Anything but ADHD...

Anything but ADHD

Fresh off an autism diagnosis, Mark sits down with his therapist — and is immediately asked if he's ever been tested for ADHD. His response? An emphatic, visceral, slightly panicked no.

Not those letters. Anything but those letters.

In this episode, Mark unpacks why a word he claims to hate feels so uncomfortably, inarguably, almost insultingly accurate. From the time that folds in on itself, to the four hundred abandoned projects, to the scissors — the scissors that are somewhere in a normal-sized house, and they are winning — he traces the shape of a brain he's spent nearly fifty years apologising for.

But this isn't really about ADHD. It's about shame. About what happens when you've been told your whole life that the way your brain works is just a personality failing — and then someone hands you a diagnosis that says: you were never failing. You were always trying harder than everyone else. That just wasn't the problem.

That, as Mark would say, is a lot to sit with.

Funny, uncomfortably honest, and occasionally derailed by a fact about duck accents — this is the episode for anyone who has ever stood in a kitchen for eleven minutes wondering why they went in.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the podcast with the unspeakable title. If you remember the last episode, it was about exploring my feelings around pre and post autistic diagnosis. And just as I was telling my therapist about my diagnosis, if you remember, he answered Have you ever been tested for ADHD? And no. No I haven't. And I don't want to. And I don't want to because I would rather have anything but that. Anything but those letters. A D H D. A thing that a hyperactive children have. Nope. That's not me. Why do I hate those letters? Because I know what it means. It means a person who's a messy, disorganized, unfocused person. But oh shit, I am a messy, disorganized, unfocused person. It's true. It's true. Now up front I'll say have not yet had my ADHD diagnosis. I will at some point this year, but it seems pretty obvious to me. Why? Well the symptoms are painfully present across my whole life. The first one I think is that time just doesn't exist for me the way it does for you. I'm either 45 minutes early or I'm twelve minutes late. Absolutely baffled about how that happened because I watched the clock. I watched it. And somehow between watching it and doing the thing, time just folded in on itself. There is no on time. There is only early mark or embarrassingly late mark. And both marks have stories to tell. Second one is I can focus just not on the thing I'm supposed to focus on. So like hyperfocus. I can spend six hours researching the acoustic properties of 18th century kirks, Scottish churches, without being asked to, without reason, without even particularly caring about those kirks. While a deadline I generally care about quietly dies. ADHD doesn't mean you can't focus. It means your brain gets to decide what you get to focus, and it's not taking requests. I've started approximately 400 projects too. Books, courses, podcasts, businesses, blogs. A very ambitious plan to learn Russian. They all began in a blaze of absolute consuming, magnificent passion. I've bought the books, I've bought the wall chart, I've bought uh everything I need to do it, and then something more interesting happened. The dopamine just got quietly checked out, and the project joined the graveyard of other shit I didn't finish. The beautiful, extensive, slightly embarrassing graveyard of things I was definitely going to do. My relationship with objects is complicated. I mean my keys nowhere to live, but I'm not sure that anything else has an actual home. Always somewhere. Somewhere that makes complete sense to past me and is utterly impenetrable to present me. I have put things in a safe place so safe I have never not once successfully retrieved them. My last passport is somewhere in this lovely flat of mine, but I have yet to retrieve it. I bought three pairs of the same nail scissors because I cannot locate the first two. And I think they're playing some kind of extended game of hide and seek. They're in the house, I live alone, it's a normal sized house, and the scissors are currently winning. I say yes when I actually mean no, and then I do absolutely nothing about it. So not because I'm rude, not because I don't care, but because the gap between intention and initiation is, for my brain at least, approximately the width of the fourth bridge. Executive dysfunction, they call it. I call it standing in the kitchen for eleven minutes trying to remember why I came in in the first place. While the thing I actually need to do slowly becomes a thing that needed to be done yesterday. I feel everything all at the same time, and slightly too much, always. A throwaway comment someone made to me in 2009 is still available for immediate playback in crystal clear high definition. It'll pop up as proof of my absolute fuckwittery just as I need it least. And when I could use a confidence shot, but it will arrive uninvited just at that moment. An after work request about removing an emoji from a message written by my boss's boss has me in red alert for alarm fire, heart stamping in my chest, panic mode for two hours. Over nothing really. And they didn't read the memo about proportionate reactions. I talk and talk and talk, and then just when you think I've finished I remember something else. I interrupt, but not to be rude, I interrupt because the thought is right there, and I if I don't say it, it'll be gone. And um I also do tangents. You're lucky I haven't gone on one yet. As you might have noticed, I am aware. But I can't stop. I'm often exhausted. Not tired, exhausted. Bone deep, mystifying exhaustion, like I've been assembling furniture in a foreign language for a decade, because holding everything together, the lists, the alarms, the systems, the compensating, the masking, the trying to appear like someone who has a handle on things takes an extraordinary amount of resource, and nobody sees that part. They just see that you were early or late. No one know what the neurotypical will say. We experience that too. You don't have ADHD, you're just messy, disorganized, unfocused, like the rest of us. No guys, that's simply not true. That slight, that trope, that cliche that neurotypicals love to bring out, it's okay we do it too. It's been wheeled out by friends, family, colleagues, yes. The lovely lady at Occupational Health has tried to make me feel better about it too, and instead completely invalidated my autism diagnosis. Yes. Neurotyps, you do experience some of that shit too, of course you do, you're human. But it's the equivalent of me telling a paralyzed guy that I get a dead leg too sometimes. You categorically do not experience it to the level of intensity and the life diverting fuckery that neurodivergence brings. And you don't give yourselves hundreds of tiny electric shocks every day, do you? Do you? No. Well, we don't tell you about that weird shit that we do. Because when we mention the stuff we do, we tell you the stuff we think you'll understand. We mask our experiences when we talk to you about it, on purpose to help you understand. Would you understand if I told you I give myself tiny electric shocks every day? Of course not. We give it in words you can follow. And that's when the neurotyps usually take those and invalidate them. Nonetheless, here we are. Me resisting a diagnosis, resisting even talking about it. And now I am talking about it, here I am. And I have shame. Shame about possibly probably having it, and shame about not owning a condition I clearly, demonstrably, inarguably have. And I've been sitting with that Why the resistance? Why anything but ADHD? And I think I know, it's it's not that much different from the theme of the first episode, actually. I think it's because I've spent my entire life being told implicitly, constantly, that the stuff I struggle with is a character flaw. The lost keys, the missed deadline, the half finished projects, the volcanic feelings, the spectacular almost artistic ability to be to be distracted, I got distracted twice writing this podcast episode. That all of this is just me being bad at life. I'm just a fuck up, lazy, scattered, scatty, need to try harder, could do better. Bright boy, it's such a shame about the follow-through. And if you add that to a socially awkward to a hellish extent, to borrow from Lewis Capaldi, you get someone who is a bit of a fuck up and quite unlikable too. And here's the dark thing about internalizing that for decades. If I get the diagnosis, I have to let go of the shame, and the shame, as horrible it is, is at least familiar. The shame says this is your fault, which means you could fix it, which means you're not broken, which means there's still some hope if you just try a bit harder. I've been trying fucking hard for f almost fifty years. I'm fucking exhausted trying trying harder. The diagnosis says something much scarier. It says this is how your brain is wired. It always was. And all those years of trying harder, you were already trying harder than most people try at anything. And since the trying harder wasn't the problem was never going to be the solution either. That is, as I believe the cool kids now say, a lot to sit with. Now, one of the things I do is run a business helping people with public speaking. It's one of the things I do. I mean my entire professional existence is about helping people. In public speaking you help people to find their voice, trust their mind, stand up and be heard. And the whole time my mind has been doing this glorious, exhausting, chaotic, hyperfocused, deeply feeling, frequently lost, occasionally magnificent ADHD thing. Or perhaps Audi HD, as we might eventually find out. Maybe because I'm neurodiverse I get it. Because I understand what it is to feel like your brain is working against you in public. In private too. I understand the preparation behind the performance. I understand what it costs to appear composed when the inside is considerably louder than the outside. And I think I understand it because it's in the fragments of my bones. So I am going to get tested, yeah, eventually. Uh I mean, yeah, I will. Probably quite urgently once I've hyper focused on it for a while. And then some random Tuesday at eleven PM I'll just book the appointment. And when I do, I'll let you know. Probably if I haven't taken up writing another completed book that I've never sent anywhere or done anything. I think the count is three completed books on different topics. In the next episode I'd like to rant or I mean talk about the topic that gives that keeps coming up a lot more for me. The topic now very dear to my heart, the words Well, we're all on the spectrum somewhere. No we're not, Gary. No we're not. But that's for the next episode. Well thanks for listening. If any of this sounded uncomfortably familiar, you're not alone. You're not broken. And the scissors, by the way, are probably in the freezer. Don't ask me why. Just uh check there first.