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?
Managing time and priorities is absolutely huge. You can get better at this stuff but you will probably never be great at handling competing demands on your time. I use a lot of phone timers and task lists to help me stay on track but ultimately I will always struggle. The difference with having a diagnosis was also a game changer in terms of how I felt and losing the shame of not being able to cope. On the other hand it also radicalised me and made me resentful of how I was being treated. I had long suspected that there was something unreasonable about the way people expected me to behave and now I knew why.
I began defending my choices and setting boundaries. Ultimately this destroyed my marriage but I couldn’t go on pretending to be normal and if she can’t accept that, it’s her loss. I think it was a co-dependent relationship. We tend to attract people that seek to control us (not usually consciously or maliciously but, yeah) and this is a recipe for burn out. At work it has been much better, my employer makes allowances for me and work relationships have improved dramatically. They give me tasks where I can play to my strengths and make a positive difference.
In short, getting a diagnosis has been an absolute game changer. The medication is a significant component of the recovery process but it shouldn’t be viewed as a silver bullet. Meditation and learning about the condition has been huge. I can accept who I am, stop hating myself and have compassion for myself.