Finding yourself as an Indigenous person diagnosed with ADHD.

It’s such a strange concept, ADHD, it’s one that I am still getting used to and, ever more so still trying to understand. I only got diagnosed last year, after practically begging my treaty-promised healthcare provider to see a psychiatrist then to only have to convince the dismissive doctor that I deserved to be evaluated. I had already had the inclination that I was, in fact, symptomatic of ADHD tendencies, and I thought the diagnosis would offer relief in the sense of validation. In a way it did, but it also led to a whole new world I was not prepared for.

This new world is ever-growing, in the gradual understanding that beyond the initial façade, there are so many more complications of ADHD. A word thrown around so easily yet so much more difficult to truly understand and accommodate. The more I learn of the symptoms of ADHD as a late-diagnosed woman in her mid-twenties, the more confused I get in understanding who I am as a person. As we should all know, teenhood is one of the most clouded periods of one’s life in navigating the lost transition from child to adult. In that stage, being the far reach of hope that breaking the “teen” number would radically clear your vision of life. It’s the idea that the simple replacement of two silly digits of “20” would be the solution to life’s confusion. Spoiler alert- this conceptualized idea of numerical age is bullshit. Life is too complicated in its beautifully messy nature to be so simple as following any “rules” institutionalized by humans. My grandpa told me once that “life is a series of adjustments,” and I think that is the most accurate simplicity of life; there are no rules because everything in life is always changing, and we with it. All this to say, the idea that we spend our teen years figuring out who we are is grossly underestimating the nature of living. The argument that your twenties are the time of figuring out who you are too, is also an underestimation.

I think your twenties are just as foggy, only this time the view of the world is much larger. I have seen more physicality of life and the world it encapsulates, and I’ve experienced more with the mind, spirit, and body I have been given, but I feel like all this running in this marathon I have done, somehow, I am back at the start line, perhaps the start of an even longer course with additional obstacles.

I spent all these years finding various hobbies, skills, and styles only to realize the beautiful rascal that is “masking.” The mind of ADHD, a mind of its own, might I say, gathers information from its environment, calculates it, and spits it back out in its translation. My life’s confusion is co-founded by the ultimate duo of chaotic dismay, masking, and imposter syndrome. Compound my ADHD diagnosis with my Indigeneity, it gets even more confusing. Think about that! Finding out that my brain operates in a way that is constantly translating my socio-environment into my personality and presenting character more than a chameleon and balancing the tightrope of two worlds of Indigeneity and an institutional world created for a specific mold. How am I to ever know who I really am? How am I to defer what I am computing then reflecting from my own thoughts and personality?

This all to say, a person’s experience with ADHD is highly misunderstood. I only spoke of the tip of the iceberg, but maybe this will reach the right person and offer them visibility and compassion or perhaps reach the person who needs to learn more compassion around those with ADHD. We are not using an “excuse” nor are we making any of this up. You are valid. We are valid.