I Was Never Built for a Normal Workplace

Now I understand 25+ years of round hole and square peg life.

Photo by Arlington Research on Unsplash - Also, a whole bag of “no goddamn way.”

One of the hardest parts of a late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD is when you start playing the tape of your life back and see things in a way you never have. Everything starts to make sense, and it’s also slightly heartbreaking.

When I play my tape, I wonder what would have happened if I would have 1) known what I know now, 2) been medicated, and most importantly, 3) advocated for myself.

There is nowhere in my life that this applies more than my previous work life. I have spent most of my life working in offices. I can definitively say that this has been a hellscape. I know now that I am not built for a normal office environment. It was never going to work.

It’s not me, corporate office. It’s you.

Of course, I feel like I had little choice in my office environment. As card-carrying members of Gen X, we pretty much assumed our lives would be spent in offices, which turned out actually to be cubicles.

Cubicles, among many other office things, are a fate worse than death for people with ADHD. They’re like the slow killing of our souls.

My career swung with exceptional highs and devastating lows. When I think back, I can connect my success to how well the team or physical office worked with my symptoms of ADHD. Mind. Blown. Sadness. Crushing.

At the highest point of my career, I had a boss who understood that I was a high-level thinker with big ideas and who provided me with a team of people who were skilled in taking my ideas and running with them.

She gave me the freedom to think outside the box, did little to no micromanaging, and helped me figure out what was going to work for me in terms of organization. Enter the greatest management tool of my entire career: an exceptionally large dry-erase whiteboard that came with a set of rainbow-colored markers.

I’m gonna say this right now. If you have ADHD and struggle to organize your work, get yourself a damn whiteboard. I am not kidding. Get a big ass one. The bigger, the better. Buy this one. Even better? This one.

All of those movies where you see the assumed crazed forensic profiler who has pictures and maps and articles and red string all connecting data points they have found to isolate the exact location of the killer? Pretty sure they had ADHD.

Every single person in the Netflix documentary Don’t F*ck with Cats? Yep. Absolutely has ADHD. No one who hyperfixates to the level of tracking down an internet psycho is neurotypical. No one.

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

My worst office environment? A makeshift office in a loud environment where I had no physical inbox and no chance of having a large dry-erase board. Yes, friends, my success as a human is intrinsically connected to whether or not I have a large whiteboard.

Worse yet, see the picture above. I’d rather shove bamboo under my fingernails slowly than to work in that space.

I like to work in an environment where I don’t actually see other people, have to hear them, and can close a door and hide from them in the event that they make their presence known.

We are facing a huge issue that I feel no one is talking about. ADHD is considered a disability per the ADA (if y’all are American folks, of course), and neurodivergent people have the right to request certain accommodations in the workplace.

Sounds terrifying.

When I realized this, I was thrilled and deeply saddened at the same time. I was sad that I never knew this, was undiagnosed anyway, and so I never advocated for myself to be able to have certain “luxuries” (read: screw you, office aesthetics and budget, I need a whiteboard).

We’re going to be talking about this for a bit. Why? Because the thrill of this discovery is being able to bring this discussion into a community (hey there!) to empower us moving forward so that we don’t feel like total failures because of a minor setback like, say, a brain disorder we’ve had for decades.

I’m out of corporate America and work from home now. This takes a whole other bag of skills I am still trying to master (like NOT working at 4:43pm on a Sunday). But, I can’t help but feel that corporate America has completely ignored its neurodivergent employees, and it’s time to fix that.

Settle in. We’re going on an adventure.

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