed out twice out of STEM degrees. I finally found a Liberal Arts degree that I could get a BA in.
Then a few years later, I had married somewhat. I went back and completed by STEM degree, somehow.
Now I'm back at it again 20+ years later, working on my Masters in IT. It takes all of my ADHD coping skills. Making lists. Exercise. Counseling. Supporting friends and family.
It's possible, but it's hard.
It's possible! Sure! If you know you have it in the first place...mental disability deniers all around me...😒
I was able to get an adult ADD diagnosis in my 50s from my mental health counselor. Which was forwarded to my PCP. Only then I was allowed to start meds.
I have heard it's notoriously hard to get a diagnosis as an adult.
This sounds a lot like my experience. I've been debating going back, and hearing others have been able to accomplish it alleviates some of my concerns.
My pediatrician told my parents that I definitely had ADHD, needed to be properly tested to confirm, and to get some medication to straighten things out.
I vaguely remember my mother saying that she didn't think it was right to medicate away childhood exuberance, and that I just wasn't challenged at school.
Fast forward 30 some years, and I get diagnosed and some medicine. My passionate love for a million different things hasn't been diminished, but now I can actually make progress on hobbies, and sometimes finish projects.
I feel as creative as I've always felt, just able to direct it more coherently so that it's actually productive.
I built shelves and put all the tools away afterwards. In the tool bag even, which is now back in the garage, and not just tucked away in a room I wasn't using.
You could be sharing my experience. I'm still working at it and need to adjust meds some but getting treatment was life changing.
When i was in 4th grade in the 90's i had a teacher that assumed something is was wrong with me. He watched me when we were skiing and i was always a bit overwhelmed when i had to use the ticket thing when there were a bunch of people waiting. He assumed i had some motorically problems.
I also knew back then that something was up but it wasn't that. I went to the doctor with my mom and he just testet my hand eye coordination. I was so worried that i was disabled or had to switch schools or something.
Oh man do i wish i got properly diagnosed back then. People sometimes don't believe me that i didn't do any homework for like 8 years in school. I never learned for a test, i never did a book report, i just winged my whole life.
Pretty sure my life would be really different if I had had the ability to actually study instead of "read some of the chapter, skip the boring bits and exercises, and then call it good".
Per the doc, a better than average memory can do a good job masking that it's not encoding stuff right or that you're not getting half of what's being given.
Good thing I have severe short term memory loss.
That last fucking paragraph
Yeah, people think they'll lose something of themselves, but no one is successful due to ADHD, they are successful in spite of it.
I didn't get diagnosed until just last year, and I'm in my early 40s. While this new knowledge has certainly had a significant impact on my life, I can't help but wonder how different my life would have been had I been diagnosed in the 3rd grade when I came home and point blank asked my Mom if I had ADHD... spoiler: she told me no.
It's hard to let that go.
Almost the same age as you and I'm fairly confident I'm undiagnosed and have been since about 3rd grade as well.
My mom had such a diagnosis suggested to her multiple times but felt the stigma of a diagnosis and a medication to treat it was worse than just doing nothing. In her mind, I'd get diagnosed, given a label that would prevent me from ever getting a job or having a normal life, and drugs I'd take for the rest of my life that would make me act like I'd received a lobotomy.
To be fair, it is possible to have all of those problems and still not have ADHD.
It is also possible to have all those problems and have ADHD.
without a proper diagnosis I don't think there is a definitive way to know.
[edit] Never mind
This helped me understand my brother a little more.
Is lazy a synonym for adhd?
Yeah...if you're from the southern US and "don't believe in mental disabilities"...😒
A lot of symptoms associated with ADHD make procrastination more likely
And how many times have I been late in turning in my ~~homework~~ screening assessments? Too many.
I never submitted any of my 10th or 12th grade reports on time, since I found them excessively tedious. And virtually all of my assignments in uni were completed last minute.
More of a misdiagnosis.
Thats what I’m starting to think. Is every lazy person actually undiagnosed adhd
No, in fact some people are misdiagnosed adhd when they are actually lazy
I know that I have it and I have struggled just like this my whole life. I recently lost the only job I’ve ever been able to keep because the company sold. I’ve got three weeks before my life starts to crumble.
I am treated for opioid addiction. No one will help me because of that.
It’s a fight to get the damn diagnosis. My poor daughter definitely has adhd. They’re trying everything first, and I don’t blame them, especially with my history of addiction. It just sucks.
She started high school last year, one year after her mother died from breast cancer. She almost didn’t get through the year because she literally can’t focus on anything and never has been able to. Her room looks like a landfill if I don’t go sit in there with her and remind her over and over again that she’s cleaning.
I’m hoping we get the diagnoses and treatment before school starts or I don’t know what we’re going to do. She’ll end up doing exactly what I did. She’ll drop out.
I’m going to stress this to the doctor next visit.
EDIT: Oh, whooops, I genuinely misread the subreddit as being the autism memes one, I'll still leave this one here, that rant felt too good to delete.
Yes, I feel this one so much. Only make it "in my thirties" - and I completely internalised my masking, leading to self-hatred and inability to properly overcome it. I got misdiagnosed with a whole slew of different disorders over the course of my life, too. Which made me try so fucking hard to do what is right and push myself again and again, only to break down into long phases of complete withdrawal, burnout and depression every damn time, even though I did "the right things" to overcome stuff like anxiety and depression. Now, to be fair, it's correct to be noted that throughout that life, I also developed a personality disorder from internalising all those things I heard, being lazy, having to remain restrained in my behaviour at every moment, questioning and repressing every intuitive emotion out of fear of it being "wrong".
I only very recently ended up being able to recontextualise all the prior shit in my life, am currently in a phase where I am reconnecting with my anger, which I had forbidden myself completely and repressed it deeply into my unconscious in my early teens, after having had daily aggressive meltdowns in my childhood, which led to both physical violence and deep shaming and essentialist shaming of me "being wrong" by my parents. And looking back at my life, considering I was in different kinds of psychological and psychiatric care almost my whole life, I simply don't understand how no one even considered autism at any point. Yeah, sure, it was not as well known as today in all its details, but the more I reflect, the more things I discover in my past that were just clear signs even back then.
Not to 1-up everybody, but I strongly suspected & brought the suspicion to a psychiatrist at age 43. He felt unable to to confirm, deny or somehow check.
At 46, finally a referral to a clinic by my GP, who believed it. No appointments available though, not even in the distant future.
1.5 years later, I'm in the process of getting checked, and it looks like I'll get a "yes" or "no" (very probably "yes") within a few months.
Obviously a dropout, too, but I managed to get a fraction of my potential due to an unexplained (to this day), 5 year lasting obsession with IT in my 20s, which caused me to study frantically day & night. Came and went, but a lot of it is still relevant.
In the past 20 years, I managed to land fat jobs over and over again, but like relationships and everything else, the fuss around the work itself gets "too much" and I quit after 6 - 18 months.
That weird 5 year study-frenzy was a blessing overall, but it also got me to think I was just an assclown before and after, rather than having a medical condition.