Discovering My ADHD, Part II

Knowing thyself is the beginning of wisdom. – Aristotle

(This post is a continuation of my first post, Discovering My ADHD, Part I if you want to start there.)

When I look back, I can see a constellation of events made my coping skills work less and less.

I had the twins at 41 and was in survival mode for the first few years. I can see now how much the sleep deprivation was very hard, since sleep is super important for ADHD brains. I felt a lot of grace during this time, and had good support thankfully with au pairs and sitters. But life was total survival mode, and it was easy to chalk that up to having twins. 

When the pandemic hit, which was when my sisters coping skills stopped working, I was able to write during their naptime, and began my second novel. With outside events cancelled I didn’t have to use my executive functioning skills as much. My friends and I took walks everyday, and we all reveled that we had more time for connection and time in nature. My husband even commented that I seemed really happy with a slower pace of life. Now I can see why. But balancing everyone’s needs and remote learning with two two-year-olds was still hard, and it will just be known as the time when there were new crayon marks on everything, every day.  

Then life opened back up, and my executive functioning skills were tapped immediately. My big kids started to be more involved in everything – friends, sports, jobs, so I was always filling out paperwork, booking activities and appointments, planning out schedules, driving, doing a lot of sports watching, i. e. things that require executive functioning skills and lack mental stimulation. The only coping skills I could squeeze in were exercise, especially joining a tennis league, and listening to smart people talk while I did boring tasks. Youtube, Podcasts, Audible – these sustained me.

Until they couldn’t. Eventually, they were not enough, and I could feel some pressure building in me. I kept white knuckling it, thinking next week, next month, next season it would get a little easier, and it just didn’t. Additionally, four of my kids and my husband have ADHD and Ronan has special needs. I used to joke to my mom that I was the frontal lobe for my whole family. I thought it was just hard because they were extra. Turns out my frontal lobes also needed some support. 

I have always loved being active and eating healthy and being a healthy weight, but more and more, I was making up for not getting enough mental stimulation by staying up way too late watching TV on the weekend, and inevitably this led to eating and drinking wine – the trifecta of impulse control issues. My weight started to creep up. I tried for the last few years to remedy this by the usual calorie-deprivation methods: Weight Watchers, Noom, Isagenix, My Fitness Pal, Intermittent Fasting, you name it I tried it. Nothing worked, and I beat myself up for self-sabotaging my efforts.

Additionally, many women end up having ADHD show up in their lives during perimenopause, because there is such a tight relationship between your hormones and your brain. This interview highlighted the relationship for me: 

As your Estrogen decreases your brain dopamine decreases. You already have a problem with brain dopamine if you have ADHD. So we see ADHD symptoms worsening as a woman enters menopause.   We also see that monthly with hormonal fluctuations, so that the week before your period your ADD symptoms may be worse, or your meds don’t work as well as they did before.

For my whole I life I struggled with PMDD, and a few weeks ago I got an email in my inbox from ADDitude Magazine (which I have subscribed to for years for my people, never realizing I had it, oh the irony) about PMDD and ADHD. It reports that 46% of women with ADHD have PMDD compared with 5% of the regular population. This link between estrogen and dopamine explains it. I have treated my PMDD with lots of supplements like saffron, Vitex, Dim (an estrogen flusher), magnesium, fish oil, and eleuthero. Turns out most of those are great for the ADHD brain anyway. 

But the cycle of PMDD and the stress from untreated ADHD continued to make my weight creep up. After trying for the last few years to lose weight, nothing worked. Then a few months ago, I joined The Faster Way to Fat Loss, which combines hitting huge macro goals with intermittent fasting with strength training. It has been such a powerful shift, and eating MORE food, not less, has been amazing. Clothes are looser, I feel so strong from the strength training videos, and I have done the fasting with so much ease. It has even been so easy to cut out sugar & flour most of the time. I could eat really healthy and fast during the week. With ease I have lost 10+ lbs. and have felt great.

But when I really wanted to stop staying up late on the weekends, I found I couldn’t. I needed that time. I needed it like oxygen. I knew it was sabotaging my efforts, but I needed it so badly that I couldn’t think of a different way of doing things. My brain literally exhaled when I got to hyper-focus on a tv show for a few hours. I thought it was just what I needed because I was a busy mom.  But it made me ask, why can all these other women go to bed early on the weekends when I can’t?

This summer was my perfect storm. I did not understand how much I needed to prioritize mental stimulation. For the last 2 years I had used my morning preschool or childcare hours for writing, and now that I was finished with my second novel, I used those hours to slog through the thousands of agents to find ones who represent my genre. And guess what? Filling out forms and reading hundreds of query email requirements is extremely boring and gives zero reward.  It gives my brain the opposite of what writing gives it. The rest of my time I was cleaning up extra messes from everyone being home, driving kids, going to the pool, which were all repetitive mundane tasks. Near the end of the summer, when I put on our twins floaties for the 2,034 time I could feel my brain screaming to break out of the monotony. I said to my husband as we entered the school year and all the fall sports with him coaching football: something has to give. I was white knuckling life, and didn’t feel like I could find any oxygen.

Because of the way ADHD shows up in women I couldn’t see that by not prioritizing getting my brain what it needed, it was making me struggle. Until I found a mom on Instagram talk about how it looks in her. Something about the way ActivatedADHDmom presented being a mom with ADHD resonated with me. I signed up for her free presentation and this was the cycle of the ADHD mom: 

It me. 

And all of a sudden: Eureka. That was it. It explained so much of my struggle. While there was so much joy and goodness in our family, there was this something, this itch I couldn’t scratch, some part of the equation I was missing that was keeping me from exhaling. 

I reached out to my insurance, found doctors who could evaluate and prescribe ADHD, and made an appointment for a few weeks later where I got an official diagnosis and was prescribed Adderall. (I highly recommend you read reviews of whoever you are looking to book with on WebMD. There are lots of bad doctors and NPs out there). 

The first day I took it, I came home and cleaned and vacuumed out my van. I had done this maybe once a year previously. I would do anything to avoid cleaning out my car. Then I cleaned the fridge and the kitchen. If I needed any proof that I definitely had it, this was it. It wasn’t like I took speed and could do more, like some people think of Adderall. It was like doing uninteresting things I previously avoided like the plague suddenly felt like cutting soft butter. Without medication, I would just automatically default to putting off the task in favor of something more interesting. But with medication, doing the job and putting order in the space was its own reward. This is actually the biggest issue for ADHD brains – the reward system in the brain doesn’t work properly. But medicine helps set this system right. I didn’t have any side effects, thankfully. I just felt great. 

A feeling of well-being continued to flood me every morning after my meds kicked in. It was so unbelievable to me that other people felt like this all the time. I felt free, I felt light, I felt like I had opened up a part of myself that not only did I not know I had, I didn’t even know it was missing. Best of all, when nighttime came, I was just ready for bed. My brain had gotten what it needed during the day and it was just fine going to bed instead of doom scrolling or watching TV. (As I write this on a Saturday morning, I am reveling in the fact that I went to bed at 9pm last night and felt great when the twins woke me up early.)

I can’t believe the healing, understanding, peace, and awe this revelation has held for me. In the weeks since I learned I had ADHD, so many memories have trickled in, like all these stray puzzle pieces suddenly fit together to form a complete picture. Being 4 years old, with lots of ear infections, and just getting lost in the corner with books because not hearing my friends and siblings made playing with them so boring. (After I got tubes, my mom reports that I went back to my extroverted self but had taught myself how to read in the process, and the love affair stayed my whole life.) I remembered being 11 and having people have to shake me when I was lost in a book when the bell rang to switch classes. Being in high school and leaving my big projects until Sunday night all the time, though during the day I was fascinated by poetry and history and got good grades. Getting lost for hours writing and reading in college and grad school, and then craving that time as a mom. When I got it, life was good, and when I didn’t, it was so hard. 

Being an adult with ADHD has often felt like a super power.  I can throw a party, organize a holiday, or write a novel during a pandemic. As Dr. Ned Halloway says in this great documentary The Distruptors, the 3 problem areas of ADHD – distractibility, impulsivity, hyperactivity – when flipped upside down become curiosity, creativity, and energy. These last three qualities inform my whole adult life. 

But there has been a shadow side, too. Using up all of my executive function skills as I packed to go up north or make dinner with small kids and feeling overwhelmed. Getting to almost the end of my PhD program and feeling overwhelmed by motherhood, running a house and grad school, then quitting. I am so blessed and lucky that I have been able to build my life around my ADHD, and thrive in many ways. But I am looking forward to the next chapter where order in my house and focus doing hard things comes a lot easier. 

Based on the response to my first blog post, I know I am not alone. I am so passionate about how families can be helped by having greater awareness around ADHD, and I am sure I will write about it going forward. It is so wonderful to finally understand myself, and I just want to help others feel the same. When my oldest daughter told me on a recent car ride that I just seem happier on medicine, everything fell into place. That’s the goal, after all. To model successful living for them. To be open and relaxed enough to make space for them. I’m so grateful that I can do that now. It’s the best feeling, and I can’t wait to see how this gift continues to unfold.