I don't really hold my ADHD as a diagnosis. My sense of who 'Rob' is on a given day isn't something I can shoehorn into a convenient acronym. I wouldn't know myself without my quirks and foibles, so naming them in isolation feels a bit daft.
Heyyy.
I love this quote (normally attributed to Krishnamurti):
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Under a military-industrial complex, there's plenty more to worry about than productivity ratios within a nine-to-five hamster wheel. I'd rather design a life that puts me in the driving seat and hold that as a success measurement, over profitability (yuck). Plus I jumped off the corporate ladder aeons ago.
And…stop press, I'm about to say something positive about AI…now that flexible systems and homeworking are a thing, this goal is more within reach than ever. So I'm embracing it.
I wrote about the diagnosis itself a while back - the assessment, the pathway, what happened when I refused the psychiatric model (absolutely no shade to anyone going down that road, as there are many lives out there being changed for the better). Today I’ll talk about the other half: not how I got the label, but what I actually do with it.
A bingo card acronym
October is ADHD Awareness Month, that old acronym that never fails to draw the pigeon psychologists out of the woodwork 🐦. To me it's little more than a bingo card acronym. Everyone's an expert on this 'affliction' they've decided you've got, and it's tired.
The tell is when a diagnostic word turns up in ordinary conversation as the explanation for something you've done. Disagree with someone and suddenly it's the ADHD talking. I’ve had ‘hyper-focus’ used against me, as if it meant fixating on something that isn’t there. That isn't insight. It's the weaponisation of fancy terms.
So here's the only position I've found that works: you're the most important thing here, not the clinical buzzword of the times. I'm a massive geek with a lifetime of tried-and-tested systems & scaffolding, and at this point I've discovered a new normal, so it's no longer a 'thing'.
Help.
What it actually looks like
A few of mine (brace yourselves):
I can't remember faces. We'll break for tea in the middle of a training session and I'll recognise very few people when I walk back in (I swear it's a very mild version of prosopagnosia - but that’s my own pigeon psychologist talking).
People approach me knowing my name and some alarming detail about my life, and I've got really good at the enthusiastic, "Oh HIII!" routine.
Twenty minutes is my limit on a film. Fast moving reality shows like Bake Off can be a struggle. Who is this? What are they cooking?
I'm obsessed with to-do lists and can't function without one. I have to plan in order to not plan. My finances and my email folders are engineered to precision, having learned the hard way.
Repetitive background noise (however quiet) is torture unless I know where it's coming from.
There's no attention deficit
There's no shortage of attention. There's too much of it in some places and none in others, and the trick is building a life around that instead of fighting it.
On music. I don't really get pub culture, preferring to be overstimulated by lights, lasers and house music. UK rave culture was built from neurocheeky brains: a packed dancefloor is an ADHD convention, and the mosh pit is where you'll find me defragmenting my brain. Techno was teenage meditation music and freeform jazz gives my brain a rest - the more confusing and abstract the better! Some of my best house cleaning has been done to ‘Miles Davis - Bitches Brew’.
Photo credit: Owen Money Photography.
Going deep
This is where hyper-focus comes in as an asset. When it takes hold, you could rev a chainsaw next to me and I wouldn't notice. Clients comment on it. I come across intense at first. Sit a little longer and this is where we shift towards our 'stuff' without slipping into distractions, pleasantries, giggles and rescuing prompts. A hidden bonus, as it turns out, for this kind of work.
The catch is being jolted out of it. When surfacing from an extended rabbit hole, I can feel really groggy and discombobulated. Time flexes somehow, making the next task feel miles out of reach. A decent ritual practice helps me move seamlessly through the day. Breathwork and a decent scheduler are essential, as without those I’m screwed (TickTick, since you asked and no they're not a sponsor sadly).
Reappraising your entire life story
The strange moment isn't the diagnosis. It's the months after, when you're suddenly reappraising your entire life story ("Wow, it's not my fault!") while people around you are desperate to track your behaviour against a list. To be honest, it's strange enough without the background commentary.
It’s also the moment a conversation helps most, so book a free 15-min call if feeling the pull.
If you read anything, make it Gabor Maté: ‘Scattered Minds’, and then ‘The Myth of Normal’ (that last one’s a massive tome mind). He reads ADHD less as faulty wiring and more as something that develops in a sensitive child in response to what happened to them. He comes at it from his own life, born into a Jewish family with grandparents killed at Auschwitz.
Gabor Maté.
The mainstream view is that ADHD is mostly in the genes: brain chemistry handed down, nothing to do with what happened to you. The jury’s still out, but you can guess which camp I’m sitting in, for today at least. A lot of queer people turn out to be neurodivergent. The biggest study on this, from Cambridge in 2020, found trans and gender-diverse adults were three to six times more likely to be autistic (for the right wingers: the study was careful to say that's an overlap, not a cause). My own hunch, for what it's worth, is that a lot of us spent our formative years dissociating and not entirely in our bodies. It stands to reason that a nervous system that grows up like that ends up wired differently.
The important part
Thankfully none of this is my (or your) fault, and it's glorious.
If you've just been landed with a diagnosis and no clue what to do with it, book a free fifteen-minute call.
If any of the above made you guffaw in recognition, send me a hello. I've got at least a hundred more distractions where these came from.