My Adult ADHD Diagnosis

I was 43 when I discovered I'm not lazy-- I have inattentive-type ADHD

One of the most helpful puzzle pieces of my life was getting the diagnosis of inattentive-type ADHD at 43 years-old. It explained so many things about my life— one of the biggest things being that I had gone my entire life thinking I’m a lazy slob.

The “lazy” narrative started in the 6th grade when I tested into the gifted program. I felt smart, but I could not make myself do well in school. I had creative ideas— so many goddamn ideas, people — but I could not figure out how to make them into a completed thing. I was utterly disorganized. I didn’t know how to study, takes notes, or do homework. My backpack was always a mess. My locker was an utter disaster. I found myself feeling constantly overwhelmed, which caused me to just shut down.

One of my parents told me what my IQ was — a number that dangled over my head for years, pointing to why I should be doing so much better at life. My parents and teachers asked why I was so lazy. I obviously wasn’t dumb — I had so much potential. I was “almost a creative genius” by testing standards, and I was wasting it. The question was asked over and over: why was I so lazy? Why didn’t I care?

I didn’t know. I couldn’t come up with any answers. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just make myself do things. I didn’t know why I started every school year, every project, with an optimistic gusto that quickly died. (Now I know that “gusto” was something I only knew how to muster at the beginnings of things.) I didn’t know why — I couldn’t articulate it — so the answer must have just been that I was a lazy slob.

That narrative stuck — hard. I became a tried-and-true underachiever. I (barely) graduated high school with a 1.8 GPA. I floundered. I self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. I consistently found myself overwhelmed into paralyzed inaction. I felt like a failure at life. I did not know why so many things that seemed to be natural behaviors for others felt so much fucking harder for me. Again, I thought I must just be a lazy slob.

The thought stuck throughout much of my adult life, playing in the background of my brain for decades. I was treated for anxiety and depression for 20 years. (I also have C-PTSD, and there is definitely a connection between ADHD and PTSD.) I took depression meds to help me feel less depressed about the fact that I felt like a lazy slob. I took anti-anxiety meds to help me feel less anxious about all of the things I was overlooking and procrastinating and forgetting to do.

It wasn’t until my ADHD diagnosis that a bulb lit up in my brain and all the dots of my life began connecting. I got the explanation of why. Why certain things felt impossible for me. I’m not lazy—my brain is literally wired differently. I am highly creative and I’m not wired for boredom, monotony, or rigid time structures.

When most of us hear “ADHD” we picture the hyperactive little boy. But inattentive-type ADHD can look very different. For instance: I am not physically hyperactive—I’m mentally hyperactive. Just after my diagnosis, I joked that I must have “ADLD… attention-deficit lazy disorder”. I often found myself jealous of those with physical hyperactivity because, I reasoned, at least they got some things done. I finished every day feeling mentally exhausted but having nothing to show for it. In any given day, I’d begin 15 tasks and actually finish maybe 1 of them. This is often what inattentive-type ADHD looks like, and an incredible number of adult women have it and many don’t know it. They instead think something is wrong with them. They think of themselves as lazy, or scatterbrained, or flighty, or a “hot mess”. They beat themselves up, and it’s a goddamn tragedy.

If you are a woman being treated for anxiety and/or depression and my story sounds at all familiar, I urge you to talk to a doctor or therapist about ADHD testing. (Again, you don’t have to have the physical hyperactivity piece of it — that’s why girls were so widely overlooked for testing and diagnosis in the first place.) A diagnosis is just the beginning of learning how to harness the way your brain works, so you can discover you are actually anything but lazy.