What I’ve Learned About Having ADHD As An Adult

One of the weird things that comes up when you write about topics like sex, self-improvement or relationships is how often you face the question of whether or not to mine your own life for content. On the one hand, it’s one of the oldest and hoariest cliches for columnists and essayists to use their own lived experiences as fodder for material. It can feel… well, kinda hacky in some ways. It can feel as though you’re trying to sell the idea that you live this crazy, adventurous or glamorous life, rather than your actual writing. And when you’re writing about things like self-improvement or getting better at dating, it can feel as though you’re more upselling folks with columns that come across as “look how awesome I am, don’t you wish you were me, well if you subscribe to my Patreon…” rather than offering real advice.

On the other hand, however… well, a lot of times, your lived experiences provide genuine context for what you’ve learned. In fact, talking openly about your personal experiences with the particular topic can make it easier for folks to talk about their experiences or to understand that their experiences are real, valid and normal. So there’s an unusual amount of tension whenever one wishes to pull back the curtain a bit and get personal.

Now, I bring this up because I’m coming up on the two year anniversary of my having gotten tested and diagnosed as having ADHD and – much like when I published my video on being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult – I want to normalize talking about struggles with mental health as well as some of the difficulties, adjustments, frustrations and downright weird shit that comes up when you’re dealing with and learning to live with it. Because, as it turns out, getting diagnosed and treated is the start, not the end.

So, as a follow-up to my last piece, let’s talk a little about what I’ve experienced and learned  about having ADHD, two years in.

You’re Going to Be Dealing With A Lot of Complicated Feelings. A Lot of Them.

So, let’s start with the most obvious part: the older you are when you first get your diagnosis, the harder it’s going to hit. I mentioned before that the first few months of getting the diagnosis is a roller-coaster of “wait, that’s a symptom??” and “HOW THE HELL COULD I NOT HAVE KNOWN?!”

In fact, the deeper you dive in – and let’s be real, you’re absolutely going to dive in because hey, welcome to your new hyperfocus! – the more you’re going to be asking yourself how much of your whole-ass personality is just symptoms, masking behavior or coping mechanisms.

Some of you are undoubtedly thinking that I’m making a joke here; I’m exaggerating the feeling for comedic effect because it’s an easy gag. Let me tell you: I absolutely am fucking not. I am as serious as a heart attack about this. Learning more about myself and how much this condition has influenced me, my feelings, my beliefs and behaviors has been about as close as I’m ever going to come to a full-blown Wolverine-esque “EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW WAS A LIE” identity crisis.

It sounds absurd to write about and, honestly, it feels a little cringey to be the one saying it. And yet, it still feels like having taken a sledgehammer to one’s sense of self. That feeling of “oh, shit, that’s why” gets mixed up with “wait, this thing that’s been part of me this entire time goes away if I take this pill?” That, let me tell you, leads straight into an entire series of very odd, very uncomfortable questions about the nature of identity and how much getting treated is going to change you. And part of what’s absolutely – and I can’t stress this enough – mind-fuckingly weird about the experience is that it creeps up in ways you would never have expected or even thought to question. Take this thread from Twitter user Sam Dylan Finch:

This tweet alone hits close to home. I’ve been fairly impulsive when it comes to buying things and overspending on things that ultimately went unused or only half-finished before my hyperfocus faded and I was left with a tangible pile of stress instead. But go through the thread and you see that Sam makes some very strong points about how, yes, you’re purchasing a hit of dopamine, but you’re also trying to reaffirm your identity. As he points out, so many of those projects, clothes, and tools are often about frustrated senses of expression or as motivation for change. Then you get to this point and it hits you like a goddamn truck:

Fucking ouch. I feel seen and I really don’t appreciate it.

But the thing is, he’s right. That’s very much what this feels like: realizing that part of what you’ve been struggling with is the effort of trying to be the person you could have been if you didn’t have ADHD interfering with things.

But those complicated feelings aren’t just about the identity you constructed around this condition or your sense of self. It’s also about the identity that was imposed on you by others. One of the most painful, frustrating, even infuriating things about getting diagnosed, especially as late as I was, is how long I lived with people telling me that there was something wrong with me. That I was lazy. That I was undisciplined.

If I could get a dime for every time someone – a teacher, a parent, someone – talked about my fucking potential and how I was wasting it, I would be challenging Jeff Bezos to recreate Gundam fights in low-Earth orbit.

I spent nearly 20 years having people telling me I wasn’t living up to my potential, as though it were a choice I was making instead of fighting against my own goddamn brain to get things to work. It’s hard to express accurately how much that fucks with you, especially as a child. First, it’s just a struggle to do the thing at all and deal with failing at it. But then, after you’ve done everything that people’ve told you that will help – use this organization method, do things in stages, use these tools – and you still fail at the task, then it becomes a matter of “well, you must be lazy” or “why are you so stubborn/defiant/disobedient/so proud of being an underachiever”.

Of course, to make things worse, if you find a method that does work for you or that helps you focus, then you get dinged for not succeeding “the right way”. And since having ADHD means you can hyperfocus on some things, being able to pay attention to things that engage you just confirms that you’re just choosing to fuck around and no amount of protesting, explaining or otherwise trying to get people to understand ever gets people to listen.

Get told that enough by the people who have authority over you and that shit sinks in. You’re a child, not a precocious movie child, but a real person, so your own sense of self isn’t so strong that you can choose to not take that on board. Instead, maybe you adopt that identity in defiance, spitting in the eye of the world with a a “fuck you, I will increase the bullshit”. Maybe it becomes a sense of shame that you’re constantly trying – but failing – to overcome. Or maybe you get both, so you end up like a burnt cookie; charred and tough on the outside, raw and squishy on the inside and unable to resolve the conflict between “fuck you” and “fuck me“.

And then one day you learn that they were all fucking wrong. You were right the entire time. You weren’t lazy, you weren’t stubbornly refusing to live up to your “potential”, you were trying to drive a car that had two flat tires, no oil and sugar in the gas tank. Well, great, now you’ve got that vindication. Now you get to unpack and deal with having lived with that identity for so long, and you’re not sure who the hell you are now that you know it’s not really you. And that’s frustrating, infuriating and so many other things.

And of course, if you had parents or teachers or employers who were half-way decent, then you also have the conflict of knowing that they weren’t doing this maliciously. They, hopefully, were genuinely trying to help. They just weren’t able to help in the way you needed. So now you can add guilt for being angry about it to the complicated stew of emotions you’re feeling.

(More on this in a bit…)

Needless to say, you’re going to be unpacking a lot of that for a while. But that’s not the only emotional morass you’re going to have to deal with…

You’re Going to Be Dealing With a Lot of Other People’s Complicated Feelings Too.

One of the things that doesn’t come up as often when we talk about being diagnosed with ADHD is realizing and recognizing how much it affects other people in your life, too. And there are few places where this is felt more strongly than in our relationships.

Let’s focus one of the most obvious examples: the toll that ADHD can take on being in a romantic, committed, long-term relationship. Some of the hallmarks of ADHD – the inability to focus on some tasks while being able to focus like a laser on others, the impulsivity,  the memory issues, the difficulty with complicated tasks, even the emotional disregulation – can make you seem like an inattentive or uncaring partner. After all, if you’re dating or married to someone who can’t seem to do simple things like “remember to take the trash out”, who never seems to listen, pays more attention to their phone than you, or who makes or changes plans with no warning, you’d be justified in thinking that they just don’t give a shit.

Or, at least, not enough of a shit to care about how you’re feeling or what you’re concerned about.

Similarly, if you’re the person with ADHD, diagnosed or not, then it can feel like your partner is just one more person just jumping on you over and over again. Here you are, feeling like the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, and you’re getting yet more criticism dumped all over you. You’re trying your best, but you’ve been overwhelmed for so long, you’ve forgotten what just plain “whelmed” feels like. Worse, try as you might, you honestly don’t remember that you agreed to do that thing on that day. You honestly, sincerely don’t remember your partner asking you to do the thing or telling you that dinner was ready.

Worse are the times when you know that you need to pay attention and so you listen.  You pay attention as hard as you can, you make a mental note: “ok, so we’re doing X thing at Y time, got it. I will definitely remember this and not forget again.” Five seconds later, it’s already gone. Because hey, turns out, ADHD fucks with your memory, especially the transfer from short-term to long-term memory. Like a computer with faulty connections, you may load the commands into RAM but what gets recorded to the hard drive is just dial tone noises.

And what is extra-crispy frustrating – especially when you don’t know you have ADHD – is that this is unpredictable. You’ll remember some things, but not others. And because the things you forget may never have made it into long-term memory in the first place, you don’t know that you’ve forgotten it. So if your partner recognizes that you’re forgetful and keeps bringing stuff up to remind you, it can feel like nagging to you. Come on, you’re a grown-ass adult, you don’t need them to be on your case 24/7! You just need them to quit treating you like you’re a child and they’re your parent… especially if your parents were on your case too.

This is, of course, before we even begin to touch on how our hyperfocus can affect attraction. People with ADHD can come across as the “falls in love hard” type, where suddenly our entire being has zeroed in on this new partner. Wanting to know everything about them, wanting to spend all of our time with them, even showing so much interest and attention that it can be scary. For someone on the receiving end of that attention, it may be flattering. For others it could be intimidating or feel threatening.

But that intensity can vanish too, because hyperfocus is a fickle beast, so that intense interest can be matched with not just disinterest but occasional anxiety because “why the fuck has everything changed? Why don’t I feel the same way any more?” And if you’re the person on the receiving end, someone going from that hot to that cold isn’t just confusing, it’s painful. How can someone think that you hung the moon and stars and then it just… goes away?? What does that say about you, that someone could just… stop feeling like that?

Now, it would be easy to assume that once you’ve gotten your diagnosis and your condition is managed, then the problem is basically solved. Hey, you weren’t being a cold, insensitive asshole who promises someone the moon and then tosses them aside when they get bored! You have an ADA-recognized disability! It’s not that you didn’t care about your partner enough to pay more attention to her than your phone, your brain has a dopamine regulation issue that affects short and long-term memory, focus and attention!

Well, guess what? Turns out that just because you have an explanation for why things were shitty before and why you were distracted, distant and let your partner take on far too many responsibilities, that doesn’t mean that the feelings that behavior caused went away! Getting treatment may feel magical, but it doesn’t retcon the past. Not realizing what what you were doing – or that what you were doing was hurting someone you cared about – doesn’t make the pain unhappen, nor does it excuse mistreatment. So, even under the best of circumstances, there’s going to be a lot of processing and dealing with what’s happened before and how you’re going to work through things.

But just to make things even more complex and confusing, your partner may feel weird about… well, feeling weird. See, one of the things we often don’t realize is how getting diagnosed and treated can end up making your partner feel like the villain. Here you are, struggling with a condition that looks like callous indifference and assholery, and they were assuming you were just a dick. Now they know differently. But… what do you do with those feelings of hurt, frustration, anger and resentment?

It’s almost like they were suddenly shifted into another universe, where their relationship with you is different, but they still have the memory of all those previous hurts and fights. In a very real way it can feel like gaslighting; were those feelings legitimate? Are they a bad person because they still feel those things? How does someone work through those past resentments and slights without either taking all the blame on themselves or laying it on you? The feelings are real and valid, but the causes were wrong so… what now?

Unfortunately, there really aren’t any easy answers because that shit all still happened. It takes work to separate the symptoms from your view of your partner. If the two of you have been living with the condition for a while, it can be difficult for them change how they react to you and vice versa. The longer you’ve been in that dynamic, the harder it can be to shift that mindset; the Titanic couldn’t turn on a dime, after all. As a result, there’s often a frustrating period where you’re both responding based on old patterns, rather than the new reality. If you’re both not cognizant of that, then it’s incredibly easy to backslide into your old dynamic.

At the same time, however, while the symptoms can be a cause of strife, having ADHD doesn’t also preclude you from having been the asshole. There’re plenty of folks who will use their diagnosis as a “get out of trouble free” card rather than taking responsibility for their actions, which makes it that much worse. Being a good partner means being willing to own your shit. Even when some of your shit is the product of a mental health issue.

Your partner’s feelings from before you got treatment are real and valid, and should be treated as such. So are yours. So, too, are your struggles to work under conditions that made things maddeningly difficult. All of these things can be true. Moving forward together is going to mean that there will be an adjustment period. But if you work together, with a priority on mutual communication and mutual accommodation, you can make things work. Just as your partner should work on grace and understanding, you need to work on finding ways to make sure your partner feels loved, appreciated and heard.

But this can be tricky. Why? Well…

Get Ready To Unlearn Everything You’ve Learned Before Now

Here’s a fun thing that folks don’t tell you when you get treatment for ADHD: the first few weeks or months are magical. I, quite literally, felt euphoric for days after going on Vyvanse. I honestly wasn’t sure if I suddenly understood the appeal of meth or if neurotypical people just felt like that all the time. Thankfully, the euphoria faded, but just the fact that I was getting shit done was like a drug in and of itself! My executive dysfunction, while still there, was much more manageable! I could focus on tasks! I didn’t constantly forget things! Hell, I was a goddamn productivity tyrannosaurus.

Then a few months in, suddenly it all started falling apart. Again.

Needless to say, I was about to lose my goddamn monkey mind. Was the medication not working any more? Was I just that broken?

Well, no. Not really. The problem is that, despite the first couple days of being higher than a giraffe’s nuts, treatment isn’t a magic spell. Going on medication may have helped me control the symptoms, but that’s it. Just as getting a diagnosis doesn’t make previous frustrating behaviors unhappen, getting my symptoms under control didn’t undo the previous 40+ years of being untreated.

The problem is that, after going for all that time undiagnosed, I’d developed a rather vast assembly of coping mechanisms to actually function. These ranged from the ruthlessly practical – automating as much of my life as I possibly could so I didn’t completely fuck my credit score, calendar alerts for my calendar alerts – to the weird-yet-functional, to the almost absurdly baroque.

As one example: because I have issues with focus and attention, things that require split-second timing and visual cues were difficult. So if I, for example, didn’t want to lose fish in Animal Crossing, I had to look away and respond to the audio cue instead.

To give a more baroque example of coping, there were the ways that I would use to overcome my executive dysfunction. Since executive dysfunction often feels like “can’t start, vibes are wrong”, I would put on a full-court press to fix the vibes. This was an escalating series of setups and hotfixes that would ultimately culminate in a combination of scents (usually scented candles or oil diffusers),  Spotify playlists, soundscape videos from YouTube on the TV, and matching mood lighting via wifi enabled smart lights. All of this in order to fix the vibes.

I was, in a very real way, trying to seduce work out of my fucking brain.

Thing is, I had adopted so many of these behaviors precisely because my symptoms were untreated. They were compensatory mechanisms based around my limitations at the time, and I was doing them for long enough for those behaviors to be embedded in muscle memory. And as it turns out, what works when your brain is freaking broken doesn’t work so well when it works more or less as intended. Need multiple sources of stimulation to focus? Well, once you get treated, turns out that becomes distracting noise. Those rituals and procedures you created to be functional? After you get on medication, some of them become impediments, not assists.

This is especially true when your mechanisms dictated a schedule that was positively grueling.

This, as it turns out, is a common story. One thing people with ADHD tend to share is the ever classic philosophy of “the best work is always done at the last minute.” This isn’t because we’re lazy, or decided to fuck around like grasshoppers while all the good little ants were doing their jobs. It’s because one of the most reliable ways to break through executive dysfunction is to trigger an adrenaline spike… and damned if there’s no easily accessible source for adrenaline than the pure panic of having a paper or a project due the next day.

However, the zero-to-OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT lifestyle doesn’t come without cost. Turns out, if you’re relying on constant panic and adrenaline to fuel productivity – which also means working much longer hours all at once, rather than if you could take things in an orderly fashion – you end up burning yourself out in short order. But if it’s the only way you know to actually get shit done, then you basically assume that this is how it goes. You can struggle all you want, but executive dysfunction wins in the end and you just build even more compensatory behaviors to help with the burnout.

But that Jenga pile is still based on behaviors that just aren’t actually helpful. It’s a bit like spaghetti coding; it got the job done, but not well and it only works in that specific context. Change even the slightest variable and the whole thing goes boom. And, as it turns out, getting treatment will do just that. Those motivating rituals you spent so much time cultivating? Yeah, they don’t work well anymore but the comedown sucks worse. The work schedule that has you constantly scrambling to get shit done before the clock runs out? It’s mostly going to dial the burnout rate up.

Oddly, the audio cues still work. Go figure.

And to make matters worse, just because you started getting things under control doesn’t mean that you’re going to magically be able to work with the same efficiency as you’ve been told you should be able to. Those old compensatory behaviors were the product of years or decades of trying to get through life. You’re going to have to start learning new ways of getting everything taken care of.

But I wouldn’t go whole hog in getting rid of all of those habits because…

Your Life is Going To Start Revolving Around Staying Functional

Here’s a truth: getting tested and treated for ADHD is a massive pain in the ass. The first step of recognizing you have ADHD is hard enough. The next steps of a) finding someone who can diagnose you, b) going through the testing and diagnostic process and c) actually getting the medication and treatment are borderline nightmarish. The number of hoops you end up having to jump through seem like they’re custom-designed to be as difficult as humanly possible for someone with the very condition you’re trying to diagnose. While the exact tests can vary, the process – multiple appointments, additional assignments and oh hey, if you’re doing this during a global pandemic, trying to do at least half of them over Zoom – feels like a classic Catch-22.

Didn’t make it to the appointment on time? Ah well, no diagnosis for you. Zoom strains your ability to focus and pay attention? Welp, can’t help you. Actually manage to get to all the appointments, take all the tests and get the various documentation to them? Congratulations, you clearly don’t have ADHD because nobody with ADHD could accomplish those things.

But hey, let’s say that you got through the testing and came through with a shiny certificate (or rather, email that you will very pointedly save in multiple places in folders marked ADHD DIAGNOSIS DO NOT DELETE OR LOSE as well as print multiple hard copies that you will stash all over the place) that says that yes, you officially have ADHD and should probably do something about that. Cool. Now comes the fun part: finding someone to actually prescribe you those brain-work-gooder drugs.

This can be a challenge if, say, you don’t have a psychiatrist, or a general practitioner who will write the scrip for you. If you don’t… well, you have to go searching for one, which is its own challenge. After all, a lot of doctors are going to stare you down with gimlet eyes as you hand them your shiny certificate and tell them that you’ve just discovered you’re neuroatypical and you want to microdose meth about it. Oh, yes, that’s the even more fun part: the treatment for ADHD is speed. Legal speed.

Guess how easy that is to get a hold of.

But let’s say that you’ve got lucky and while your GP may not prescribe psychiatric medication, someone else in their practice will. Great, problem solved. Except not really because now you have to convince a pharmacist – who already won’t sell you enough allergy medication to get you through the month – that you’re doing crank under doctor’s orders. Because hey, most ADHD meds – the ones that work, anyway – are Schedule II controlled substances, you are going to be seen as a potential dealer before someone who’s, y’know. Trying to get the shit that makes their brain go “brrrrrrrrr”.

Want to take a guess as to what comes next? Did you answer “more tests that are singularly designed to be nigh-impossible for someone who needs ADHD medication to accomplish?” Congratulations! Your prize is descent to your next level of Hell. Hope you packed a lunch, because you’re gonna be here a while. Oh, did folks not mention that you’re going to have to fiddle around to find your minimum effective dose and you’re going to have to go back to your doctor to say “hey, this isn’t working I think I need to go up a dose?” And that can look a lot like what experts call “drug seeking behavior”?

Fun times, yo!

But, hey. For the sake of argument, we’ll say that you’ve successfully made it through those hoops and you’re lucky enough to have a doctor and a pharmacy that get you your medication with relatively bearable levels of hassle and life is good. Well, outside of needing to remember that you have to call your doctor to call the pharmacy to authorize a refill because Schedule II drugs can’t just be prescribed with automatic refills. But details, right? The important thing is that you’re making the brain work and you’re feeling… well, you’re feeling normal for the first time in forever.

However, as the saying goes, man plans and the gods laugh because there are probably going to be some more speedbumps thrown your way. Such as, say, your insurance suddenly deciding that they will no longer be covering the medication that actually works for you and feel like you should go onto a different one. Ironically, the medication they won’t cover – because METH – is actually formulated to be useless for getting high, and they’d much rather you get on one that does get people high and has more side effects. Don’t want to go through that nightmare again? Ok cool, guess you’ll be paying out of pock… wait it costs how much?

Alright, so you made it thus far. If you’re like me, and I know I am, then other than needing a second career in order to afford a brain that works, life is actually not half bad! In fact, it’s pretty sweet! You’re adjusting, you’re learning how to manage your condition, you’re in a pretty good place! You may be be a little bitter that it took you four decades to get here, but you got here and that’s what matters.

Which, of course, means that you’re going to get hit with yet another new complication. Such as, say, your prescribing physician leaving their practice and going to a new one that doesn’t take your insurance, won’t let you pay out of pocket and thus won’t let you continue being their patient. So hey, welcome back to the grind, my dude, time to go searching for another doctor who will help support your legal meth habit.

Well maybe you’ll go to one of those telemedicine places that promises to make it as easy as possible to get your meds. That’s great… until it isn’t. Because if something goes wrong, such as, say, some pharmacies deciding they no longer accept prescriptions from telemedicine services, you’re fucked. Again.

Now, maybe, just maybe, you’ll look at things and say “ok, so maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe, now that I know my condition, I could get by without medication. Or I could ration it, stretch it out, only take my meds when I know I need to be able to work.” This might work if everything lines up juuuuust right for you. But trust me when I say that if you see you’re down to your last couple of pills and the doctor or the pharmacy can’t or won’t fill your scrip, you will learn to have a deep and abiding understanding of Flowers for Algernon in a way that you will not fucking appreciate.

And why do you have to go through hell to make your brain work gooder? Funny you should ask…

Some People Will Refuse To Believe You Have ADHD No Matter What

So, one of the most frustrating things about having ADHD – other than the year and change that you will be insufferable about sharing memes, jokes, Twitter threads and so on about having ADHD – is actually getting people to believe you have it. Remember what I said about this being the closest I’ve ever come to a Wolverine-esque “CAN I TRUST MY OWN MEMORIES??” moment? Yeah, well, about that… as it turns out, 2020 was the second time I was diagnosed; my first time had been as a child.

Fun fact: most people don’t realize that ADHD isn’t like being the dog from Up where you can’t finish a sentence before SQUIRREL! Er, I mean, getting distracted. Nor, for that matter, is it like being unable to sit still, focus or pay attention. As it turns out, there’re three different kinds of ADHD: hyperactive, inattentive and combination. However, the name Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, leads people to believe that if you have it, you must be vibrating like Barry Allen after a triple espresso.

However, one of the most common symptoms – hyperfocus – actually means that you may well be sitting damn near perfectly still for hours. Moreover, if your ADHD is untreated, the things you will hyperfocus on the most are things that you actually enjoy as your brain tries to squeeze every last drop of serotonin and dopamine out of whatever it is that you’re doing.

So, in a moment of irony so palpable that even Alanis Morissette would say “well, shit“, one of the most predominant symptoms leads people to believe you don’t have the condition. “Look,” they say, “he clearly can focus and pay attention when he wants to! He’s just undisciplined and lazy!”

Now to be fair…

If you’re a Gen Xer, then you grew up in an era when ADD and ADHD diagnoses were alternately considered to be either bullshit coddling of undisciplined kids or deeply stigmatizing, and the treatments had hellacious side-effects. It’s understandable that some parents might think it was better for their kids not to go through that or to grow up without those labels. Yeah, it meant that they went through life with one arm tied behind their back and both legs tied together and then yelled at for not being able to complete the obstacle course in a timely manner, but folks meant well.

It also doesn’t help that ego gets in the way, especially for children with ADHD. Many parents see their children as commentary on them. If a child has a chronic mental illness, then their parents see it as a sign that they did something wrong. It’s easier on the ego to say that no, it’s the child’s fault. Their condition is a choice they made and thus can be corrected… by force if need be.

Similarly, the parents and teachers of Millennials and Zoomers had good intentions and genuinely want to help their kids succeed. But when nothing that they think should work is actually producing results, it’s much easier to assume that the problem is with the child. The idea of “the system doesn’t fail, you fail the system” is deeply, deeply embedded in our society and it’s often easier to think that your child (or employee, for that matter) is willful and shirking than to admit that the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t actually work.

Not to mention, trying to accommodate people with disabilities, handicaps and chronic conditions gets expensive, quickly. In a capitalist society, money and efficiency is all-important, and  anything that gets in the way of such things is to be eliminated. Since you can’t magically make people not have ADHD, it’s easier to just pretend it’s not a thing until forced to otherwise acknowledge it. I despise the woo-woo “your problem isn’t that you’re neuroatypical, your problem is with capitalism” meme I see every few months because no, I would have the same fucking problems if I were unemployed, but it’s right about one thing: our culture and society refuses to admit that it only actually serves a limited number of people and everyone else is basically fucked. It’s a hell of a lot easier to blame the people it fails.

The same outlook of “everyone fits into this specific model” is precisely why it’s so fucking hard to get treated. Because our drug laws are based more on racism, political agendas and DuPont’s profit margins than science and reality, people who want to get their condition under control are seen as liars and potential criminals who have to prove their innocence rather than people with a disability that need support.

Now, if it sounds like I’m frustrated… well, I am. There’s nothing  quite like having a condition that society says is real but also refuses to accommodate is incredibly frustrating. Trying to keep my symptoms managed is a significant source of stress and I’m only now really managing to overcome the burnout and find new ways of working around my limitations. And, if I’m perfectly honest, it’s really hard not to be a little angry about how much I’ve struggled when it turns out I didn’t have to.

But here’s the thing: for all that it’s been one massive learning curve – again, four decades before I got diagnosed – I can’t say that it’s not worth it. Most of my frustrations have to do with how little I knew about this, how long I’ve lived with it and how little it’s discussed. It’s a little surprising to learn just how much you don’t actually know. Learning more, earlier, might have made a significant difference in my life. And talking about not just having the condition or what it means, but what it’s like learning how to live with it, can help normalize it, demystify it and, hopefully, destigmatize it.

And maybe that will help someone else get diagnosed and treated sooner than I did, so they can get through the frustrating bits earlier and quicker than me. Because honestly? For as much of a pain in my ass as it’s been getting here… I infinitely prefer how things are now.