AD(H)D and Me⌗

I don’t think it’s a secret that I suffer from depression and anxiety. I do my best not to perpetuate the stigma of mental illness, so I talk about it a lot, I imagine often to the detriment of my friends’ attention span. I’ve always felt though that the anxiety and depression were symptomatic of something else. There was something ethereal and undefined that orbited my identity, prodding at my mood from time to time and gently knocking me into an eccentric orbit of my own. Of course, it may be best to accept that there quite often isn’t a good reason for anxious episodes and periods of bleakness, and that brain chemistry sometimes simply, is. As an engineer though, my primal need for searching out root cause – and fixing it whenever possible – almost always supercedes any other urges, with the possible exception of afternoon naps.

And so, I’ve always found it difficult to simply accept something for what it is without seeking to discover what it is that makes what it is, what it is.

For my entire life, I’ve always felt slightly adjacent. To what? I hear you ask. One has to be adjacent to something. Dear reader, I regret to tell you that I’ve always felt slightly adjacent to everything. Whether it be a team, a band, a friendship group, whatever. I’ve always felt slightly off to the side, like I was 80% part of the group but not all the way there. I was the drummer, the goalkeeper, the team lead – quite literally. There, part of the team, but slightly different, not quite getting the in-jokes. I know this is nonsense, I know I’m as much part of any group as anyone else, consciously, but this feeling, this itch at the back of my skull was – and still is – always there. And in being ever-present, it itself becomes a tiny, dim beacon of anxiety in any situation in which other humans are likely to exist. It always has me second-guessing my place there, and in extreme cases modifying my behaviour to try to ‘fit in’. Again, these are definitely subconscious thoughts, and I CBT my way out of them more often than not, but it’s an emotional overhead that’s added to every social encounter, and it’s cognitively exhausting.

This is a defining characteristic of my life, and has been as far back as I remember. My earliest memories of this adjacency were primary school. I was singled out in a number of ways, both from the other kids, and the teachers. The teachers noticed I was quite bright and so spent a bit of extra effort with me. Especially around things like maths and programming the BBC Model B. I also had a reading age that was in excess of my actual age. A lot of the other kids consequently resented me for the extra attention, and the fact that I was helping teach them to read. That’s not to say I had no friends though. I did, though I remember being more tolerated than accepted. I was also a naughty kid. I couldn’t keep still and I was impulsive. I’d shout things out and get into trouble trying to defend myself from other kids. I was outspoken and frankly annoying. I got away with a lot though because I was pretty clever.

This didn’t translate well into secondary school. I was pushed hard at the end of primary school to take the entrance exam for the grammar school. I went and sat amongst hundreds of other hopefuls from considerably better schools than mine, many of them paid for prep schools. They’d been coached for this for years. I got in, scoring somewhere in the top 50 percentile. There was a big difference between me and the almost all of the other kids there though. I was poor. I certainly wasn’t the only working class kid there by any means, but we were properly poor then. Children are cruel, and they made sure I knew I was different. Many of the teachers weren’t much better either. Combine that with the fact that I was a royal pain in the arse, and I got myself very swiftly into spiral of bad behaviour, detentions, and work report. Average grades at KS3, GCSE, and A-Levels were actually an incredible achievement if I think back at how much work I didn’t do. I rarely did homework, I never revised. I especially hated exams, and we were still in the older bracket of students that would study for two years and then do three, three-hour exams at the end. I couldn’t sit down and concentrate for three hours, I could barely manage one.

Eventually I managed to get to university and that’s were it started to fall apart for me. I could no longer shamble my way through, and after two years, I quit, failing to get the grades I needed to get into the second year, twice. Even at university, I felt slightly adjacent, as all the other students managed to get up for lectures, work in the evenings, revise for exams. I had no driving force any more. I wasn’t going to get into trouble if I didn’t do something, I’d just fail. It wasn’t enough for me. I lacked the skills for self-study, or perhaps the discipline. I lacked any kind of drive whatsoever. Eventually I started putting considerably more effort into my job at the Wetherspoons than my course because I was getting immediate feedback and money. Trying to see so far into the future and planning for it was completely alien to me. I was a just-in-time kind of person, and my impulsiveness was getting worse. I was working too hard, drinking too much, and spending all my time twatting around with pub people, alienating my real friends and girlfriend.

Catering jobs then filed the need for instant feedback, and I began a short-lived career in various restaurants and hotels in north Wales. That all ended spectacularly however, when my impulsiveness and lack of patience collided with a drunk and abusive chef. He attacked me with a knife, I hit him with a blender, and catering and I went our separate ways.

My IT career has been a long road of grind, disappointment, and luck. My impulsivity and short-term thinking is actually a great skill in certain circumstances. In operational support, where I’ve spent the majority of my career, impulsivity is just an alias for decisive action in a crisis, and boy have a I seen a lot of dumb crises in the last twenty years. As such, I’ve been hugely lucky to have been noticed by a few notable managers who elevated me to leadership positions. Partly, it’s for me problem solving approach, but mostly because I’m an easy-to-get-along-with, inoffensive white man. I love my role in leadership. Not because I like being in charge, but because I love the human element of problem solving. I like to see people get through things, to coach them, and guide them through problems, and see them outgrow me and move on. I’m consistently envious of people who become deep experts in things and fly the coup into specialisation. This is almost impossible for me, because specialism is anathema. It always has been. I want to do all the things. I want to be involved in everything. The thought of choosing a thing and staying with it for an entire career is terrifying. It’s why I failed as a musician, a cook, a writer. The reason I stuck with IT is because it’s constantly in flux, and there’s always a crisis looming.

I imagine you’re wondering by now what the hell anything I’ve said has to do with the title of this essay. Well, that’s fair, I’m thirteen hundred words in and I haven’t mentioned it yet. Well, the reason is, because up until now, almost right now, I’ve lived my life with no knowledge of ADHD. It’s literally been in the last three months where I’ve found out that ADHD is part of me. I’m 39 years old, and for my entire life, I’ve thought I was different. I’ve thought that I was deficient in some way, because I couldn’t stick with things; I couldn’t get started on things; I couldn’t see them through to the end; I tap my fingers and feet constantly; I’m paradoxically both enormously risk-averse and unable to make decisions and hugely decisive and impulsive; I could never get really good at a thing; I could never save any money; I could never have one chocolate digestive, and then be left with some later; I could never do the work now to plan ahead for my future. I thought it was my fault. That I was just a lazy piece of shit.

Turns out, that’s not necessarily true. It also turns out the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is not a disorder at all, in my opinion. It’s just that our society has chosen to see people like me and pick them out as troublemakers, slackers, and annoyances. Actually it’s just that society doesn’t value our skills. Or rather, it does but only in a specific flavour: white, male entrepreneurs.

You see people on the ADHD spectrum, don’t have the equipment to invest in something boring now in order to reap the benefits in a decade. They lack the ability to tune out of their surroundings to concentrate on deep work for hours. They lack the ability to stick with a course of action once it looks like it won’t work out. There’s a really great book on this: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World - Thom Hartmann

If you look at those deficiencies from a certain point of view, you can see they’re actually great strengths. In not being able to concentrate on a single thing, it’s easy for me to be alerted to emerging things. This is especially useful for my line of work. By not spending huge amounts of energy now, on something that might not come off until years later, it makes more agile and I find it easier to recover from failures. In changing tack at the first sign of trouble, I can often avoid disaster early. Yeah, these things are also weaknesses, but if you know about them you can use them to your advantage.

The problem with these behaviour traits is that they aren’t desirable for our education system (or at least my experience of it). This system expects attention spans longer than I ever had. It’s taught by people who generally have had the ability to sit and study and learn and pass exams, because that’ what one needs to do to become a teacher. It certainly meant when I was a child, I was surrounded by authority figures that didn’t know how to coach my behaviour and get the best from me. I had to work that out for myself, and it took me 39 years. A scruffy, impulsive, poor kid in an ill-fitting uniform that won’t do his homework is just a dragged up scum bag from the council estate. He doesn’t deserve any extra attention. He’s just a naughty boy. Imagine how much worse that is when you’re black. The other kid in my first year class at grammar school who, I’d wager was also on the ADHD spectrum was a working class lad from a council estate. He was also black. Where I got the benefit of the doubt, he got expelled. He didn’t make it through to the third year.

Contrast that with your risk-taking, adventurous, rich, white entrepreneur. I can’t imagine how different their lives must have been, to be indulged with exciting pass times, encouraged as confident, when we were called disruptive. Isn’t it amazing the difference it can make, when your strengths are encouraged, rather than your weaknesses used as a stick to beat you.

I’m still very new to this, and I have a huge amount of baggage to unpack. I’ve gone through my entire life building up a personality that’s based on low self-worth, self-esteem, and perceived failure. I can’t attribute all the mistakes I’ve made in life to ADHD, and I can’t blame all those people that didn’t know for not knowing. I am angry though, and frightened. So much of the screw-ups in my life, the wrong turns, the trouble, so much of it is at least partly down to mismanagement of what people call a deficiency disorder, or neuroatypicality. I’m angry because so much of the fight I’ve been through has been dismissed as naughtiness, troublemaking, and the tragic upbringing of a loudmouthed working class kid. I’m angry because despite how hard it is for me, it’s been doubly hard for those who haven’t had the luck I’ve had. Quadruply hard for those who don’t have the supportive parents I had (I’m so sorry for all the trouble I caused). And for those from black and ethnic minorities, having ADHD in this country, I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be. Where I’m give the benefit of the doubt, black kids in council estates just get arrested or worse.

I’m frightened because this is utterly new to me and I still don’t know how to parse it. I’m educating myself though. If you ever feel like any of things rings even remotely familiar, please talk to me. Mental health issues hold no stigma to me. I’m at the very start of a journey here, and it’s dangerous to go alone.