Month: April 2020

“Am I Sure I Have ADHD?” Part 2

theadhdtherapist

“Am I sure I have ADHD?”

A year ago, I sat in my supervisor’s office. She was a woman in her seventies, with a piercing kindness in her eyes that revealed all insecurities. More importantly, she was a woman who had practiced in the field of mental health for over twenty years, and was the one who first confirmed my suspicions.

That day, I held a lined notebook in my lap, of all the questions I had listed, different colors for different sections to help me organize the shaking thoughts in my mind. But there was one I had not written – the one that mattered most: 

“Am I sure I have ADHD?” 

I told her I believed that it existed. I told her that I could even believe that countless others lived with it, experiencing the same struggles and hardships that typified the diagnosis. I saw the clients daily. I worked with them on their experiences. They had ADHD, of course, and I could reassure them with every gentleness that what they felt was true.

But me? 

What if it was just me? 

What if I, the exception, was wrong and bad and broken, and just looking to find a name for my newest excuse?

And she watched me cry tears of years of painful history, and in that kindness asked me a single thing. 

“Have you tried your best, and worked your hardest, and found something lacking still?” 

Of course, I answered. Of course I have. I have given it my all. 

“Then it is something. Perhaps it is ADHD, or perhaps it is something else, but know that it is something. I have seen who you are: you are intelligent and earnest at everything you do, and yet in your work there is a gap between what could be and what has been.” 

“So know it is something, and ‘something’ is not your fault. Because it is not that you have not tried enough…”

“But that it should never have been this hard.” 

“Are You Sure You Have ADHD?” Part 1

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“Are you sure you have ADHD?” 

Yesterday, I went with my husband to the doctor’s. We went to speak to her about his ADHD symptoms, and about how he could get the help, much the same way I did when I was first diagnosed nearly a year ago.

I sat beside him as he explained his symptoms, the assessments he had taken, the experiences of functional disruption built up over a lifetime, and I recalled.

I recalled when it had been me, a year ago, sitting in the same seat in the same office. I recalled explaining my symptoms as well, in the clinical terminology that I had studied in my textbooks, but that now sounded brand new and strange when ascribed to myself. I recalled the way she paused, the well-practiced temperance of an experienced medical professional, looking into me pensively as if she were once again holding a stethoscope to my heart. 

“Are you sure you have ADHD?” 

I recalled the way that question struck me so hard. 

Because no, of course not. Of course I was not sure. I desperately hoped, and I wanted to believe it was real… but it was struggling against every doubt that whispered to me, insidious, 

“Are you sure? Or maybe it’s just you?” 

What if ADHD was a convenient excuse: a blissful grasping of a label to cover up moral decrepitude? What if the condemnations I’d heard all my life: that I just needed to work harder, to be better, to understand that every failure had simply been due to a lack of effort because I didn’t want it enough…

What if all of that was instead the truth?

“Are you sure you have ADHD?” 

She didn’t ask the question yesterday. Instead, she simply nodded at him. At the restless bouncing of his leg, his nervous energy. At the look of apprehension in his eyes. 

“Oh, yes. I can tell.” 

If only it had been that easy the first time around. 

The Start of Something New

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“This is the start of something new.” 

It is a phrase that should fill me with wonder and excitement, but I admit that I am fearful, too. I find myself at a crossroads, and I must remind myself that I am not the only one: everyone falls. Everyone fails. At times, anyone could give their best, and find out that their best is not enough. 

On March 6, 2020, I resigned my job. It is more accurate to say that after months of honest effort to manage a caseload that had become greater and greater, with time restrictions that had grown more and more demanding… I was told that my best efforts were nonetheless unsuccessful at keeping up with the requirements of the position I held, and I was asked to step down. 

In the days since then, I have had the time and opportunity to listen to the way my mind speaks. Self-Talk, it is called, and in the haze of the everyday it is often quiet. I am grateful that I have had the luxury of silence on my side, to put a voice to the welling discomfort within my chest. 

“Maybe I’m just not good enough.” 

The phrases run through my mind on repeat. I know myself well enough to sense it when it begins to plague me, and it is not what my conscious mind believes. But unconsciously, it is the echo of a lifetime of little failures attributed to not my efforts nor my skills, but simply…because of who I am. 

I am inconsistent. I am found out. I am juggling so many things in my mind that I often cannot quiet it down. I am forgetful. I am inattentive to details. I don’t know what I’ve missed until I’m told I’ve missed it, and that often comes far too late. 

I do my best to change it around: to depersonalize the experience into a reframe is not so based in shame. It is an active process and an ongoing one. But it is a choice I make. 

To the voice that says, “I could have done more,” I tell myself, “I tried my best.” 

To the voice that says, “This always happens,” I tell myself, “I’ve learned more this time.  I understand myself better. Perhaps this had to happen to gain these experiences I will use for my future.” 

To the voice that says, “I am bad,” I tell myself, “no. That’s not it. The circumstances did not fit me, and I did not fit them. And sometimes, it’s okay to not belong to a place that does not belong to me.” 

Because the hardest part of failure is not the change. It is not the uncertainty of the future, and the worries of what unknowns it will bring.

The hardest part of failure is that part where it tries to confirm as true every terrible thing I’ve ever believed about me. 

In these times, I choose to speak to myself as a friend. I lean upon the encouragement of those who love me, and I hold their words against me like floating rings in an open sea. 

“I can do this.” “I am more than this moment in my life.” “It’s okay to be afraid.” “There is something better out there for me.” 

That’s it.

Moment by moment, day by day.

I will speak gently, and I will make it through.