“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.”