Author: theadhdtherapist

Having ADHD is like having a car where the ignition only works sometimes. Other times, you have to sit in the seat, revving the engine futilely over and over, praying for a miracle so that you can make it to work on time.

And then sometimes you get it to work after an hour of begging, and you sprint your way into the office with your hair on fire and smelling like engine smoke, already prepared to face the worst of your boss scowling at you. You know what they’re going to say. It always goes like this:

And that’s for the times you actually can get it to work. Some other days, it’s so demoralizing that you just give up and go back to bed.

No one’s ever driven your car before, so no one’s ever been able to say, “you know, that’s not right. Maybe there’s something up with that car so it isn’t connecting the way it’s supposed to. It isn’t supposed to be that hard to start up a car.”

But nobody says that. They just tell you to figure yourself out. Or be fired.

Again.

“Christine Kuo, you are very smart, but you are very lazy!”

I laughed along with the class that day. Later, I retold the event with a sort of pride about how I had “bested” the requirements of the exam by exploiting some technical loophole: one that allowed me to complete a task legitimately, but far more easily than planned. 

I recounted how I had been caught eventually, of course, but that the professor had been good-natured enough to recognize the cleverness in my actions, and grant me the clemency of not docking my points- with the caveat that I would not be allowed to do it again. 

“You are very smart, but you are very lazy!” 

It had been a compliment then. I wore it eagerly.

But what she did not see was the desperation behind that act of cleverness: that it was panic that led to a drastic feat of self-preservation. 

She did not see that all that week before, I had willed myself daily to study, but time had dripped through the sieve of my mind until I woke up the morning of, drenched in the remorse of things I should have done. 

She did not see the way my chest constricted upon viewing exam questions on a topic we had practiced all quarter, basics that “anyone should know by now,” but that suddenly appeared terrifyingly alien when I held it in my hands. 

She did not see the relief with which I grasped a singular lifeline: one possible solution to rescue myself from drowning in another failure. Not the right way to do it — not ideal, not even technically acceptable… but not ‘wrong,’ either. Good enough. I would have to settle for just good enough. 

It was not laziness, but survival. 

And the pride, in retrospect, was not in the fact that I was smart or clever. The pride was not in the points I received or in the approving chuckles of my peers. 

The pride was in the fact that I had gambled on the relationship with my professor, with whom I had spent so many months building up my reserves of good will–

So that in a time like this, when in my despair I risked everything…

She smiled at me, and only called me “lazy.”

“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?” 

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.