So, I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD. Both inattentive and hyperactive, it’s apparently mild, but it still gives me cause to think of what might’ve been if I’d been diagnosed earlier in life.
Bittersweet really. I mean, I feel a loss of self in a way. All the times I’ve been called off with the pixies/fairies (not a bad thing really), or accused of always being late, or vague. They are of course the negative associations, the positive ones are what I’d really like to concentrate on…
All my life I’ve been able to see the ‘lay-of-the-land’ easily, I initially thought everyone could see it, because it really did seem like a no-brainer to me most of the time. This skill bode well for me when I was in corporate-land because I could see the dominoes falling a mile off and could duck and weave before they landed on me (usually).
I wanted to write about this, because well, it’s a cathartic exercise and if there were any other folk in their mid-fifties who had also just been given this nugget of information, that it was all going to be okay.
If you have kids, get them checked out as this shite is hereditary, so odds are they’ve also got an acronym of sorts. Earlier the diagnosis the more help they’ll get to be able to forecast their future in a more pliable way. I don’t mean they need to fit into the norm with all the other neuro-typicals, but they can also make things easier for themselves. Even the recognition that they are neuro-spicy can be a load off their minds, all those times in school they felt weird, or off-kilter just because things didn’t gel, well now the puzzle pieces might seem to fit – I mean, we could always get the edges right, but the center pieces well, they kinda suck, or appeared to be upside down.
Next step is to go to my doc and get a referral to a psychiatrist to get meds, I don’t want them to take away what I perceive to be a bit of a superpower to be frank – but why not try to fill in some of those missing center pieces hey?
Ciao for now, A x