A Personal Account of Navigating Womanhood, Pre and Post ADHD Diagnosis.
In the May of 2019, approximately 12 hours before my first A-Level exam, I opened my untouched copy of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’. Armed with red bulls and seventeen open tabs of various ‘SparkNotes’ pages, I worked into the wee hours immersing myself in the unchartered territory that was my entire two-year A-Level English literature syllabus. This was a studying method I had discovered in my early secondary school years that I continued to employ, increasingly unsuccessfully, right up to my final term of university.
I had more or less sailed through school without ever submitting homework, yet always finishing with disproportionately high grades in end of year exams (much to the annoyance of my teachers). My school reports had consistently followed the line that I was exceptionally bright - when I put my mind to it and wasn’t distracting others or staring out the window.
This behaviour pattern follows the common experience for young women with undiagnosed ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
In secondary school I attended a high achieving girls Grammar school. That environment was entirely un-conducive to supporting students who may need extra help - the primary focus of the school was maintaining high grades and therefore a combination of low funding and a disbelief in the existence of female ADHD meant that, as long as grades were flourishing, the rest would go unnoticed. My personal difficulties with ADHD went far beyond those that affected my education. Not unlike many others, I was an incredibly difficult teenager, but concern arose when many issues spanned into adulthood. I had atrocious money management problems - I was always running out of money and regularly built-up parking tickets to the point of debt collection. I couldn’t deal with the stability of relationships and was constantly picking fights. Any room I entered was somehow immediately (and often quite dramatically) untidy. My impulsivity was affecting every corner of my life - fidgeting in lessons was only a fraction of it.
Photo by Liudmila Chernetska on Pexels
I had previously been attending therapy sessions for an anxiety disorder and low mood, and presented the idea to my therapist that I might have ADHD. She gave me two forms - one for my parents, and one for my teachers. She suggested I give it to the teacher who knows me the best - a difficult task, as I had spent my time at school flying under the radar academically, and increasingly skipping lessons, so my relationships with my teachers were certainly far from friendly. The one teacher I did choose scored me incredibly low on many of the indicators, not least because it was a poorly designed form designed around the stereotypical ADHD characteristics of a loud and disruptive young boy. These traits are often not recognised in young women, as female gender norms do not connote the more outlandish symptoms of ADHD which leads girls to ‘mask’ their behaviours so as to fit in. Indeed, she even suggested that I avoid ‘putting a label on one’s individuality’. Therefore, I returned to my regular, disorganised, chaos-filled life with even less understanding about why I work so differently to my peers. Not to mention, with my upcoming a A-Levels, I now buried my head in the sand and tried to copy the study methods of my friends - all to no avail.
My personal experience perfectly epitomises the prevalence of the myth of female ADHD. Understanding the differences between the ‘typical’ perspective of ADHD characteristics and those presented in women was critical to my ability to garner sufficient belief from people that I did actually operate differently to them. Albeit, to those who know me best, there was little persuasion needed…
When I was finally re-diagnosed in my third year of University, I began taking stimulant medications and was beyond excited as I thought they offered some magical cure. They certainly helped me focus, although often on entirely the wrong tasks. Just recently, my housemate reminded me of the two-month period when she would return home from a long library day only to find me maniacally trying to deep clean my rug. I had been ecstatic to be diagnosed as I hoped that medication would offer a holistic solution to my problems, although quickly understood it would not be my preferred route. I was disheartened that I felt like I was back at square one, feeling isolated because my peers all seemed to live such well-adjusted lives and now, I didn’t even know where to begin trying. I felt as though we were living in opposition: I've since come to realise that ADHD is not such a binary issue. I could not approach ‘fixing’ my ADHD as one entity, rather that each challenge that ADHD presents must be tackled individually.
Helping the disorganisation side took nothing more than sheer perseverance: I have no concept of time and can’t differentiate how long ten minutes is versus an hour, which affected how long I would dedicate to tasks and caused chronic lateness. Although I still struggle with time blindness, I have to ensure I set disproportionate timings for myself (e.g., leaving an hour to travel a 30-minute journey). I also previously struggled with dysregulated moods, a common factor in ADHD, especially in women. I would often aggravate this by engaging in self-destructive habits - no exercise, unhealthy eating and sitting on my phone all day, to name a few. These habits are like crack to people with ADHD as we’re constantly in search of dopamine-raising stimulation. To counteract this, I had to ensure I focused my time doing things that did not excite me. However, I was very frustrated to find that exercising, eating a balanced diet and deleting apps like TikTok were hugely instrumental in fixing a load of issues in my life (shock). My moods were now more stable, which in turn helped me find joy in simpler tasks. Executive dysfunction is not about a lack of willingness to perform. People with ADHD are fundamentally limited in their ability to balance things like timing, organisation, or impulse control. By nourishing my brain, I am now able to put myself in a better starting position to even begin to consider maintaining some essence of an organised life.
Now that I understand how to mitigate the disruptive facets of this disorder. I wholeheartedly believe that neurodiversity is a strength: I rarely feel stress, often being able to perform tasks even better under pressure. And, as with most ADHD people, I am highly extroverted and socially confident. The benefits of having ADHD do not come without the necessity of micromanaging every element of my life. Realising that speaking over somebody does not translate as excitement as much as it does rudeness was instrumental in limiting some of its effects on my personal relationships. I often have ‘To Do Lists’ saved as the lock-screen on my phone, and the alarm app punctuates my day in 15-minute intervals, keeping me timely and ensuring I don’t leave my laundry in the machine for three days straight. I have always had a terrible fear of beginning a corporate job as I could only ever envision myself going stir crazy sat at a quiet desk job. However, I recently started a career in recruitment, an industry not unfamiliar to people with ADHD - the fast paced and people-facing nature of it aligns brilliantly with the kind of structure we need. It has been unbelievably reassuring to realise that there really is a stable for every donkey!