Happy ADHD Awareness Month!
By Lindsey
October is ADHD Awareness Month! I’ve pulled together a handful of items that scream “ADHD” to me — check out the carousel above. What do you think?
I came to be intimately aware of ADHD a few years ago when my son was diagnosed in the fourth grade.
As I learned about his diagnosis and how best to help him as a parent, I realized that I saw much of myself and my own struggles throughout my life reflected right back at me, but through a totally different lens. These struggles were the ones I kept carefully hidden because I had always thought of them as resulting from my own character defects — things I was too lazy to fix in myself.
My secret shames, in no particular order:
the constant internal overwhelm
the external chaos and mess I created in every space I inhabited
the forgetfulness and resulting financial penalties
the impulsivity and poor decision-making
the anxiety
the self-loathing
the people pleasing, to constantly prove my worth
the perfectionism, to constantly prove my worth
the fidgeting, skin picking, nail biting, leg bouncing, joint popping, and tics/stims
the extreme sensitivity to any and all criticism or judgment, even perceived or imagined
the constant and costly creative hyperfixation-then-abandonment cycles
the inevitable burnout and physical sickness
I had lived through so many cycles of high performance and burnout by my late 30s that I just assumed it was me sucking at being a human, and whose fault was that but my own? I should try harder, I thought, even though I felt like I was always trying as hard as I possibly could, at everything. I am a proud lifelong try hard, after all! See “perfectionism” above!
Then I learned about the “lost girls” — women my age who slipped through the cracks in the ‘90s when ADHD was understood to be something mostly affecting little boys:
Neurodivergent women often slip through the cracks of diagnosis because they can appear smart or gifted. This is because we’re more likely to be perfectionists or suffer from low self-esteem, so we work extra hard to prove ourselves (see also: my burnout). Combined with hyperfocus – the flipside of the attention coin where one zones in on a single interest for hours – this results in flashes of brilliance.
We’re also experts at masking symptoms. We form habits by mirroring the social behaviours of those around us. …
As I discovered, burnout is what happens when the mask slips. Your entire world comes crashing down, and you don’t have the executive function to figure out which way is up. ADHD adults take an extra 16 days of absence a year, according to a report by the Australian ADHD Professionals Association, so while it certainly makes life interesting, it is a rollercoaster for your REM sleep patterns.
Gaining this knowledge about myself has been like finding a key to an important room in my house I didn’t even know was there. And that room is full of more sticky notes with clues about who I am and how to give myself grace and find systems that work for me, as well as how to be a better parent to my son as he navigates his own ADHD-related challenges. The room also has a therapist and doctor in it, and my medicine (which helps me with my ability to switch cognitive sets), and the piles of money I have shoveled into trying to get answers and find the right accommodations for our family so we can thrive. (We are not there yet!)
I kind of also feel like this secret room in my house should have a nice comfy chair for me and me only, that no one else can sit in. Not even dogs. But I’m getting distracted, and I don’t think the metaphor is making much sense anymore.
The point is, so much of the art I have made for Eyedot Creative can be tied directly to my experiences as a person with undiagnosed ADHD. So many themes I return to — being a brain disconnected from a body, a skull screaming into a void, a white hot explosion of frustration — are directly tied to the experience of growing up a lost girl. And I literally only realized that recently!
