Discovering My ADHD, Part 1

I was last week years old when I finally realized I had ADHD.

The revelation has been a bombshell. 

How in the world have I lived 46 years without knowing this? Because now that I can see it, there is so much clarity. It is like putting on glasses. And realizing all the ways I was compensating for it is truly amazing.  It feels like I managed a super human feat for most of my life, and I was VERY good at finding ways to cope, finding mechanisms to help my brain get what it needed. Running. Writing. Excercising. Food blogging. Praying. They all worked so well, until they didn’t. 

Like most adults who get diagnosed with ADHD, what brought me to my knees and made me finally see that I have it was my coping mechanisms were no longer working.

After I had the twins, the pandemic hit, my big kids got older and there were more demands on me. For the past few years, I was white-knuckling life, I was gaining weight, and I was not achieving all the things I kept dreaming about. 

Because prior to this time, I could organize my life around getting what my brain needed, and in many ways this hid the fact that I had ADHD. I was lost in books my whole childhood, got to hyper-focus in college, grad school, teaching, and writing. As a wife & mom, I hyper-focused on learning everything I could about cooking, becoming a food blogger, writer, and columnist. I could fit that into the small windows of time in my day as a mom, and when I got a larger block of time I wrote. I got to hyper-focus when I ran and listened to music. Oh, the freedom I felt on a run. But then my chiropractor showed me my X-ray and said I shouldn’t run anymore since I had no cartilage between my L4 and L5 vertebrae, and that was why my back hurt all the time. I had an absolute mourning period when I couldn’t run any more. Now I know that running and listening to music were yet another way to hyper-focus. 

But the very best coping skill, the best way to hyper-focus, was when I was reading and writing novels. When I didn’t have a book going – either reading or writing – I felt adrift. I always used to say that reading and writing were self-care, and now I know that I was definitely getting my brain what it needed.

As a presenter with ADHD said on a recent Tedtalk I watched: 

We have more thoughts then we have time to pursue, so we do so at every available opportunity. Our brains have a special lust for dopamine. We are wired to take risks. ADHD minds become super-powered under pressure. 

This is truly are me in a nut shell. I now understand why SO many of my friends and acquaintances comment on my mode of operating. How do you do all those things with six kids? How do you cook food and write a book? I never really knew how to answer their incredulity. I don’t know, I just know I need to do it. Now, it makes sense why I do those things and why neurotypical people don’t get it.

I remember a night right after my third child was born when a babysitter came over to help while my husband was traveling. I was busy making Ina Garten’s aioli in the food processor to put on top of fingerling potatoes, because I had watched her make the recipe earlier that day while I was nursing. The kitchen was filled with pots and pans and the food processor was whiring, my precious 4 and 2 year olds were playing, the baby was in a bouncy seat, and the dog was barking at her entrance. The (older and wiser) woman walked in to the kitchen and kindly said, “You just had a baby. Do you think you might want to keep things simple right now?” And I remember saying, “I just had a baby. I need to do this to stay sane!”

How in the world did I miss it? How did everyone around me miss it?

There are a few reasons. First, as I mentioned I was very good at setting up coping skills and structuring my life around it. I was always able to change things up so my brain could find something new to learn, to create. I prioritized exercise and healthy eating which is important for the ADHD brain. I kept a very disciplined spiritual life, which I am sure sustained me this whole time. According to this article, How You Are Self-Medicating Your ADHD, I had a lot of good things going for me and did use a lot of healthy ways to self-medicate. 

The author lists the following: 

Exercise – I have long had a habit of excercising 4-6 days a week, because I knew I needed it. For a long time running gave me the hyper-focus and endorphins I craved, but now it is a mix of walking, elliptical, tennis, classes, HIIT workouts, and more recently the Faster Way Strength workouts. I’ve had amazing results eating tons of protein and doing strength workouts and losing weight for the first time in two years, and credit this program with helping me to prioritize my health and start to uncover the fact that I have ADHD and was compensating with bad habits.

Meditation – I could write a whole book about my faith journey and probably will, but I said to my husband that having the Rosary as a daily habit with ADHD has probably helped me more then I will ever know. There is some connection with the spiritual life and ADHD I think, maybe it is because we make so many mistakes we need to lean on God, or are more easily like little children? We have way more tolerance for imperfection, and ideas like forgiveness and mercy and second chances fit our understanding of life because we see how much we need those things. Or maybe it is because there is always so much more to learn about God and ourselves, it is endlessly interesting to our brains. I read St. Therese’s Story of a Soul at 16, St. Therese’s Interior Castle at 18, Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain at 20, and Augustine’s Confessions – my all time favorite book – at 21. (I bet he had ADHD, and I also learned St. Catherine of Siena is the patron saint of ADHD because she struggled with it.) Looking back, I can clearly see that the depth of these works were perfect stimulation for my hungry mind. In the same way, I was completely hooked on my first day of philosophy and have only grown to love it more as I get older. There is a big meditative quality to philosophy makes my brain feel like a duck in water. Maybe truth lights up our brains.

Passion – Being a mom has absolutely been good for my ADHD in giving me a purposefulness to tackle mundane chores. My love for my kids and my passion for my family has made me put systems in place and order in our home and schedule that actually are part of why I didn’t think I had ADHD. I don’t forget to pick up my kids, I rarely missed doctor appointments thanks to always setting 2 reminders in my phone, and there was only 1 school event that I completely spaced (because another of my kids was home with strep, but we still talk about the trauma around when I missed the 1st grade rainforest play.) I’m five minutes late to everything, and our house is messy, but otherwise I take care of my people because of passionately wanting a good life for them.

Connection – I would say the faith piece and the mom piece fall under this coping strategy as well, because feeling connected to God and my family has been the center of my adult life, and the times when I am thriving, it is due to connection. We are also very blessed to have an amazing community, and my husband and I both thrive with a lot of connection and friendships. We have made some major moves in our past in order to raise our kids in a place with a lot of connection, and it has paid off. 

Coaching – I have always been interested in self-help, therapy, self-improvement. I think I was trying hard to understand the parts of me that felt different from other people. Now that I know, I truly hope to help other people who may be struggling unknowingly with ADHD. In particular, it is crazy undiagnosed in women. We have only been part of ADHD studies since the 1990s! And I think not understanding how it presents in women is why it took me so long to get diagnosed. It was the ADHD mama on Instagram that made me see. This Ted talk is also about how women are under-diagnosed (and this presenter has a very similar ADHD to me as well though I don’t share all of her thoughts).

Having all of these coping skills in place helped me self-medicate my ADHD and while they are clearly beneficial, they probably masked it and prevented me from seeing it. 

Another reason why I couldn’t see it is because my husband has the very traditional type of ADHD. Very high energy, needing to move his body, seeking peril & thrill in skiing, hiking, kayaking, bike riding, super social, frequently interrupts. We joke that on our honeymoon in Aruba, in order for my husband to be able to sit by the pool with me for a few hours, he needed to sign up for the 20-mile bike ride around the Island at 7 am. In comparison, I craved finding down time to sit still. But that was because then I could read/listen/think about something mentally stimulating. That was my way of getting a fix. And I had no idea. Now I can see that during ski season, our whole family tends to thrive because skiing medicates ALL of our ADHD.

When my kids started to get diagnosed, they had a similar type as my husband, which added to the idea that I couldn’t have it since I didn’t share their ‘motor running’ symptoms so common in childhood ADHD. When our oldest child went through testing for his NF-1 at Boston Children’s hospital, we were surprised when they diagnosed him with ADHD. I immediately read all the things (i.e. hyper-focused) and bought Ned Halloway’s book Driven to Distraction. He recognized his own ADHD at Harvard Medical School when he was sitting through a class about ADHD, and how they seek out high-adrenaline activities that have peril or risk. I then immediately recognized my risk-loving husband’s ADHD. But not my own. I didn’t seek risk or peril. I was happiest going to a coffee shop to write for 4 hours quietly. Now I know that ADHD’s Ferrari engine (as Dr. Halloway calls it) runs fast in men’s bodies, but it runs fast in women’s minds. Now I see that I like to take risks on anything creative, because doing it is so gratifying to my mind.

As we kept having kids and they kept getting diagnosed, our family went through tremendous learning curves, and found lots of great tools and help from therapists and books and specialists. And I still didn’t see my own ADHD. I would help parents who asked me for advice in person or on social media and suggest that they may want to consider medication for their child because if they don’t, they will likely grow up and self-medicate. And I still did not connect my weekend wine habit and hyper-focus staying up late watching tv on the weekends with ADHD. This absolutely blows my mind. 

Then my sister was diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. Trying to work full time while having school-aged kids remote learning created days where her coping skills no longer worked, and she wisely talked to someone who helped her realized what it was. She spoke of going on medication as feeling like her brain went on vacation, and was filled with ah-ha moments after her diagnosis. We talked about the possibility of me also having it, since hello! It’s genetic and now my husband, kids, sister, and very definitely our mom and my oldest brother, had it too. Our conversations went like this:

Me: I don’t think I could have it. I loved school. I loved learning. I have a Master’s in Philosophy and loved it. I write novels. I don’t have a problem sitting down and doing hard things. Isn’t that the main symptom of ADHD?

Her: Remember in your 20s when you would drive your jeep, smoke a cigarette, turn on your favorite song, and converse with whoever was in the car? Maybe just get checked out. 

So I took many online quizzes.  I even took one from a Marriage and ADHD course my husband and I took – and they all came up scoring very low possibility. I didn’t even relate to the test questions like ‘are you always fidgeting?’ ‘do you bounce your leg or feel like you have a motor in you?’ ‘is it hard for you to start a task?’.  No, I thought. I am very task-oriented! I get stuff done. I can accomplish a lot in a day, and tackle my to-do list, and don’t procrastinate or blow stuff off. 

That is, as long as it is interesting. My answers were colored by the fact that my drive to get to the mentally stimulating stuff made me plow through the things that were hard and boring. See, I could slay my to-do list and sit and do hours worth of hard writing work, and heck, I didn’t even have trouble with the day-to-day stuff of being a mom because I love making dinner! Don’t ADHD moms struggle with that? But all of those things are super interesting to me. When I had to fold laundry I piled it all on the bed, watched a movie and had a chore beer (i.e. made it interesting). I love learning about food, and when you are ADHD your brain is always seeking mental stimulation, finding new recipes to try is exciting and interesting. So it makes sense that I started a food blog, and as long as I could keep creating and trying out new recipes, my brain was happy, and I have kept it going for a long time. BUT – and this is a big but – ask me to do something to make the blog successful like posting it to a zillion food sharing sites and Pinterest and try to monetize it by reaching out to collaborators and figuring out how to post adds on the site – and my eyes glaze over. I have kept the blog a labor of love and delightfully ad-free partly because I hate ads when I am reading a recipe and mainly because the business side of the blog is SO boring to me. I have been fine with a small, loyal following of 2,000 ish readers per month for so long, but every once in a while I would wonder why don’t I try to build it? I chalked it up to being too busy with motherhood.  Now I see how much ADHD played a roll in procrastinating on doing the things that were boring to me compared to the fun & stimulation of creating content and new recipes. 

I also found the most stimulation in writing though. I wrote for the food blog, and then used it to write for magazines, and the story assignments were always so much fun to write. In fact, it was part of why I didn’t think I could have ADHD, since so many evaluations ask you about work, and my work was sitting down and writing an article which was easy for me to start and complete. Now I see the truth, that every assignment was a chance to hyper-focus and give myself the stimulation my brain needed. My work was by design not boring. 

Now I can see why I was always the happiest while I was writing novels. The name of the writing genre is literally an ADHD brains favorite thing – novelty. I remember thinking while I was writing my first one, this is the best! I am such a much better wife, mom, friend when I am writing. I feel all filled up, I feel so content. I am meant to do this! 

But when I got bored waiting to hear back from publishers, I immediately had to start another book. I got lucky that my first novel won a novel contest while I was waiting, because without knowing I had ADHD I might have given up. And even more lucky that it was received so well and had so many good reviews. I do have discipline and passion when it comes to trying to find an agent and I will keep going, but that part of the business is hard for everyone to face rejections, but for an ADHD brain to do something hard and to keep having no reward is a special kind of torture. The fact that my brain didn’t get the stimulation from writing it needed this summer and on top of that did the hard work of slogging through agent queries was a BIG part of what led to my unhealthy coping and realization that I had ADHD. 

For the whole of my life, I had my coping skills of reading, writing and learning, and I was lucky to have a great education and a lot of great friends and family around. For a long time, the only cracks that really showed seemed minor, and easily blamed on having a big family. 1) I was always running late and 2) I was very disorganized. 

I remember talking to a mom (hi Pippi!) at my daughter’s softball game last spring, and she mentioned she was just diagnosed with ADHD. I I told her my sister was too. She said she learned that people with ADHD tend to be very authentic, because they are so busy holding it all together that they don’t have time for facades, or pretense. I remember something clicking in me, thinking, ‘I really love authentic people too’. I thought of my husband who creates so many great relationships because he is that way too, as is my sister. I thought of my friend Kristen Reilly from One Hail Mary At A Time who has ADHD and is very open about it and very authentic. So many other ADHD people come to mind – Mel Robbins, Jim Carey, Robin Williams, Simone Biles, Will Smith, Peter Kreeft.

And then Pippi added, they also tend to have really messy cars and rooms. 

Check, and check.

Disorganization has probably been the biggest source of shame in my adult life. Luckily, my husband never gets stressed about it because his ADHD makes him blind to it too. We have compensated by having cleaners every 2 weeks, and my friend who runs an organizing business helped me with lots of problem areas last year which was amazing. But our van is always, always messy, and I rarely open the door with out something falling out. Her comments struck a nerve to be sure.

Why I didn’t just go get diagnosed right then is beyond me. But eventually, my coping tools didn’t work, and the cracks started to get bigger and bigger this summer, until it felt like every day I was duct-taping our life together. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold on, until finally I saw the truth.

It wasn’t our pace of life, it was me.

To Be Continued….