ADHD: I was today years old (27) when I realised...

Life was always tough to an extent, but then it became tougher, until, one day, it was simply no longer bearable. Now I know this is a bit of a sour note to start my story on (and fortunately I can tell you that life recently became a whole lot better, thank God), but it is exactly this state that my life needed to be in for me to get to this discovery.

I grew up in a very loving family with two very loving parents and an amazing younger brother. Despite that, my emotions were always messy and all over the place. Sometimes, when a change of plan occurred, I would have an unreasonable amount of trouble adjusting and I would fall into a pit of despair upon the realisation that I no longer understood what my day was going to look like. The older I got, the sadder occurrences like this made me feel. After all, isn't life full of unwanted change?

My sadness was diagnosed as childhood depression. As I got older, anxiety and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) got thrown into the equation. Of course there was definitely a lot of truth to those diagnoses, but now, at age 27, I find myself wondering whether things really needed to get this out of control for me to realise that there is an explanation for almost every single 'unreasonable' thing I've ever felt.

ADHD in girls

ADHD runs in my family. As a young boy, my younger brother was diagnosed with it and, judged purely through observation, my grandfather has it too. The reason why this disorder got detected in them and not in me, however, is very simple: they are both male, and I am female.

Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder is strangely enough seen as a male disorder. Under many teachers, who are usually among the first to detect ADHD in children, this belief still stands. When a girl displays inattentiveness (which is a subtype of ADHD most prevalent in girls; it was previously known as ADD), either no alarm bells go off, or it simply enough doesn't get noticed—especially when no hyperactivity is involved. Girls are naturally better at adapting and the social standards that society holds young girls to, subconsciously tells girls to be a certain way and behave a certain way. Of course, this also happens to boys, but in a much milder fashion. On top of that, boys are more likely to express their emotions outwardly, whereas girls are more likely to do this inwardly.

This unfortunately makes it a whole lot harder for parents and teachers to detect ADHD (and Autism, but that is a whole other story) in girls.

So how did I come to realise?

It wasn't until I moved to London at the age of 23 that I really started to feel myself lose it to the chaos.

I had spent some time in The Netherlands living in student accomodation, so of course you can imagine that my life was pretty messy and unorganised. After all, how could anyone expect me to keep a room clean when it was no more than a broom closet with windows? That's what I thought, at least...

In London, I started living in an apartment with two of my friends. For the first time, it felt like I really had an apartment that belonged to me, rather than just a bedroom in a house that I shared with people I didn't really know. I was surprised to find out, though, that this didn't make the mess any easier to deal with.

Having more space also meant having more space to keep track of. It also meant that I had more space to make a mess of, which irritated my friends and, more than anything else, confused me. Multiple times, I was asked why I wouldn't clean certain things when I could see that they were dirty, to which I had to respond that I simply didn't see that they were dirty. Although I knew they believed me, this always sounded like a weak excuse to me. Despite feeling that what I had told my friends was correct, I didn't believe myself. After all, how was it possible that I was really that incapable of keeping a clean house?

I wondered if I was lazy, but how could I be lazy if I always did my house chores if my friends would ask me to do it? Then I wondered whether I wasn't simply depressed, which once again subsequently became my truth for the next four years of my life.

This 'depression' affected more areas of my life. For example, it was impossible for me to hold on to a job. Over the past four years, I believe I have had at least five jobs. Funnily enough, I have spent the vast majority of those four years jobless, aside from the occasional freelance gig. The job I managed to keep the longest, I had for only five months.

Those jobs drained me. For a long time, I didn't even know what to say about them apart from the fact that they were boring. I would spend my time working in a customer service job, taking phone calls about booking adjustments for a chain of European holiday parks and then I would go home, drained, and unable to wind down. It became impossible to organise my life around it. Whenever someone would ask me to meet up on a day off, I would find myself stressed. If I would give up one of my days off to one of my friends, how much time would that leave me with for my hobbies?

Speaking of hobbies: I had none left. I lost interest in all of them, which my mother now tells me first happened when I was sent to primary school.

However, as I had experience with depression, I could clearly tell that what I was feeling back then had nothing to do with depression. Despite being drained, I felt fine. I wasn't sucked in a deep hole of nothing, nor was I chased by the big heavy dog. I was just tired, and I didn't sleep, as every second felt like it needed to be well spent. I could not go to bed without feeling fulfilled, and yet there was nothing that fulfilled me. So, what the hell was going on?

In April of 2020, I quit my job on a whim. I had thought about it for exactly 30 minutes, and then I wrote my letter of resignation. The next day, I didn't turn up to my shift. I was over and done with, without a backup plan. I would manage it all with my savings and the hope that a miracle would happen.

Well, that miracle did happen in a sense, but it didn't happen in the form of a wad of cash on my doorstep. Instead, I went on a journey of self exploration. I had to get to the bottom of this, and in the meantime I would try my best to start a career in writing, no matter how long that was going to take me.

Needless to say, I solely focused on that writing career, and never got to the bottom of the problem, but I suppose that is just another classic sign of inattentive ADHD. I hyper fixated on my work and forgot about everything else...

No, instead it was my friend (who had recently discovered, at 30, that he had been living with Autism all his life), who pointed me to look at ADHD in girls and women as it was something he had stumbled upon through his own journey of self exploration.

And then my mind was blown. Everything suddenly clicked.

Why am I telling you this story?

Life is miles better now. I am doing my research, and I am using all the coping strategies that therapist recommend to people with diagnosed ADHD. As my story might tell you, I was never diagnosed with ADHD by a therapist, but after all the research I have done, there is no way that what I am feeling is related to anything else. I tick all the boxes, even those I found in extensive research that you won't be able to find in a quick Google search. I am hoping to, one day soon, speak about this with a professional, but at this point there is simply no way to get myself any higher on the waiting list. Until then, I am letting myself be helped by all those coping strategies, whether I will ever be diagnosed with ADHD or not.

I am writing this story for everyone with a female upbringing who, at a later stage in their lives, feels themselves crumbling under the chaos of life. I am writing this in case someone relates to my story; to help those who find themselves stuck in a similar amount of executive dysfunction.

I am also writing this to bring some awareness. As I mentioned, ADHD in girls very frequently flies completely under the radar and it's about time we change that.

It's about time we properly look at our girls, and about time allow them to be different.