When I was 31 years old, I was diagnosed with ADHD. The realization of my neurodivergence was overwhelming and bittersweet. All these doors in my brain flew open at once. It was a flood of realizations about my behavior—past and present—mixed with new strategies to try, mixed with regrets about how I’d lived my life up until the point of my diagnosis.
The first time I emptied the dishwasher after I started ADHD medication, I burst out crying. All my life, emptying the dishwasher had been a daunting task. When I was younger, I had to be forced to do it by my mother, who was desperately trying to teach me responsibility. Each time, after a lot of dragging my heels and griping and crying, I discovered (or rediscovered) that the task was easy. Simple. Quick.
Why had I gotten so distraught? Surely, I could remember how easy this task was the next time I had to do it.
Nope.
Years and years passed with me facing down a full dishwasher like I had been asked to clean all the public bathrooms at UCLA with a single toothbrush.
As an adult, with no mommy to force me to do chores, I ended up using the dishwasher like a catch-all dish cabinet. By the time I emptied it, it had been clean for three days and was already mostly empty from me picking clean dishes out of it on an as-needed basis.
Then I had to face the equally daunting task of *gasp* filling the dishwasher!
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
(So to speak)
Then medication happened. I saw the full dishwasher. My brain went, “Oh. I should empty that.” And I did.
Why did I cry?
Like I said: Bittersweet. On the one hand, I finally had the answers to a lot of questions. I could look at myself in the mirror and know I wasn’t stupid or lazy. Or broken. “Broken” was a word that haunted me for most of my adolescence and young adulthood.
On the other hand, I could have avoided so much tension and stress and pain and self-recrimination if I’d known earlier.
But what’s the point of steeping myself in regrets on what could have been? The only reality I have to live in is the one in which it could not have been. While I’m not a believer in fate, per se, I do believe that all the past events of my life were, in a very literal way, meant to be. I am who I am because of all the pluses and minuses, the mistakes, the joys, the triumphs. All learning experiences in their own way.
I focus now on the future, on taking my newfound self-awareness and using it to better understand myself and create coping mechanisms that work for me.
I can even tell now why emptying the dishwasher filled me with dread: It’s because my brain could not see a task and break it down into component parts or steps. I saw a full dishwasher and my brain said, “Make this empty.” Step 1: Full. Step 2: Empty.
With medication, I saw a full dishwasher and my brain, for the first time ever, went, Step 1: Take out a plate. Step 2: Take out another plate. Etcetera.
Imagine seeing a jigsaw puzzle and thinking, “I have to make these pieces into a single image in one step,” while simultaneously knowing that’s impossible, and being aware that assembling a puzzle requires moving through it piece by piece, but also not knowing where to start and being paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the task. It’s like that… for everything. Doing the laundry. Organizing the pantry. Picking up after the kids.
Now I am struggling with a new obstacle. I can empty the dishwasher, in theory, but I am also a stay-at-home-mom to two neurodivergent children. My new process for emptying the dishwasher goes something like…
Step 1: Take out a plate and put it in the cabinet
Step 2: Answer the insistent repetition of “MOMMY” from the other room
Step 3: Get older son a snack
Step 4: Take another plate out of the dishwasher and put it away
Step 5: Investigate the crash you just heard from the other room
Step 6: Try to impress upon your non-verbal younger son that he cannot throw canned goods around the living room
Step 7: Remove another plate from the dishwasher
Step 8: Notice that younger son is covered head to toe in melted chocolate
Step 9: Clean chocolate off of bath-hating younger son
Step 10: Clean up the canned goods that he definitely continued to throw around the room
Step 11: Watch him remove the canned goods from the cabinet again
Step 12: MOMMMMMMMYYYYYY
Step 13: “Ah! Stop! You can’t climb that! Get down!”
Step 14: Give up
It’s frustrating. Not gonna lie. I finally have all the answers to my problems, but I can’t implement the solutions as well as I’d like. Fortunately, I have my husband to help pick up the slack. But I wanted to impress upon you, dear reader, the uphill battle that is coping with newly discovered neurodivergence as an adult.
This all came about because I started reading How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, a book I highly recommend. It is extremely helpful to realize you’re not alone, which is another reason for this post. For me, reading things like the aforementioned book, and web comics like ADHDinos, and social media posts from other Millennials who were diagnosed with ADHD later in their lives, provides regular, much-needed doses of not-aloneness. It’s a revelation, truly, to understand how not-alone I am. How (ironically) typical my experience is. The Internet has done some good things for humanity. One of those things is connecting people who are going through similar struggles. Sometimes it’s enough just to know you’re heard and seen.
So, for the record: You are heard. You are seen. You are not stupid. You are not lazy. You are not broken.
Love,
Bex
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