October was ADHD Awareness Month. I thought I would write something to talk about my experiences, my hopes for the future and just a little dive into my struggles with ADHD. It’s difficult to talk about something that you’ve had all your life but have only gotten a diagnosis and answers for in the last five years, to then have to reevaluate who you are. You get your diagnosis and everything makes sense but you also have to sit down and figure out if your personality is just one big coping mechanism or if it’s you.
It’s been hard to deep dive and to strip myself of who I thought I was and have to start slowly rebuilding myself. But saying that, from last December to now, I am a lot happier with who I am as a person, compared to maybe secondary school. And that was mainly because I started taking my diagnosis a lot more seriously. Last year, I started reading, sitting down and figuring out what my symptoms and triggers are, the negatives and positives of ADHD and how I want to place myself in the world.
And I think that’s why ADHD Awareness Month is so important, because even though I got my diagnosis at university and I was very privileged to have gotten that for free and to be diagnosed at the age of 18, which is quite young if you look at the diagnosis rate for women and then Black women. Even with the diagnosis, I still had people doubting it, from my GPs to my ADHD therapist and I wonder if that’s because I didn’t look like a typical person with ADHD and also if because my indicators at 18 didn’t fall into the stereotypical symptoms for women and girls.
This month is a great way for people with ADHD to speak about it, the positives and the negatives. There are a lot of positives that I am grateful for. It does make me a unique person, but there is also a lot of negatives. I feel it shuts me off of my humanity and the way I see the world and my pessimism and my scepticism, and not being able to regulate your emotions it’s such a hard way to live. Knowing that this is something that I’m going to have to be living with it for the rest of my life and having to constantly create new coping mechanisms to deal with it is not a nice feeling.
Ironically, I’m writing this because anyone who knows me knows I hate writing, I doubt myself when it comes to writing but I want to push myself out of my comfort zone and I wanted to be able to talk about my experiences because we don’t hear like personal pieces from black women who have ADHD.
And a lot of the pieces we do have are those who have just been diagnosed or those who have been diagnosed in childhood, I feel like there’s a massive missing gap for people who’ve been diagnosed and been left behind in the system. Had my diagnosis at 18, when I was doing my dyslexia exam. Throughout the next two years of my university life, I had ADHD therapy. Try different medication, tried to commit suicide on some medication, tried CBT, none of it was working for me and then graduated. Tried to get back on getting another ADHD therapist that took me another two years, got to the top of the waiting list and then got told that they don’t have any ADHD specialists.
So now I am trying to learn about something that I still don’t have a very good understanding of but has a massive impact on my life on my own and its hard because we have gendered ADHD and that adds to the doubt I have in myself. Especially when I was younger when I had the typical ‘male’ symptoms. I was very rowdy, quick to anger, couldn’t sit still, always out of my chair and but now I feel like I’ve gone completely the opposite way, a lot of my symptoms aren’t outwards anymore.
Trying to navigate something that for years was presented outwards which is now inwards is not easy, and the UK isn’t great with self-learning information about ADHD or its understanding about the disorder either so I tend to use American sources from people on Twitter to webinars and articles to help me navigate myself and life. I am still learning what ADHD is, what it means to me and what my symptoms, the causes and impacts. So it’s been difficult to navigate a space to create coping mechanisms because it’s difficult to be different in the world, but I feel that being a neurodiverse individual means we are fighting a battle with our minds and thought processes that don’t match up to how the world is evolving.
Learning what my value is as a person compared to my achievements is a hard lesson especially when you read statistics of people with ADHD, you’re so much more likely to be clinically unemployed, more likely to end up from the school to prison pipeline, more likely to take drugs. And on top of being a black woman as well. I still need to figure out what my actual ADHD symptoms are. And if my personality and my coping mechanisms are from being a black woman or ADHD. It’s not fun, it’s hard, it’s draining, it’s depressing really.
But I do have some hope for the future, I worked for an organisation that would just so helpful with my ADHD, especially when they asked what I needed help with and they accepted my answer of I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure it out myself and they didn’t get annoyed, they were just happy to follow my lead so that they can create an environment that benefited me the same way as everyone else. Also going freelance has been hard but at the same time, I’m not having to fit myself into this box of what employment is.
I am so relieved and I just want to continue this conversation about ADHD, to continued conversation about ADHD and capitalism, ADHD in Black woman and just see if we can move forward in creating a space where people with ADHD who have just been diagnosed or have been diagnosed ages ago but have been left in the system to have that space to make mistakes and be wrong and when I tell people I have ADHD, understanding that I’m still trying to figure it out myself and I don’t have all the answers and this is a long life journey that I’m going to be going on in to be able to live comfortably and happy, but I’m excited about the future.
