What Women With ADHD Wish You Knew
Most women with ADHD feel alone, misunderstood and have a deep sense of
”otherness”. Yes, our society understands a lot more now about how ADHD impacts women but we also know that there is a range of severity and uniqueness in how symptoms impact us differently. Not only do no two women experience ADHD the same way, there is a lack of deeper understanding from society of how truly painful, chaotic and frustrating it is to live with it as a woman.
Most of us go our entire childhood and well into adulthood without a diagnosis, which means we were never taught any tools or strategies to cope with executive functioning deficits our brain creates.
I always believed there was something “very wrong and bad” with me as I called it in my head, and I assigned my wrongness to being stupid and inherently bad from as early as I can remember. Like most little girls I developed a wild arsenal of coping skills to overcompensate for my deficits, but for the most part I was very good at keeping my spicy and intense emotions under lock and staying out of the way; both at home and school. I had teachers in middle school and high school who would express their frustration with me that I had “so much depth and potential” but seemed determined to blow up any chance I had at success before I even got started.
Yes, that’s the point, I would think to myself.
What they didn’t understand is that I didn’t trust myself to even try the thing, to learn the thing, to do anything, because by middle school I had learned I could not trust my brain. I couldn’t trust my emotions...I couldn’t trust any of it. So why bother? Why try? It always ends in crippling shame and a host of adults angry and frustrated with me. No thanks. But the irony, which is true for most women like me, is that there was always a voice inside of me reminding me that I was smart. Quite smart actually. When the teacher asked a hard question and the class was silent, I knew the answer, but would never speak up. I never trusted my brain. Unfortunately the voice reminding me of my intelligence was often a whisper.
I white knuckled my way through high school (a nightmare) and college and it wasn’t until I was interviewing with the dean of my graduate program during the application process that ADD (that’s what it was called then) was ever put on my radar. At the end of the interview, which I thought I had nailed, he was reviewing my GRE scores. It was not the overall score that he wanted to talk to me about, but the drastic discrepancy between my verbal and quantitative scores. My verbal reasoning score was in the 96th percentile, however my quantitative score was somewhere in the low 40th. He jokingly asked me “what happened there?” and I just shrugged my shoulders and said “yeah, I don’t know…story of my life.” He then asked me a series of questions about what school was like for me, how learning and friendships had felt for me as a kid, pulled out the DSM and skimmed it for a few minutes (NOT WHAT YOU WANT IN YOUR GRAD SCHOOL INTERVIEW BY THE WAY), sat back down and said “I bet you probably have a math learning disability which is really common with ADD, and no one ever bothered to diagnose you with either. Has anyone ever told you that before?” You’d be the first, sir. I was 26.
I shoved that experience to the back of my head as quickly as I could, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel a wave of validation and warm relief for the first time in my life.
‘You mean there is an actual reason, something I can assign all of my badness to that someone else actually knows about? And I’m not the only one?’
This absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t do anything with that information and wouldn’t for another 14 years. I got into the program and moved forward with my life, but I did it energized with this new little secret. A different perspective and understanding about myself that gave me just enough gas to help me push through graduate school, an emotionally demanding new career, marriage, pregnancy challenges and motherhood.
Women are the glue that holds society and our families together. Having ADHD makes that incredibly hard for us and that’s why I’m writing this for you today. This is not to minimize the male experience of living with ADHD because they have their own challenges which I can’t speak to because I don’t personally live their experience. But I am highlighting the unique experience of being a woman with this disorder because of the ridiculous expectations placed on us by society and ourselves. If you’re living with ADHD I want you to feel seen. I also want you to be able to send this to someone who loves and cares about you and wants to know how to support you. If you don’t have ADHD you don’t have to look very far to find someone in your life who does; a loved one, your neighbor, a colleague. I hope this helps you understand their subjective experience and that they are very likely trying so very very hard.
Here is what women with ADHD want you to know:
We’re Probably Going to Do Things Differently Than You
We try very hard to find systems, routines and habits that work for us. Sometimes they work and sometimes they crash and burn. We get that for you it seems insane that we can’t just start something and finish it, make a list and cross it off, or buy a paper planner and use it. It’s insane to us too. If our system of post-it notes transferred into Google Calendar, then synced to our Apple watch works this month, please just let it be! We often have to think outside of the box to find strategies that work for us and unfortunately what works one week or month might not work the next. Sometimes we need help and creative suggestions are always welcome. We want to be as organized and tidy as you. We want to be able to do things the way you do. We can’t.
We Care Deeply About You, Your Feelings, And What You’re Saying
Although our behavior might not always indicate it, we care to our core about those around us. We may interrupt you mid sentence because of impulsivity which can seem really rude and immature. We might space out in the middle of a conversation because of inattentiveness. We also really struggle with anxiety because we know that we do these things, so social interactions get really stressful. When someone else is talking we tend to tell ourselves “pay attention, pay attention, don’t interrupt, don’t interrupt” so much that we completely panic and space out. None of this means that we don’t care. A huge part of ADHD is a struggle to regulate emotions, which can be a drain on those around us. Our external behavior doesn’t often reflect our internal experience.
We Carry Immense Shame and Guilt
I believe this true of almost all women with ADHD but even more so for women who did not get a diagnosis in childhood. When you spend your life thinking something is very wrong with you or that you are just dumb and broken, you can’t help but feel shameful. It sucks to be told that you’re smart but don’t apply yourself. It sucks to know you are capable of so much more but something inside of you just can’t launch. We tend to get a lot of criticism from others but none of it can come close to the self criticism we lay on ourselves, so any victory we have is always tainted by a failure we know is just around the corner.
We Can’t Change Just By “Doing It”
We hear a lot of “you just gotta focus” or “just try to power through” and that’s like telling a toddler learning to walk to stop falling down. Yes, everyone struggles a little bit with focusing and completing tasks they don’t want to do, but that’s because the majority of us are addicted to our phones and social media! (Try doing a task without picking up your phone every 10 minutes…seriously, try.) ADHD brains are structurally different and thankfully we now have imaging to prove this. The field of ADHD neurobiology is rapidly evolving and we are learning so much more about how and why this disorder impacts dopamine, serotonin, and other parts of brain function. If we could change by willpower alone, we would. Believe me.
We Are Not Unmotivated or Careless
In fact the opposite is true, but we get how difficult it can be to live with us. Bills that we forgot to pay or the house projects that remain 80% finished. The 100 ideas we have going all the time but never seem to get executed but seem urgent. It’s not because we aren’t motivated to do them or we’re lazy, our brain doesn’t make enough of the necessary dopamine to carry them out and because we are creative thinkers, we tend to have too many ideas for our own good. ADHD makes carrying out executive function very difficult and being a woman means you are tasked with managing not your own executive function but your children’s as well. And if you have children, things like remembering the doctor’s appointments, school paperwork, keeping up tidying the house, ordering diapers, knowing where things are in the house, having conversations about dividing the mental load and parenting- these are all things that tend to fall on us and are a major tax for women with ADHD. We’re trying our best to keep up with all of it but a lot is going to fall through the cracks.
ADHD is both my superpower and my kryptonite. I wrestle daily with the hold it has over me but over the last few years I’ve tried really hard to focus on the gifts I have because of it. For example, I have so many different ways to communicate and tell a story. Words come alive to me and I visualize stories in the greatest detail, which helps me commit things to memory in a unique way. I notice everything that’s happening in a room and notice the emotions of every single person around me. I have a deep well of empathy for others, especially anyone who feels unsupported or like the underdog because women with ADHD have felt like that most of our lives. It allows me to connect things and make big picture connections that others don’t seem to be sensitive or perceptive enough to be able to do. I care deeply about people’s stories and emotions and I get hyper-focused on devoting my energy to those. And all of these things make me an excellent therapist.
Meme Therapy:
If all else fails, this sums it up :)
Be well, I hope this one really helps…
Melissa