That Time My Client Diagnosed My ADHD
I was in my early forties when Ms. Madeline, the renowned interior designer who was also my PR client diagnosed me with ADHD. I’m not entirely sure what gave it away. Probably it was the daydream I had while she was telling me about the Parisienne flea market she attended every quarter to bring home all of those fab finds she sold in her fab boutique.
You see, it’s those keywords that pull me in every time. They’re like childhood friends beckoning me to come daydreaming with them. When Ms. Madeline uttered the keywords “Paris flea market,” my busy brain took off on yet another one of its madcap adventures. I could hear the French accordion music playing in the background. I was dressed smartly—my Hermes scarf tied in a natty knot around my neck, my black artiste beret perched jauntily atop my well-coiffed head—diagonally, of course—which required a few bobby pins. A Louis Vuitton purse adorned my arm. The other arm held a leash with MiMi, the well-behaved standard poodle from my childhood at the end of it. I was now Amelie, perambulating through that Parisienne outdoor market, directly beneath the Eiffel tower, which in my daydream, was directly across the street from the Louvre. Marcel Marceau was handing me a satin ribbon-wrapped floral bouquet of lilacs and lavender—it smelled heavenly—but the freshly baked croissants and baguettes du pain wafting through the spring air were even moreso.
(By now you might be thinking, “I don’t think she’s ever even been to Paris.” And you’d be right about that.)
I was happily off in my magical ADHD-land, shopping for Parisienne treasures when there it was: the most fabulous apothecary cabinet I’d ever daydreamt! I knew just where I’d stage it in my living room. But first, I’d have to sell another piece of furniture to make room for it. And then I would need to get it from Paris to Geneva, Illinois. Hmmm…Ms. Madeline must know how to ship big furniture pieces from Paris since she does it routinely…I wonder what that would add to the cost?
But Ms. Madeline was still having her conversation with my vacant, staring eyes and bemused facial expression (not unlike the cat image you see below). My bemused face is always “the tell,” according to my bestie. The curtains appear half-drawn on the windows to my soul. Whenever I ADHD-dream, I am still halfway—perhaps one-fourth of the way is more apt—paying attention to the ongoing conversation.
You see, I have this secret weapon: my “word salad filter.”
Let me explain. You know how when you’re at a cocktail party and there’s this blur of ambient noise, but you’ll still catch your name being mentioned from across the room? It’s like that. If Ms. Madeline had said some mission-critical word like “Tornado!” I would’ve snapped out of my daydream seamlessly and done a semi-convincing job of pretending I‘d heard the rest of her words, relying on the context to rescue me. But in this instance, Ms. Madeline was going on and on about boring stuff, like her travel schedule. These details should have mattered to me since I was scheduling her media interviews, but I had more important things to consider. After all, I had an imaginary Parisienne apothecary cabinet to ship!
Abruptly, Ms. Madeline ceased speaking, mid-sentence. We went from the Charlie Brown teacher’s white noise to total silence. That snapped me out of my reverie. She looked at me as if seeing me for the very first time. Studying me, sort of.
“You know you have ADHD, right?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat from the opposite side of her tasteful and imposing executive desk. I was equal parts embarrassed and curious. “Oh? Do you think so?”
“Definitely. Want to know how I know?”
I gave a nervous, semi-affirmative nod.
“I have it, too. And I can see it in you. But don’t feel bad. All the best creatives have it.”
Suddenly, I felt psychologically naked. With no fig leafs in sight. Ms. Madeline went on to explain how she was diagnosed in her forties. She told me about the stimulants she was prescribed and how life-changing they were in helping her manage her ADHD.
I took great care to pay closer attention to her conversations after that—even the boring stuff like travel schedules and furniture measurements.
That’s not to say I didn’t go through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief over my diagnosis years later, once I fully understood how my undiagnosed ADHD had cock-blocked my life. I had mixed emotions about so many things:
· The fact that my ADHD was obvious to an outsider, yet I’d never been diagnosed
· The endless jokes about me being late to my own funeral
· Mourning the career successes I could have had (I coulda been a contendah!) if only I’d been medicated sooner
· The relationships, friendships, and jobs I’d abruptly quit because of my RSD (rejection sensitive dysmorphia, an ADHD side effect) assuming that they were the ones on the verge of abandoning me
· The frustration, shame, and humiliation I felt from people misjudging and misinterpreting me my whole life
· The embarrassment and shame over being a “neurodivergent” and my lack of self-awareness
There. Were. So. Many. Feels.
They say awareness is the first step to correcting a problem. But not for someone like me. If it’s out of sight, out of mind. My short-term memory is sorely compromised. I forgot to address my ADHD. This life-altering diagnosis had to marinade awhile. In my case, seven years. Yes, I waited another seven years to take it seriously, get legit diagnosed by a real psychiatrist, and finally start taking Vyvanse, an ADHD medication.
I’ve since learned that one nasty side effect of my ADHD is the under-performing, “executive function” portion of my brain. I’m told it’s the organizational filing cabinet located in my pre-frontal lobe. So, here’s how this plays out in real life: when a project has too many sequential steps, or too many decisions to make with too many options, my brain starts racing and my thoughts feel all jumbly. They bang about inside of my head like a horsefly trapped between two windowpanes with nowhere to safely land. If you have no concept of what a horsefly looks like, picture this instead: imagine the beachball that keeps spinning on screen when your Mac computer screen freezes.
This is why I’d rather donate the ill-fitting shoes I just bought, tags still intact, to Goodwill rather than go through the overwhelm of figuring out the many steps to return them. (Someone should do a study—I’ll bet most people who don’t return unsatisfactory items have ADHD.)
My version of hell is making a decision when there are too many options: like which AT&T mobile package to sign up for, which insurance package to choose during open enrollment, or which books to buy at Barnes & Noble. Processing all these details and making decisions exhausts me. I literally need to nap after a Costco run.
If there’s some complex decision I need to make, I procrastinate until the moment I hit full-blown panic mode and have to make a snap decision. That’s when one of my she-really-has-her-shit-together friends comes to my rescue, talking me off the ledge.
My disinterest in boring details creates these random vacuums in my foundational knowledge. You know. The stuff that normal people know and assume that everyone knows. The holes in my knowledge confound my inner circle. They’ll regularly comment on how smart I am (without irony, even). They’ll rely on me to help them win pub trivia competitions. My clients will depend on me to strategize complex, integrated marketing campaigns. Yet here I am, this paradox, blissfully unaware of life’s most basic facts:
I can’t read maps nor navigate my way around Chicago. You can tell me Chicago’s on a “grid system” all day long and it means nothing to me. Without my Waze app telling me how to drive to a location, I’m a goner.
I can’t count back change when I have to operate a cash register (this humiliating mental glitch reared its ugly head again recently when I had to work the booster club’s food counter during my son’s football game).
I cannot remember what 8 + 5 or 8 + 6 adds up to, yet I can remember the sums of 8 + 4 and 8 + 7.
I cannot calculate percentages, yet I can easily calculate the 20% restaurant tip.
I once had a mom friend who occasionally mentioned anime’ at our weekly breakfasts. I’d exhibited at enough Comic-Cons to know this was not a topic that interested me. She was a new friend, so I didn’t question her quirkiness - I just sort of tuned her out during her conversational forays into anime’. One morning I had a rare moment of paying attention to what she was saying, and the context made zero sense to me. I was doing all of these mental gymnastics, trying to reconcile her monologue. Out of frustration, I finally blurted out, “What does Japanese cartooning have to do with any of this?!?” The whole table erupted in laughter and one of my friends patiently explained that her mother’s name was Anna Mae. She was one of those rare types who referred to her mom by her first name. At this point in time, I’d experienced a few years of her Anna Mae stories at breakfast. I was internally mortified by my lack of awareness.
Here’s another example. In my early thirties, I was dating this guy who had a Ph.D. in chemistry. We stopped for gas during a road trip, and he was bitching about how high the gas prices were at this station. I still thank God I didn’t reveal what I was really thinking at that moment. But I did share it with my cousin later: “I’m only paying 87 cents per gallon. I dunno what the hell he’s talking about!” When my cousin was finally able to get his words out as his belly laughs quieted, he helped me realize for the first time in my 32 years that the octane level was not the same thing as the price per gallon. Here I was just paying for gas on my Shell card, never noticing what those rapid-fire, slot machine-like numbers on the gas-pump display actually represented.
MRI studies have shown that my ADHD tribe and I share a pre-frontal lobe that is, on average, 8.3% smaller than a normal person’s brain.
I have a sneaking hunch mine might be even less.