The relief I felt at being diagnosed with ADHD

Now I knew my brain was just not wired the same as most people’s, it made sense of a lot of my experiences and let me go easy on myself.

Source: Getty Images/Westend61

In 2022, when I was 28 years old, I cried when I got my ADHD diagnosis. It was the first time someone who wasn’t a girlfriend had seen me cry in over a decade, although I supposed the psychiatrist would have been used to these sorts of things. A couple of things had happened the week before. I nearly lost one of my jobs over careless mistakes caused by inattention. I had also submitted my doctoral thesis.

In 2002, when I was seven years old, I was referred to psychometric testing on suspicion that I may have been a “gifted and talented” child, whatever that means. I have the report in front of me, as I write. Although my IQ test placed me in the 99.8^th percentile over, the report said that I demonstrated a “high degree of restlessness,” “below-average memorisation/rote learning ability,” and that my distractibility was “an area of personal weakness,” for me, while “careless errors in calculation,” reduced my scores.

If you already know where I’m going with this, you might be surprised to hear that instead of being treated for ADHD, they thought it would be appropriate to move me up a year for some subjects at school and enrol me in a couple programs for “gifted” kids.

I was never a good student. In fact, as someone who now teaches for a living, I would have to say that I was in the bottom tier. It didn’t help that I was enrolled in a selective high school where the standards were high and the atmosphere was competitive. My family, teachers and peers alike often chastised me for being an underachiever. I would occasionally produce surprisingly decent results in the classes that interested me, but for the most part, I barely participated.

My family, teachers and peers alike often chastised me for being an underachiever.

That lack of effort, however, came after years of a total inability to pay attention. In primary school, I was carried by my reading and comprehension skills. I didn’t have to pay attention in class to keep up. The moment I had to concentrate long enough to carry a one, much less do long division, I was out of the running. I alternated between making a nuisance of myself and sleeping through classes.

I often acted impulsively, spoke obnoxiously, and had a reputation for being a minor delinquent – and a major punish as a teenager. I was so bored and unable to focus, I would do anything to give my brain a tiny hit of the happy chemicals. While I had some friends, I struggled to fit in anywhere and always felt alienated. My difficulty even following a normal conversation sometimes simply made my responses strange.

People told me I was lazy, and that not applying myself was a moral failing. In the workforce, I found that I struggled with even the most menial of jobs – in fact, often the more menial it was, the more incompetent I was.

My first couple of years at university were a blur of absent fails and missed deadlines. In my third year, I decided to turn it around. The day the question was released for an essay, I would not do anything else until it was done.

Inspired by a friend and mentor, in pursuit of my lifelong dream of becoming a writer, I decided to go into postgraduate study. I decided that I was going to use graduate school as a way of forcing myself to write, and that I would teach writing for a living. Within a year, I was about to graduate on the Dean’s Merit List – at the cost of many friendships, and nearly my relationship.

In pursuit of my lifelong dream of becoming a writer, I decided to go into postgraduate study.

The same pattern continued throughout my master’s degree. Then, I did the same on my doctorate. While I was fortunate enough to receive scholarships on both, I was working an hour away in the city. I would leave at 7am, barely keep my job, come home at 7pm and then I would stare at a blinking cursor until I had a couple of hundred new words. Even if I didn’t sleep at all, I would do this.

Eventually I lost my job. I survived on a shoestring, doing nothing but writing. My novel, the creative component of my doctorate, won a respectably sized prize for an unfinished manuscript in 2019. Then I found more work. Teaching work, even, and a plethora of side hustles, too.

Yet – I cannot articulate the struggle that it took to get to this point. The effort was herculean, Sisyphean and diabolical all at once. In reality, I wrote the entire doctoral thesis, which was nearly 200,000 words before being pared down, in about six or seven large bursts of what I now know as hyperfocus. The rest of the time, I had just been torturing myself, staring at that blinking cursor and hating every cell within my body while I fidgeted and fought to not pick up my phone – I blocked all distractions on the computer, of course.

My girlfriend snapped at me one afternoon. I had completely tuned out to what she was saying about linen, or fabric, or something like that while we were looking at cushions in an Ikea store. She said that I had every symptom of being an adult with untreated ADHD and that I should do something about it if I wanted her to stick around.

I was sceptical. My older brother had ADHD, and while he was mostly grown by the time I was born, many members of the family had told stories of him being wildly hyperactive. I wasn’t hyperactive, I just couldn’t pay attention to things. Sometimes I was hyperactive, I supposed. I looked down at my leg and realised I had been bouncing it on the floor most of the day, while I swivelled my chair left and right.

Was it not normal to essentially chain yourself to the computer for weeks on end to get modest length writing tasks completed while you writhed in discomfort?

I began to read up on it, and booked an appointment with a psychiatrist. It took months, but I told my doctor what I had been experiencing. A week before, I had nearly lost one of my jobs over repeated, careless mistakes. It was a job for a well-regarded literary publisher that I wanted to keep. It was comical that the same week I submitted my doctorate, I had utterly failed to do the most basic of office administration tasks. My doctor told me he rarely saw a clearer case of ADHD.

My doctor told me he rarely saw a clearer case of ADHD.

I heaved a sigh of relief. I had felt like a fraud every time something went right for me. Having some modest successes here and there as a writer and pseudo-academic, I figured I’d somehow just lucked or weaselled my way in. Surely someone who couldn’t even succeed in high school or dead-end jobs was simply a dead loss? Maybe not, I thought, an immense weight now off my shoulders.

Now I knew my brain was just not wired the same as most people’s, it made sense of a lot of my experiences and let me go easy on myself. Yet, I couldn’t help but think – how different would my life have been if this was caught earlier? Would I already have a novel published? Multiple? Own a house? Maybe all of the above, or maybe none.

What I do know is that I’ve spent most of my life feeling less than. It hasn’t gone away overnight either, and I know it spurred on a lot of behaviours that I regret, too. It’s just frustrating to think how many years I might have lost to this.

This story has been published in partnership with The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for young writers from Western Sydney, hosted by Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre.