Step 1: Receive a diagnosis and accept it
Step 2: Educate yourself about ADHD as best as possible
Step 3: Make changes in your life to help cope with the disorder
Step 4: Apologize to people in your life who have been negatively affected by your disorder & work to educate them on ADHD and it’s symptoms the affect you
Step 5: Accept who you are and strive to be the best possible version of you
STEP 1: A little over a year ago I received a diagnosis of a neurological disorder known as ADHD. Once I began to educate myself on how it manifests itself in children and adults, my whole life and its struggles began to make sense. For the last year I’ve vacillated back and forth between anger and comfort due to feeling understood by books and medical professionals. STEP 3: I have gone through 8 different kinds of medication attempting to treat my ADHD symptoms and have had some counseling. I’ve dealt with crazy amounts of negative side effects to the medications all while attempting to obtain my Masters of Divinity. To say it’s been a trying time is an understatement.
STEP 2: During the last year I have learned a lot about myself and about ADHD. All my life I have had to work three times as hard as a regular person to obtain my educational and professional goals. I have had a lot of failures amidst few successes. All my life I have seemed less than my peers. Social comparison is a bitch - in school, my relationships, and in my jobs I have constantly compared my abilities to theirs and seemingly come up short. Despite all this, I have always worked hard. However, my inabilities, difficulties, and short-comings led me to depression and anxiety once I was in college.
STEP 4-mostly: For years my “situational” depression and anxiety were treated as such. The first psychiatrist I had was in college. He thought that my anxiety and depression were siloed and only induced by different stressors. My ADHD went undiagnosed. I then began a long history of relationships that were reckless, destructive, and ultimately damaging to my self-esteem. Those ugly relationships affected my friendships negatively, which further pressed me into those damaging relationships. It was as if I was drowning, gasping for air, and reaching for anything that might hold me up for just a little bit.
Often times I get overwhelmed easily. I feel deeper than most and can’t shake emotion as easily as most. I become hyper-focused on the source of my stress to the detriment of my jobs and social obligations. It was and sometimes is (much less than before) a vicious cycle. The older I get the more it seems that large social obligations cause anxiety in me. Lots of people equals lots of stimulus. For me its not only exhausting but mentally rigorous to keep up with it all. This anxiety causes me to cancel on events and people much more often than I would like to. I loathe being inconsistent. Insert more depression and self-loathing. I truly SUCK at communication in these times of texting, emailing, and social media. If some line of communication comes across my path while I am busy, it goes in one ear and out the other. This often times leads people to become frustrated with me. This letting down of people deeply troubles me and sends me further down in my self-depreciating ways.
I am an intelligent, relational, deeply caring person and because of that, the symptoms of ADHD which I carry are intensely maddening to me. For as much as I’ve let people down and baffled them with my ways, somehow I am still vigorously loved by a couple handfuls of people. I have to work 3 times as hard to be “normal” - meet the status quo. The more I come to understand and educate people in my life about my neurological disorder the more forgiveness and acceptance I hope to find; not just in others but myself. I am deeply critical of myself and my short-comings. It’s maddening setting your heart and soul to something and having your mind override it. I’m in constant battle with myself.
Step 5: It’s a learning curve. Truth be told, though I am a year and some change into this, I’ve only just begun my journey into accepting my brain and self for what it is. Heck, I’m even angered that medication works for most but for some reason, not for me. However, I’ve only got one mind and therefore I need to love it and put who I am and what I am to good use. I have some agonizing limitations but I also possess some wonderful, intrinsic gifts as well. The trick is to learn to accept yourself, your limitations, and your gifts for what they are. I, admittedly, am still learning. The more I lean into STEP 4, the more I believe I will be able to embrace STEP 5.
