People had been telling me for years.
Colleagues and friends, all saying some version of the same thing.
You definitely have ADHD.
I’d laugh, responding; funny you say that, I get told that a lot.
Three years ago, 15 minutes into my first ever therapy session, I was asked if I’d ever been diagnosed and was offered a referral.
I parked it, uninterested.
My mum dismissed it too, at first.
When she mentioned it to her friends, their response was instant.
Oh god, yeah. They had all just assumed we already knew.
It is not just anecdotal either.
Psychiatrist Dr Sasha Hamdani, a leading voice on ADHD in women, points out that decades of research focused almost entirely on hyperactive young boys, while women were quietly masking and compensating in the background.
That gap is a large part of why so many of us are told we have anxiety or depression for years before anyone asks the real question, and symptoms often sharpen around hormonal shifts like postpartum or perimenopause, worth raising with whoever you see.
I built my own infrastructure instead.
Systems, self-discipline, whatever I could construct to better self-manage.
When it did not work, I blamed myself.
I was not going to use ADHD as a cop out for my shortfalls, so I did not chase the label.
It was only following several conversations with different friends, that a couple of months ago I was finally convinced to consider acting on it.
I was assured that I wouldn’t lose my creativity and drive (my superpower) and that the medication helped to improve focus, energy and quietens the negative noise or self-doubt, which is what I needed most.
Interestingly, working through the assessment questions was like a wake-up slap in the face.
Every question fit with uncomfortable precision.
In that moment it became crystal clear, there was no doubt.
For someone who prefers to avoid medication unless it’s absolutely necessary, a month on, I could not be happier with the results.
Apparently, the fix for a brain running at full speed is a legal stimulant.
The last time I’d experienced such focus was walking home at 10am in London in my early twenties, join the dots or don’t.
Last week I built a full PR strategy for one client, mapped an entire event schedule for another, and designed a marketing campaign for a third, all in a day’s work.
In between, I also cooked two big pots of food for the week, cleaned up and walked the dogs.
Full focus, full passion, each task. My superpower, supercharged.
The negative spirals still visit, they just don’t take over the way they used to.
If people around you keep independently landing on the same observation about you, that is data, not noise.
Knowing what I know now has made me a little less hard on myself, and instead excited about what is possible.
Whether it is medication, therapy, or just better systems, sometimes progress is not about trying harder with the same toolkit.
It is about having a look at what is in there and upgrading it.
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