I Just Thought I Was Too Much

After years of believing I was difficult and too much I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and think, “I wonder if I’m ADHD?” because I didn’t even know that was a thing.

ADHD wasn’t talked about then (2023) in the way it is now. It wasn’t something I was seeing everywhere or hearing people explain in a way that made sense to me. Even a few years ago it wasn’t as visible to the general public as it is now in 2026, especially not when it came to how ADHD can show up in women. So I had no reason to look at myself through that lens. I only had the words I had already been given and those words were difficult, too much and getting life wrong. When nobody is talking about how something can actually show up in real life you don’t know to question it. You just keep believing what you’ve been told about yourself.

I was still trying to understand myself through everything I’d already been told. I knew I struggled with things that other people seemed to cope with but I didn’t have the right words for any of it. I didn’t have a nice neat explanation for why life felt harder than it seemed to feel for other people. I just had years of trying to make sense of myself through other people’s opinions.

If someone said I was difficult I believed I must be. If someone said I was too much I tried to be less. I didn’t know there was another way to look at it.

Then it was identified that my eldest son could be neurodivergent.

That was the start of me looking into neurodivergence in a different way. Not for myself but for him. That feeling that as a mum I wanted to support him in any way I could, even though he was an adult, so that meant understanding. I wanted to understand more and because the world of neurodivergence can feel vast when you first step into it, I chose a conference that was for women only. I thought that would feel easier for me and that maybe it would be a language I could understand.

I wasn’t going into it expecting to find myself in any of it. I wasn’t looking for a label. I wasn’t trying to explain my own life. I was just trying to find information that would help my son feel understood.

What I didn’t know was that it was actually a conference about ADHD in women.

I went into it thinking I was there for my son but as I listened I started to realise they were talking about me. Not me personally of course but my life. The things I’d felt for years, the things I’d tried to explain but never really had the words for. I could relate to so much of what was being said.

It wasn’t just the behaviours they were describing. It was the feeling behind it, it was hearing experiences that sounded so familiar that something in me just stopped. I felt like I’d been hit, and hit hard, with a whole new way of understanding.

It was the sort of moment where your head is still trying to keep up but your body already knows. I didn’t have time to organise it or make it make sense. I just had this sudden feeling of, “That’s me.”

I turned my camera off and sobbed.

Not because I was sad in that moment. It was relief. Even now it’s emotional for me.

My whole body felt it before I had fully made sense of it in my head. For the first time there was another explanation. I wasn’t all the things I had been told I was.

Maybe I was just neurodivergent.

I can still remember the feeling of that because it was such a shift. I had spent so long trying to understand why I found things so hard even when I knew I was trying as best as I could. That was one of the hardest parts for me, I knew I was trying. I knew I wasn’t setting out to upset anyone or make life difficult but when you keep being told the same things about yourself you begin to believe them.

I believed I was the problem.

That sentence still hurts because it shows how deeply it had gone in. I hadn’t just heard those words from other people. I had started using them against myself. I had started judging myself through the same lens and that is a painful place to live from.

When suddenly there was another possibility, it changed something in me. I didn’t have all the answers. I didn’t have a diagnosis at that point. I didn’t know what would come next but I knew I had heard something that made more sense than anything I had been told about myself before.

I was elated, relieved and excited. There were so many emotions at once that I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.

That might sound strange when talking about ADHD but it really was how I felt. I had found the missing part. The part of me that couldn’t understand why I felt like such a bad person when I was trying so hard finally had something to make sense of it.

It wasn’t that I was difficult. It wasn’t that I was stupid. It wasn’t that I was doing life wrong.

My brain was just wired differently.

Those words changed everything for me because they gave me room to breathe. They didn’t erase what had happened and they didn’t suddenly make life simple but they gave me another way to understand myself. I started to breathe out after so many years of almost holding my breath.

When I look back now I can see why that moment meant so much. It wasn’t just about ADHD. It was about finally having the chance to question the story I had believed about myself. Because if you’ve spent years being told you’re too much you don’t just hear those words once. They become part of the way you see yourself.

That’s what masking had been for me. I hadn’t known that word before I’d just thought I was trying to be the person I should be like everyone else. I thought if I tried hard enough I could become someone people accepted more easily.

I didn’t understand that masking takes so much energy because you’re watching yourself all the time. You’re checking how you’re coming across and trying to work out what people expect from you before they even say it. No wonder I was tired all the time.

That conference made me start questioning what I had believed about myself.

It didn’t mean everything suddenly made sense or that everything became easy. It didn’t even mean I fully knew what to do with the information yet. But it gave me a new place to start from.

So I started to look at myself through a different lens. One that allowed me to question whether the things I had believed about myself were ever actually true.

I started to understand that there may have been a reason I reacted the way I did and that there may have been a reason life had felt so hard. There may have even been a reason I had spent so long trying to hide parts of myself.

And once I had understood that I couldn’t go back to not knowing. Awareness is such a key part.

For me awareness wasn’t about giving myself an excuse. It was about finally having information I could do something with. When you don’t understand yourself you keep trying to fix the wrong thing. When you start to understand yourself you can begin to ask different questions.

I think this is why moments of recognition matter so much. Sometimes we hear something and our whole body seems to understand it before we have the words.

For me that conference was one of those moments.

I went there to understand my son and came away understanding myself in a way I never had before. But that didn’t make the next part simple.

In my next blog I’m going to talk about what happened next. The process of seeking a diagnosis, why it overwhelmed me and what it felt like to finally be told I was actually ADHD.