I Just thought I was too much

I just thought I was too much

In my last blog (that you can read here) I shared the moment I first heard ADHD in women being talked about in a way that made me feel like I was hearing my own life being explained.

I’d gone to that conference because it had been identified that my eldest son could be neurodivergent. I went there to understand him better but I came away understanding myself in a way I never had before.

That was the moment everything started to make sense.

But recognising myself in ADHD and actually getting diagnosed were not the same thing.

I knew ADHD made more sense to me than anything else ever had but I still needed the diagnosis. Not because I wanted a label for the sake of having one but because I needed something official to help me fully believe that what I had been told about myself wasn’t true. I had spent years believing I was difficult, stupid and a bad person. I needed to know that wasn’t who I was. I needed to know there was another explanation.

Until I had that official diagnosis I don’t think I could fully let myself believe it. A part of me still needed someone who understood ADHD to say, “Yes, this is what’s happening.”

I think sometimes people imagine that once you start to identify as neurodivergent the next step is simple. You speak to someone, you get referred, you wait and then you get an answer.

That wasn’t my experience.

The waiting itself didn’t worry me. By that point I had already heard enough to know that ADHD made more sense to me than anything else ever had. It wasn’t that I needed someone to tell me before I could feel it was true. I think part of me already knew.

What was hard was getting through the system.

The doctors had agreed that I could be referred but then I had to deal with a process that felt much harder than it needed to be. I had a secretary who made things very difficult and it got to the point where I gave up for a while.

That sounds like such a small sentence. I gave up. But if you understand what it feels like to keep pushing through systems that aren’t clear, aren’t easy and don’t feel like they are built for brains like yours then you’ll know that giving up isn’t always because you don’t care. Sometimes you care so much but you’re already at capacity.

I had found this thing that explained so much of my life and then I couldn’t seem to get through the next part. I didn’t know how to keep pushing when the process itself felt like another thing I had to fight.

Then someone suggested I use a letter from one of the diagnosing organisations.

So I did.

I sent that in, got past the secretary who had been blocking me and finally got onto the waiting list. After that it was another year before I got an appointment which was still much shorter than the NHS wait would have been.

Even though the wait didn’t worry me the diagnosis process itself completely overwhelmed me.

I don’t want this to put anyone off seeking a diagnosis if that is what feels right for them. I can only speak from my own experience and other people may experience it very differently. But for me having to go back through my whole life and explain how I reacted to things to someone I had no connection with was awful.

It wasn’t just answering questions.

It was being asked to pull apart years of my life. It was trying to explain things I hadn’t understood at the time. It was going back into memories and reactions and feelings that had already been heavy enough to live through once.

There is something very exposing about trying to explain your inner world to someone you don’t know and have no connection with which is why the first few sessions I have with a client is always about building connection. Especially when you’ve spent so much of your life being misunderstood or told that you were the problem.

I felt like I was having to prove something that had already cost me so much.

And because I had spent years doubting myself it didn’t matter how much sense ADHD had made to me before that appointment. By the end of the session I was convinced he was going to tell me I wasn’t ADHD and that I had made it all up.

That fear didn’t come from nowhere.

I had been told before that I made things up for attention. That was something people in my world had said to me and it stayed with me. I couldn’t understand it because it was so far away from who I was.

I tried really hard not to be ill. I tried really hard not to create any sort of drama. I tried really hard not to need too much from anyone.

So being told I made things up for attention didn’t make sense to me but it still made me question myself. That’s what words can do when they come from people around you. Even when something doesn’t feel true it can still get in and make you doubt what you know about yourself.

I can see now that those comments were about the people saying them to me. They weren’t proof of who I was.

But in that diagnosis appointment all of that old fear came back. What if I’d got it wrong? What if I had seen myself in ADHD because I wanted an answer so badly? What if he thought I was making too much of it? 

That is the part of diagnosis I don’t think we talk about enough. It isn’t always just about being assessed. Sometimes it brings you face to face with all the years you weren’t believed, weren’t understood or didn’t feel safe saying what was really going on for you.

Then he told me I was ADHD.

And the first thing I felt was relief.

Relief that I hadn’t made it up. Relief that I hadn’t misunderstood myself. Relief that there really was a reason so much of my life had felt harder than I could explain.

Then he told me that I should also apply for an autism assessment because it was clear to him that I was also autistic.

That was another moment again.

I had gone into that process looking for confirmation of ADHD and came out with something even bigger to understand. It was a lot to take in. Not because it felt wrong but because it opened up even more of my life in a way I hadn’t expected.

At first I think I just held onto the relief. I wasn’t making it up. I wasn’t attention seeking. I wasn’t difficult because I had chosen to be. 

My brain worked differently and someone who knew what they were looking for could see that.

But after the relief came the grief. Grief for the years I hadn’t known. Grief for the child I had been. Grief for the adult I became while still trying to make sense of myself through other people’s judgement.

Then came anger. Anger for all the things I had been made to feel. Anger for the things that had been said to me. Anger for the years I spent believing I was the problem when actually I had been trying so hard with no real understanding of why life felt the way it did.

Diagnosis didn’t arrive as one simple emotion. It wasn’t just relief. It wasn’t just happiness. It wasn’t just an answer. It was relief, grief and anger all sitting together.

I think that’s important to say because finding out you’re neurodivergent later in life can bring so many feelings at once. You can be grateful to finally understand yourself and still feel sad for the years you didn’t. You can feel relieved to have an answer and still feel angry that no one saw it sooner.

For me the diagnosis gave me language but it also made me look back. It made me look at all the times I had judged myself for struggling. It made me look at all the times I had tried to be easier for people. It made me look at how much of my life had been spent trying to fit into things that were never built with my brain in mind. And whilst that was hard it also started something important.

It started allowing me to understand myself with more honesty.

Not through the words other people had used about me. Not through the belief that I was too much. Not through the fear that I was making it all up. Through the truth that I was neurodivergent.

That didn’t mean everything suddenly became easy or that I had a clear plan for what came next. But it did mean I could finally stop trying to explain my whole life through blame.

I had an answer and that answer changed the way I saw everything.

In the next blog I’m going to share what’s happened after the diagnosis. The grief, the anger and then the understanding. How I started to look at what was neurodivergence, what was trauma and why it isn’t always easy to separate the two.