Finding and Embracing My Superpower

 
“Strug­gles to work qui­et­ly with­out dis­rupt­ing oth­ers.” (Grade 1)

“Gwen is quite social at school. It often direct­ly affects her work. We need to redi­rect her focus. She does need to be less social & check her work. Gwen is always in a hur­ry to get her work done. She will often write down any­thing just to get done. She is not pro­duc­ing the work that she is capa­ble of doing. There is a lack of effort.” (Grade 2)

“Gwen has had a prob­lem with late work and needs to keep pri­or­i­ties straight. Also, she needs to work on lis­ten­ing a lit­tle bet­ter. Final­ly I would like for her to remem­ber to raise her hand and be called on before speak­ing in class.” (Grade 5)

Grow­ing up was a con­stant strug­gle to keep my des­ig­nat­ed areas picked up. I’d leave things every­where and my fam­i­ly was very tired of trip­ping over my stuff. Most of my allowances as a kid went to replac­ing my lost library cards or house keys. I rou­tine­ly strug­gled to remem­ber to bring my work home, do the work, and then remem­ber to bring it back to school to be grad­ed. 5^th and 6^th grade were par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult on me as that was when my dis­trict start­ed mov­ing stu­dents between class­rooms instead of sit­ting in one room all day. 

I strug­gled to fit in social­ly with my class­mates. I was dif­fer­ent. I liked to read — and not just YA fic­tion books. I’d read the Read­er’s Digest at school or big books like Anna Karen­i­na. (The lat­ter was worth 75 Accel­er­at­ed Read­er points. I did­n’t fin­ish the book but I did read enough to do well on the quiz. I set records for AR points in 5^th and 6^th grades that stood for sev­er­al years.) My class­mates thought I only read the begin­ning, mid­dle, and ends of the books when in real­i­ty I just real­ly liked read­ing and read super fast. It seemed like I was always say­ing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I had zero fil­ter between brain and mouth. 

And yet, despite all this, I did well in school. I loved learn­ing (and still do!). My grades were in the A‑B range with the occa­sion­al for­ay into C’s when it was some­thing I did­n’t like (such as chem­istry or geom­e­try). I have records from test­ing that was done on me as a kid. My results ranged from above aver­age in Math­e­mat­ics to high in Fine Arts on a low-below aver­age-aver­age-above aver­age-high scal­ing sys­tem. I was able to use my intel­li­gence to mask my dif­fer­ences. I grad­u­at­ed high school with a 3.5 GPA and a 28 on my ACT. I also had an exten­sive list of extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties like Nation­al Hon­or Soci­ety, library aide, office run­ner, swim team, soft­ball team, intra­mur­al sports, and Girl Scouts (includ­ing get­ting my Gold Award which is the equiv­a­lent of the Boy Scout Eagle Scout award). There were days when I was at the school from 545a to 8p. All of these com­bined to get me my full-ride schol­ar­ship to col­lege, where I grad­u­at­ed with hon­ors straight into a good career. 

I found the Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence world and made it my goal to retire at 35 while I joined the local quilt guild, played recre­ation­al soft­ball and soc­cer, start­ed this blog, and start­ed a num­ber of oth­er hobbies. 

Fast for­ward to 2020 when the glob­al pan­dem­ic hit. Life as we knew it screeched to a halt. No longer could I play week­ly soft­ball or hit up pick­up soc­cer in the park twice a week. We start­ed work­ing from home. I could­n’t trav­el on the week­ends. All activ­i­ties were over Zoom. 

I hit a wall and fell apart. All of the cop­ing strate­gies I’d devel­oped to keep con­trol over my life fell apart and I was forced to face facts that I could­n’t mask the symp­toms anymore. 

In Mid-June of 2021, I was offi­cial­ly diag­nosed with mod­er­ate com­bined ADHD, which is hyper­ac­tive and inat­ten­tive. The most com­mon reac­tion when I tell peo­ple has been some­thing along the lines of “Duh. We knew this all along. Wait.….… you mean you had no idea?” And hon­est­ly, I had no idea until I start­ed see­ing peo­ple talk­ing about their diag­no­sis online. There are a ton of great con­tent cre­ators on Tik­Tok, Tum­blr, Red­dit, and Twit­ter talk­ing about their ADHD and how that affects their view on life. It was­n’t until I found myself relat­ing to all their con­tent that I thought I might have ADHD too. 

Sud­den­ly.… every­thing made sense. I don’t suf­fer from a lack of atten­tion — I strug­gle to focus on the right things. I’m over­whelmed by every­thing and my brain does­n’t know what the impor­tant things to focus on are. This makes things like clean­ing the house awful since I’ll start in one room, move some­thing to anoth­er room and start clean­ing there, and then I have 3 hours of work and a house that bare­ly looks like I did any­thing. As a kid I strug­gled to keep my room clean. I liked the messy piles. I knew exact­ly where every­thing was. My fam­i­ly cleaned my room a few times and it was like I had betrayed. Every­thing looked great but I could­n’t find a damn thing. ADHD also helped me under­stand why I want com­pa­ny for every­thing and strug­gle to do any­thing by myself. There’s a con­cept called “body dou­bling” that real­ly rea­sonat­ed with me. As a kid, I’d pro­cras­ti­nate and moan and com­plain about hav­ing to clean my room by myself, but if my sis­ter was in the room I could do it. Not even hav­ing them help, just hav­ing one of them sit on the bed.  Some peo­ple have posit­ed this serves as an anchor for the brain and gives it a rea­son to do what­ev­er chore of the day is on the list. 

Now that I am an adult, I find I still need a body dou­ble or a dead­line to get things done. At work, I can do tons of tasks if my cowork­er is near­by work­ing on their own tasks. Put me in my cube by myself or at my own desk at home and I strug­gle to get things done. For­tu­nate­ly at home I have my part­ner to be near­by when I do things, so that’s real­ly helped things like doing the dish­es or mak­ing food. 

(I lit­er­al­ly wrote an entire post on how hard dish­es are to do.….)

But most­ly, my entire life it’s been a strug­gle to get me to start some­thing. Once I’m in it, I’m fine, but I have to con­vince my brain to just do the damn thing. I did­n’t real­ize every­one did­n’t have to fight their brain to do things. Neu­rotyp­i­cal peo­ple say hey, I need to do the thing, and then they do it. *Mind blown* This caus­es prob­lems when I team up with peo­ple on projects. I’m great at being the peo­ple per­son and doing the “face work” but I absolute­ly despise pret­ty much all detail ori­ent­ed tasks. It caus­es me phys­i­cal pain to get things per­fect — which is unfor­tu­nate since “good enough” is not where the mon­ey is made. (This is also one of many rea­sons why being employed by a com­pa­ny is in my best inter­est. I’m the worst pos­si­ble boss I could have.) This has led to peo­ple call­ing me lazy in the past and I thought it was true.…. but I’m def­i­nite­ly not lazy. I’m over­whelmed and can’t focus on the minute details unless I get into a hyper­fo­cus state. 

Take writ­ing a blog post, for exam­ple. I’ll kick an idea around in my head for a long time, and then I’ll one day find a spark of moti­va­tion to start the post. If I don’t write the whole thing in one shot and pub­lish it, it’s going to sit there until my next wave of inspi­ra­tion. This post is cur­rent­ly on its third ses­sion. I’ll go back and scan it to make sure it’s cohe­sive, makes sense, and has no major gram­mat­i­cal errors but I very rarely rewrite posts. My brain says “Hey, no, we already did this. We don’t like redo­ing work. The first round took so much effort and now I have to do more work on this? No.” I have to be per­fect and if it’s not per­fect, why both­er? This dri­ve for per­fec­tion­ism means things rarely get all the way fin­ished. I’ve made a con­cen­trat­ed effort to change that nar­ra­tive in my head. Things will occai­sion­al­ly need touch­ing up or redo­ing. I can­not do things per­fect­ly all the time. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poor­ly. And hon­est­ly, my stan­dards for myself are so high that even things I think are done poor­ly are just fine. If it means I don’t have seo phras­es in the alt text on pho­tos, cus­tom social media pho­tos for each site, or a focus key­word in the con­tent, so be it. I have released myself from all those things because oth­er­wise I’d get absolute­ly noth­ing done. I don’t care about mak­ing tons of mon­ey from this blog any­more. I don’t need it to be an alter­na­tive source of income to retire at 35 any­more. I’m not capa­ble of con­sis­tent­ly pro­duc­ing that lev­el of work.….….. and I am per­fect­ly ok with that now. That’s not who I am. 

The best thing I can do for myself is embrace all the things that ADHD adds to my life. I notice so many small things about the world around me, which lends itself to appre­ci­a­tion about the world I live in. I notice nuances in friend’s behav­ior and can check in with them when they seem off. I then imme­di­ate­ly for­get the vast major­i­ty of details which is great for things peo­ple don’t want to tell any­one else. I can make peo­ple laugh by say­ing the things that pop into my head that some oth­er peo­ple are think­ing but don’t want to say out loud (fil­tered for the work envi­ron­ment, of course). I’m great at think­ing of ideas for peo­ple and dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios. I’m not afraid to stand up in front of a bunch of peo­ple and be the cen­ter of atten­tion. I’ll walk up to any­one and start talk­ing as though we’re old friends. (Once you’ve sung sil­ly camp songs and done pud­ding races in front of 50 8–13 year old girls you can do any­thing.) If I can design my life to take advan­tage of these strengths, I’ll live a rich and ful­fill­ing life.