Hi friends, I’m 36 and recently just discovered what ADHD actually is, and am waiting for a consultation/diagnosis from a psychologist (a few more weeks on the wait list I think).
Apologies for the long post, but I’m working through some shit and feel the need to share here.
Anyways, as Ive been processing what having ADHD might mean for my life, Ive been having some incredible “aha!” moments about areas of my life where I feel significant amounts of shame for coming up short.
The one that I’m having now, which I’m very curious to know if anyone has also experienced, is an extreme amount of frustration and stress when my spouse starts “task stacking” with me. She’ll ask me to do something around the house, or with our kiddo, and then while I’m in the middle of doing that thing, she’ll ask me to do another second thing, and then a third, and so on until either all of the tasks are finished or I politely ask her to stop piling work onto my plate.
Relatedly, when we were dating we would spend a lot of time hiking together and its where we got to know each other a lot. However once we got married I began to really dread the days when we went hiking together. My thoughts on this now are that, we would have to wake up super early (which sucks but isnt a deal breaker in itself), but my wife would spend the entire morning in a whirlwind of task stacking, talking to fast to understand, and then have an unbreakable rigid “get out the door” time. Once we were in the cat to go hiking, I was a complete wreck of feeling exhausted and beaten down. I never had any of these frustrations or dread of hiking before we lived together.
This ended up in me coming to the conclusion that maybe I really don’t like hiking at all (which I’m starting to suspect is not actually true), and then fighting back on planning days to go hiking (planning is another massively shameful kryptonite of mine, but that’s another story). She’s also silently blamed me quite a lot for taking away something that she really loved doing together, and I’ve felt this existentially deep shame about “false advertising” for myself while dating as an adventurous spirit, only to turn into a massive homebody once we got married.
Essentially, I’m starting to realize that many of the things that have caused me deep shame and cost me insane amounts of relational capital in my marriage might actually just be symptoms of ADHD.
Can anyone else here validate whether or not these sound like ADHD symptoms you’ve experienced and, if so, whether or not those symptoms have been helped by medication?
Yeah mate, that’s bang on. I was diagnosed at 35, after years of struggling with exactly what you describe. The guilt of ‘losing’ my adventurous streak, the quiet blame for holding someone else back. The shame is real, feeling like you’re never as much as you should or could be. It’s what leaves so many of us late diagnosis types scarred and withdrawn.
The turning around point was the diagnosis. Learning why you are experiencing all of that makes all the difference, gives you a frame of reference to deal with it and improve things. Start healing.
Importantly, even if the doctor says you’re ‘normal’, ie no ADHD, it doesn’t need to change your approach. Recognising who you are and how your mind works can come from a professional, or it can come from you. If I had been taught as a child to recognise my own patterns and deal with them in my own way, I’d have been much happier despite being undiagnosed. Everyone’s fucking weird, some of are just weird enough to get a doctors note (and meds) to go with it. Give yourself some slack, treat your mind with the care it deserves.
I was diagnosed as a kid and still the shame and guilt you described feels very very familiar