“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.