Before I knew I was ADHD

Before I knew that I was ADHD I believed what I’d been told about myself. I believed I was difficult. I believed I was too much. I believed I was the one who reacted wrong, felt too much, said too much, needed too much and took things too personally.

I didn’t have the language then to understand that my brain worked differently. I didn’t know that the noise in my head wasn’t just me being over the top. I didn’t know that the exhaustion I felt from trying to be acceptable wasn’t because I was weak or  that so much of what I was trying to control was my nervous system doing its best to keep me safe.

All I knew was that I didn’t seem to fit, so I masked.

I became very good at trying to work out who I should be in each space I went into.  What version of me would be easiest for other people? What version of me would get the least judgement? What version of me would not be told she was difficult or too much? What version would create the least negative attention?

I didn’t call it masking then. I didn’t know that word. I just thought I was trying harder to be normal.

And oh boy, I did try hard.

I tried to say the right thing, to read the room, to stop myself reacting. I tried to be calmer, easier, less intense, less emotional, less needy and less me.

The problem was that the more I tried to be the person I thought I should be, the further away I got from who I actually was.

From the outside people don't see what's happening on the inside of me they see what I want them to see. They see the me who is functioning, they see the me who turns up, they see the me who keeps going. They see the me who appears capable and strong. They don’t often see the effort behind doing that. The constant checking, the overthinking, the panic, the noise, the fear of getting it wrong and the crash that comes from trying to hold it all together.

For me, the weekends became a way to switch off. I drank a lot, not because I was out having carefree fun, I drank because it gave me a break from the noise in my head. It blurred the edges for a while. It gave me a way to stop thinking, stop feeling and stop having to try so hard.

At the time I didn’t understand it like that. I wouldn’t have said, “I’m using alcohol to cope with an overwhelmed brain and a nervous system that doesn’t know how to rest.” I just knew I wanted it all to stop for a bit.

The noise, the self-doubt, the feeling that I was always wrong. The fear that someone would tell me off and the effort of trying to be someone people could cope with.

When you’ve been told enough times that you’re difficult, you start looking for proof that it’s true. You look back at your reactions. You look at the times you cried, the times you got defensive, the times you talked too much, the times you shut down, the times you couldn’t explain yourself properly and the times you felt rejected even when no one had said the words out loud.

And instead of asking, “What happened to me?” or “What support did I need?” you ask, “What is wrong with me?”

That question followed me for a long time. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just be like other people? Why do I feel everything so strongly? Why do I get overwhelmed so quickly? Why do I always feel like I’m in trouble? Why do I try so hard and still feel like I’m getting it wrong?

 Now I can see that I wasn’t asking those questions because there was something wrong with me. I was asking them because I didn’t understand myself yet. 

I didn’t know I was neurodivergent, I didn’t know I was masking, I didn’t know that my brain was having to work so hard to do things that other people seemed to do without even thinking and I certainly didn’t know that the things I had been judged for were signs that I needed understanding, support and different strategies.

So instead, I blamed myself.

That’s what can happen when you don’t have the right words for your experience. You take other people’s reactions and turn them into your identity. So “you’re difficult” becomes “I’m difficult.” “You’re too much” becomes “I’m too much.” “You’re making a fuss” becomes “I can’t trust myself.”

And once those beliefs settle in they start shaping how you see yourself. You begin to question yourself before anything has even happened and it’s exhausting trying to be the version of yourself other people seem to accept. 

That’s why being aware and understanding matters. Not because a diagnosis suddenly makes life perfect. Not because a label fixes everything. It doesn’t. Understanding matters because it gives you a different starting point.

Understanding yourself gives you a different place to start from. You can stop assuming you’re the problem and begin asking what support, space or understanding you actually need. 

That shift in belief matters because when you stop making yourself the problem, you can start looking at what you actually need. You can start asking what would actually help you instead of trying harder to be the version of yourself other people seem to understand.

For me, this was the beginning of seeing myself differently. Not completely and not all at once but enough to start questioning whether the things I believed about myself were actually true.

Maybe I wasn’t difficult or too much. Maybe I wasn’t stupid. Maybe I was a person who had spent years trying to survive without understanding the way my own brain worked.

And once that thought arrived, I couldn’t unthink it. I can see now that so much of what I believed about myself came from other people’s issues. It was never proof that I was difficult, stupid or too much. But it was proof that I needed to understand myself.

And that understanding changed everything.

This was before I knew I was ADHD. Before I had the language. Before I understood that there was another reason I’d spent so long feeling like I was getting life wrong.

In the next blog I’m going to share the moment that changed that. The moment I joined a conference to understand my son better who we were just beginning to think was neurodivergent, and heard my own life being described back to me.