ADHD Awareness Month.

11 minutes ago

3 min read

Guest blog by Gem O'Connor, Senior Advocate at Your Voice Counts

October is ADHD Awareness Month, so I'm going to do something that makes me slightly uncomfortable and talk about my own brain.

I have ADHD and I am autistic. Together this is often referred to as AuDHD.

I was diagnosed as an adult, but obviously I did not suddenly become ADHD or autistic when somebody diagnosed me. I have always been this way. A self-identifying Chaos Goblin.

What diagnosis gave me was context.

It gave me an explanation and a language for things I had spent a lifetime experiencing, compensating for, masking and, in many cases, blaming myself for.

There is something quite strange about discovering as an adult that things you believed everybody found difficult, but that you were apparently just not very good at managing, actually require significantly more effort for your brain.

It makes you look backwards as well as forwards.

Too loud. Too intense. Too direct. Too much. Weird. Disorganised. Impulsive. Difficult.

You revisit a lot.

And you begin to understand yourself differently.

AuDHD can also be contradictory.

My autistic brain likes structure, clarity, certainty and predictability.

My ADHD brain does not appear to have received that memo at all.

I can desperately need organisation whilst finding organisation difficult. I can need routine and predictability whilst also craving novelty and spontaneity. I can want to know exactly what is happening and when, then become so completely absorbed in something interesting that the rest of the world effectively disappears.

Sometimes it feels like having two parts of my brain engaged in a very long-running argument.

One of the biggest things I've learned since diagnosis is that what you see on the outside isn't necessarily a good measure of the effort happening underneath.

I have worked for years. I manage responsibility. I solve problems. I support other people. I deal with complicated situations and difficult conversations. I can become completely absorbed in complex pieces of work and I am bizarrely awesome in a crisis.

There are also things about the way my brain works that I genuinely value.

I make connections quickly. I notice things. I spot problems and immediately want to fix them. I can become intensely interested in something and learn huge amounts about it. Trust me, you want me on your pub quiz team.

When I care about something, I care enormously.

But I don't call any of that my superpower.

I struggle with the idea that ADHD or autism has to be reframed as a superpower for neurodivergent people to have value.

Some parts are strengths.

Some parts are neutral differences.

Some parts are disabling.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

And some of it is simply tiring.

Like many people diagnosed later in life, I learned how to function in the world long before I understood why some of that functioning required so much effort.

You learn. You compensate. You develop systems. You watch other people. You prepare. You rehearse. You double-check. You become very good at appearing fine.

Sometimes what looks relatively calm on the outside involves an extraordinary amount of work on the inside.

And apparently one of my hobbies is still lying awake at 3am thoroughly reliving something embarrassing I said in 1993.

Diagnosis hasn't changed my brain.

Medication hasn't 'fixed' me.

What diagnosis has given me is context.

I'm still learning and unlearning.

I'm trying to work with my brain rather than continually blaming myself because it doesn't work in quite the same way as somebody else's.

I'm learning that clear expectations help. Written information helps. Knowing priorities helps. Good systems help.

Most of all, I'm trying to remember that “I am failing at this” and “my brain has difficulty with this” are two very different statements.

And I'm trying to be kinder to myself.

I was already doing all of this before I knew I was AuDHD.

The difference is that now I understand a little more about the work that was happening underneath.