Did My Brain Tank My Career or Vice Versa?

What I wish I would have understood sooner about my brain at work.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

After my ADHD diagnosis, I started doing what most people do and waded way deep into research and information in an attempt to understand my whole life. There’s a lot to unpack.

I know I’m not alone in experiencing overwhelming feelings of regret and even anger in knowing that my life could have been very different if I had known about my ADHD, understood it, learned how to work around it and with it, and made life decisions based on what I knew about how my brain works.

There is no place in my life where this is more apparent than my career. My career spanned 22 years and had exceptional highs and lows. When I think about the high points and the low points of my career, I can easily connect them to how my brain functions because of my ADHD.

If we, as neurodivergent people, want to take control of our ability to be successful in our careers, we need to understand and acknowledge that we have choices in our work and move ahead accordingly.

Damn. What the hell does that even mean?

It means I have existed in a world that has made me feel like I am to bend myself to whatever work environment I am in, regardless of whether that works for me. Asking for anything to be different would seem ungrateful and could run me the risk of being seen as whining or complaining.

I don’t have time for that noise anymore. I have recognized what I need to be successful, and I wish I had known this earlier to be able to make better choices in taking jobs or communicating my needs to bosses.

I mean, how many times have you sat in your boss’s office during a mid-year or year-end review only to be told for the umpteenth time that you’re awesome, except for your time management sucks. For me? A lot.

Many of us have spent our whole lives being shoved into various boxes in which we will never fit. This tanks our success and our self-esteem, which in turn holds us back as we seem under-functioning compared to our neurotypical coworkers or keeps us from having the confidence to find a job that works.

Finding the job that works, though, is the key. I did a whole inventory of what worked for me. Realizing this has been huge in trying to figure out my new career path, so I’m successful. I wish I had known all this and been able to advocate for myself.

I need a job that brings me joy because I need dopamine.

If we can’t have jobs that are fun, what are we even doing with our lives? I feel like many of us seem to be raised on the idea that work is supposed to be the miserable part of our lives. How many comics did we read as kids about people who hate their jobs or their bosses? It’s like a weird American cultural norm.

Think about how different life could be if people with ADHD were encouraged to pursue jobs that are fun. What do you like doing? Oh, cool. Can you make a job out of that? Good.

My daughter, who also has ADHD, will never be a desk job person. Pushing her in that direction will ensure a life of discontent. She’s a college athlete. Encouraging her to work in anything related to sports will be seen as fun for her, and she can dive into it with a high chance of success.

I need work environments conducive to actually getting things done.

My last job was a veritable hellscape for anyone with ADHD. I worked in a huge room that was never supposed to be an office. It was at a community aquatic center, and one whole wall was basically glass windows looking out at a huge community pool. Oh no, wait. It gets better.

My entire day, while I answered about 10 emails an hour and a good couple of phone calls, was spent watching children run all over the place while their parents chatted with each other and their little brothers or sisters would stand in the alcove outside my door and scream loudly because echoes are super fun.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

I need a peaceful, quiet, well-organized space with as few distractions as possible. This is why so many of us do really well working from home, where we can control our environment.

Let someone with ADHD have control of the design and functionality of their workspace, and we will go deep. And buy 18 different colored pens.

I do best in high-level thinking jobs where someone else can do the detail work.

I am an idea person. I can solve just about any problem you put in front of me. Ask me to actually do the work necessary to implement said idea or fix said problem, and that’s going to be a hard pass. No thanks.

Give me a job where the high up I move, the less time I have to spend on meaningless busy work, the happier and more successful I’ll be.

I think about all the times I had that “where do you see yourself in this company in five years” discussion with a boss. I wish I could have just told him I don’t care what my title is, I want to think big and then hand the ball off to someone else. I can oversee that work. I just don’t want to do it.

The more creative I can be, the better.

Good work matches are often ones where creativity is going to be appreciated and rewarded. Sadly, many of us feel beaten down because we keep missing deadlines on reports we hate that you don’t see the value in any way. TPS reports anyone?

I could sit in any meeting I needed to and give a verbal report on how any part of my job or department was doing. Ask me to send you a report in a format that my brain can’t compute “because that’s the way we do it,” and you’re not getting that report on time. At all.

I need the creative ability to design parts of my job to be able to move outside of the box. The best thing an employer can do for me is to entertain my ideas that start with “well, what if we did it this way…”

I switched directions with my career in the spring and abandoned my 9-to-5 job to pursue the creative interests I’ve had most of my life but ignored. I work for myself now. The biggest game changer is that now I have full control over my work environment. I am solely responsible for my own success or failure.

This is, of course, exciting and terrifying. I struggled for six months to organize myself and get a business plan together. Then the ADHD diagnosis came and changed how I think of my work life completely. Redesigning my work life has been incredibly fun and I’m only getting started.

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