40 Years of Unknowingly Living with ADHD

This is the start. This is how I came to refine my entire adulthood.

Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

Growing up, a window in our kitchen faced out into the backyard. My assigned seat at the dinner table faced this window. Our neighbor's yard had this immense Sisso tree that must have been as tall as their two-story house. 

In the early evening, the light would catch the leaves and they would flicker and gleam. I was hypnotized by them. They’d catch my eyes and my brain would wander. Everything disappeared, even my dinner sitting on the end of my fork, inches from me.

Eventually, I’d snap back to see my family staring at me. “Did you have a nice trip,” my dad would ask. This may be the first time I ever remember being aware that I was different. A little weird. There must be something wrong with me. 

Fast forward 40 years.

I am bringing my groceries into my apartment. I have one job to do. Put away the groceries. For most people, this would look a lot like unpacking the groceries, putting them in the refrigerator and then the pantry, and going about life. This is not what I do.

I unpack all of the items, placing the on the counter by the pantry. I wad up all the plastic bags from the trip and put them under the sink. This is where plastic grocery bags go to die in my house.

I put them there because, at some point, I am going to take all of them back to the grocery store where they have a bin you can throw them so the bags are recycled. However, this does not happen.

I have lived in my apartment for nearly six months and not once have I done this. So, the under-sink area is overflowing with a vast collection.

Every time I need a cleaning product that lives not-so-harmoniously with the bags, I have to dig through what must be well over a hundred bags. This would be great if Monty Hall from “Let’s Make a Deal” was still alive and arrived at my house to pay me $100 for every plastic bag under the sink.

Since the pantry is closest, I go to put a bag of rice inside, only to find that nothing will fit in my haphazardly arranged pantry. So, I start taking everything out with the intention that I will do a “quick organization” of the pantry.

I know now that there is no concept of “quick organization” that lives in an ADHD brain. It is either complete chaos or four hours of hyperfixation.

After getting all contents of the pantry on the kitchen island, I realized that the problem is that the cabinet is too tall and I need some kind of shelving to allow for at least two levels of storage.

I sit down at my computer and start searching Amazon. I find ideas but this requires me to find the tape measure and measure the cabinet. I know it’s in the junk drawer where I find my missing purple pen that I grab so I can add the to-do list things to the planner that actually functions more as a coaster on my desk.

I go back for the tape measure. I add the right size shelves to the cart but also a set of spice jars that require me to go count all of the spices I have because I might as well organize that this week, too.

Photo by Maria Lin Kim on Unsplash

I head back to the groceries, still sitting on my counter. I have lost a total of 90 minutes of my life to this endeavor, during which my perishable items have sat on the counter. I shove all the items, old and recently purchased, into the pantry I will organize in two days when I get the shelves.

The perishables get thrown into the fridge because I am now overly concerned I will get salmonella from the now-cold rotisserie chicken. This makes me compelled to go back to my desk where I do not go back to the impending deadline for my editing assignment. Instead, I waste another 30 minutes on a Google search of “Will I get salmonella from rotisserie chicken left out for 90 minutes?”

I miss my deadline by five minutes. The shelves come two days later and sit on my counter for two weeks until I shove them out of sight into a closet for “later.”

This has been my entire life. I know normal people can just put groceries away, but I learned at age eight, staring out the window, that I was not normal. I just didn’t know why.

On October 3, 2022, at age 48, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Everything in my life suddenly made sense. However, along with this knowledge came a myriad of emotions, all of which I process on a daily basis. Shame, regret, anger, hope.

I posted a TikTok the morning I took my medication for the first time to document the overwhelming feeling of something that looked like normalcy. What I did not expect was the mass of people, namely women over 40, who came out of the woodwork to tell me my story was the same as theirs.

This is our home. All of us. Every single one of us that have gone through our entire lives feeling less than because our brains don’t work like other people’s do but we somehow missed the memo.

I want to tell you my intention in creating this space. The responses I have received in openly talking about my recent diagnosis have been a mix of questions from people trying to understand themselves, become familiar with other signs I should have seen, how I came to be diagnosed, and what life is like for me now.

I want to share what I come to know as I come to know it. I need connection, both with people who are coming to know this and those that have known for a while, and I feel others do, too. Along the way, I hope to share some research and ideas for how we can move forward with our lives that we seem to have started over.

I have also seen a small army of people trying to process their own experiences who are crying out for a community. So, I created one. I am glad you’re here. This is our space.