I never thought I was different. I just marched to the beat of my own drummer, or at least that was how my mom put it when, for instance, the preschool I went to pulled a Felix Unger on me and asked me not to return. I've gone through the issues I had in school with paying attention, but still, I didn't know that meant I was different in any way.

I knew that I had trouble paying attention and that my mind wandered and that my brain was constantly active, but as a kid and teenager at a time when not a lot was known about ADHD and, in fact, the form of ADHD I have wasn't even recognized until I was well into my 20s, I thought I was no different than anyone else. I thought everyone's brain worked as quickly and as relentlessly as mine did.

A Career That Fit the Pace

I worked hard to get through my days and when I started to work part-time jobs through college, I wound up in jobs where the ADHD didn't really come into play. I worked in a movie theater for a short time, then I got a job parking cars as a valet at Belmont Racetrack. I was constantly moving around, I was interested in the cars, and there was enough downtime and distraction where I enjoyed the job.

After I left the racetrack, I got a job in a restaurant as a bartender. Again, it was a job that was interesting enough that had a mix of being busy and downtime to make the job a good fit for me.

Even when I got my job at the ad agency, there was enough distraction throughout the day where I thrived at the job, whether it was my time working in media planning or when I switched over to the IT department. At some point I will talk about why the move over to the IT department was a great fit for me, but today, I want to talk about what happened after I left the agency after 20 years and decided to take a friend up on her offer to work with her in her social media marketing business.

The Crash After the Novelty

We were and still are close friends and when I decided to accept her offer to work with her, I thought that it would be great to work with a close friend. I imagined a near constant collaboration between us.

This is when I realized that something was up with my brain. At the beginning we did talk for a couple of hours a day so she was able to show me the ropes as to how she handles her business and I wanted to learn as much as possible and do a good job. After only a few days, I realized that most of the day would be me working on my own. I had to manage my own calendar and task list. I had to go out and get more clients and meet people. I had to start networking. I had to build a business.

I would say that the first year wasn't really too bad because this was all new and interesting. It was the first time I didn't work for a big corporation. It was exciting and there was enough that kept me interested. It was still a novelty. And as we know with ADHD, interest and novelty is a prime motivator.

Once that interest and novelty wore off, things started to get far more difficult. After almost two years of working with this close friend, I realized that we no longer talked to each other as friends. It was all about work and the business, and we didn't quite see eye to eye on everything. Our disagreements were not major, but I think we both realized that working together had eaten into our friendship.

When I started my own business in July of 2017, the work once again became interesting and novel. So once again, my ADHD brain had something to latch on to. Though, at this point I still had no idea that I had ADHD. The problems didn't really start to manifest until a year later when, once again, things were not as interesting or novel. I enjoyed the work I was doing and I was lucky enough to have developed a decent list of clients, but at some point, work became difficult and I wound up with a to-do list of over 75 things that needed to get done, and I was all of a sudden completely incapable of getting any of it done, except when something was immediately due. Then, due to the urgency, I was able to get the work done. But I was only able to get the work done that needed to be done.

It was exhausting and frustrating to look at a long list of things that needed to be done and be completely unable to get anything done. I was paralyzed. I just could not get up the motivation to get anything done and it was causing an extreme amount of anxiety. The interest was not there. The novelty was gone, and the only time I was able to get anything done was when I was facing an immediate deadline.

Interest. Novelty. Urgency. Without those things, there was not enough dopamine in the system to get anything done.

The Doctor Visit That Changed Everything

Not knowing where to turn, I talked to my doctor about it. After listening to me for just a few minutes, he quickly assumed that I was just dealing with anxiety, and he prescribed an anxiety medication.

After one day on the anxiety medication, I knew this was not anxiety. I had anxiety, but the anxiety came from not being able to get the work done, not the other way around.

I called the doctor back and was back in the office about a week later. To his credit, he started asking me a bunch of different questions that seemed a little weird and out of context. He asked me how I did in elementary school. He asked me what the elementary school teachers said about me. I told him about getting kicked out of preschool and marching to the beat of my own drummer and being told I was a daydreamer. I told him about the struggle to get any work done unless it was due that day.

We spoke for about 45 minutes, which was great since this was just a regular office visit, and he did have other people waiting for him. After a lengthy conversation, he suggested that I met practically all of the criteria for ADHD.

Living With ADHD, Not Fighting It

That was a transformative day. While I didn't immediately go down the rabbit hole of learning what that meant and how, in retrospect, almost everything I went through since preschool was informed by ADHD, I did feel an almost immediate weight taken off of my shoulders.

I was able to put a name to it, and as with the RSD, once I was able to put a name to something, I was able to work on it. Fortunately for me, the doctor prescribed a low dose of Adderall, and it turned out to be a good fit since things started to change for me right away. It was a game changer.

Fast forward to the present day, and it has now been about six months since I last took the Adderall, but that's a story for another day. At the time, in 2018, staring at a to-do list of 75 items with no ability to get anything done, the Adderall changed my life for the better. I was getting my work done. I was productive. I enjoyed what I was doing. I was on my way.

I knew nothing about ADHD at the time. I would learn quite a bit over the next few years, but at the time, I was just glad that we figured out what was going on and how to get past that first hurdle. The problem was the phrase I would repeat often… “my broken brain.”

Little did I know what mini-trauma that would cause. It took a while to understand that my brain was not broken. It was just different. Getting the ADHD diagnosis was not the cure. It was the start of a new journey. But as with any journey, there were obstacles along the way. A lot of them.