Five Things I Wish I’d Known About ADHD
I have spent the majority of my life not knowing I had ADHD.
An idea I’ve come across quite a bit is the sense of loss we can experience with a late diagnosis: how could this have helped me at school? In relationships? It’s a space I’ve seen others hold, and certainly held myself.
Looking back, there are experiences that make more sense now. Leaving school at 13. Periods of intense creative motivation alongside an inability to get started, becoming lost in the ether of my own cruddy brain. As the therapist who first suggested I explore ADHD put it, the feeling that you are either an express train whistling along the tracks of life’s challenges or completely derailed.
Being diagnosed wasn’t a revelatory spark that instantly transformed my life. It took seven years from that first conversation to diagnosis, and the years since have been a gradual process of learning how I can plot my way through life and meaningfully shape my future.
I have a brilliant and bamboozling brain — and I have learned both to embrace the chaos and recognise the need for structure (not too much, not too little) in the right moments.
So, these aren’t five things I think everyone with ADHD needs to know. They’re five things I wish I’d known earlier.
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For a long time, I saw the things I struggled with as evidence that I would never reach the milestones that those around me seemed to.
Leaving school at 13 felt, for many years, like a failure. The reality is that it took as much courage as I could muster — an act of rebellion to preserve myself. Returning to education later and eventually completing a BA and MA forced me to reconsider what that ‘failure’ actually said about me.
While school refusal can sap our energy (and that of our families), for me it was ultimately an act of resilience. I wasn’t incapable; I was doing what I could to protect myself.
I wish I’d understood earlier that failure doesn’t have to be a judgement on your capability or character. Sometimes something doesn’t work. Sometimes the environment isn’t right. Sometimes you’re not ready. And sometimes you simply get it wrong.
Leaving school at 13 is something I now consider one of the most important things that happened to me.
A fork in the road.
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One of the issues I’ve had in learning about ADHD is the pejorative language. It’s there in the name itself: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Deficit. Disorder.
There is, quite rightly, a lot of discussion about the challenges of living with ADHD. But I wish I’d understood earlier that my brain isn’t only defined by what it struggles to do.
For me, ADHD is an abundance: ideas, thoughts, interests, connections, emotions, enthusiasm and possibilities — often arriving simultaneously and without much regard for whether I have the time or capacity to do anything with them.
That abundance can be brilliant. It can also be completely bamboozling.
I start things. I experiment. Some ideas become something meaningful; others disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. I’ve stopped seeing every abandoned idea or change of direction as evidence of failure. Sometimes that’s simply part of the process.
This isn’t about calling ADHD a ‘superpower’ or ignoring the genuine challenges it can bring. It’s about challenging the idea that ‘deficit’ tells the whole story.
Sometimes the challenge isn’t an absence, but an abundance — and learning where to direct it.
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I used to think that I began songwriting as a way of understanding early traumas. With greater perspective, I’ve realised that creativity and exploration were there much earlier; my home environment hadn’t created them, but had placed limitations on them.
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to fit the mould, often feeling as though I had to try twice as hard. I wish I’d spent at least as much time pursuing the things that interest me.
Writing. Ideas. Education. Working with people. Starting something new. Following a thought just to see where it goes.
I’ve come to recognise how important interest and meaning are to the way I engage with the world. When something matters to me, my relationship with motivation can look completely different.
Of course, we can’t construct a life consisting entirely of things we love. There will always be admin, obligations and things we’d rather not do. But perhaps we can take our interests seriously, rather than treating them as distractions from the things we should be doing.
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This sounds relatively straightforward. I’ve found it anything but.
There are days when ideas are flowing, things are getting done and everything seems to connect. And then there are days when even getting started feels difficult. Impossible.
Those are the days when the questions start: Why can’t I do this today when I managed it yesterday? Why haven’t I started? Why am I wasting time? Why can’t I just get on with it?
I’ve learnt that recrimination rarely helps. And a diagnosis doesn’t automatically change the language you’ve spent years using about yourself.
Lazy. Difficult. Too much. Inconsistent. Disorganised. Not trying hard enough.
Positive self-talk doesn’t simply appear because you understand yourself better. There’s something about it that can feel faintly un-British, too. We’re often much more comfortable with self-deprecation than saying something genuinely kind about ourselves.
For me, it means noticing those old stories and being willing to challenge them. How do I know this to be true? Would I speak to somebody I love this way? What evidence am I choosing to ignore?
Being kind to yourself doesn’t mean pretending something isn’t frustrating or avoiding things that feel difficult. It’s about learning to internally validate and recognise all that you are doing.
I don’t always manage it. It takes practice.
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Perhaps one of the strangest things about discovering I had ADHD was beginning to recognise it in the relationships I’d already formed.
Some of the people I’ve connected with most easily over the years — the friendships where conversation jumps from one subject to another, ideas bounce around and you somehow just ‘get’ one another — have turned out to have brains that work in similarly wonderful ways.
There’s something comforting about realising that perhaps we were finding each other long before we had the language to understand why.
Since diagnosis, I’ve also discovered the value of finding that connection deliberately. Support groups, online communities and simply talking openly about ADHD can introduce you to people who recognise experiences you’ve spent years struggling to explain.
Recently, I began an adult support group in my local area and was amazed by the response and the need for connection in the community.
Of course, having ADHD doesn’t mean we’re all the same. But sometimes you don’t need someone to have exactly the same experience.
There can be enormous relief in simply not having to explain quite so much.
Feeling uncomfortable together.
