I would just like to express my gratitude to everyone for sending me down a rabbit hole of research after reading many comments and relating to almost every single meme that was posted.
After my diagnosis, I have a plan moving forward to help better my decisions and what I should do next. Do it if you are questioning and can afford it, is what I would say!
Honestly grateful too for everyone here for validating my feelings and making me feel more okay about myself. It has been quite confrontational to realise that what I thought was my identity was actually a disorder, but at the same time quite comforting to know that my struggles are something I can learn to deal with
When I realised I had ADHD, being able to recontextualise my struggles and set aside all the negative self talk allowed me to see that actually, there are parts of my ADHD-ness that I think are really cool. For example, I found it useful to have multiple tasks on my “menu” for a given day, so that I can cycle between them and not get burnt out on any one task. As well as being a strategy to cope with some of my ADHD deficits, it turns out that putting a tricky problem on a back-burner while I focus on something completely different is a great way to generate new ideas and connections about the original task.
Have you found anything like that so far? It took me a while to get to that point, but I think it’s part of the liberation of neurodiversity as a framework — it’s a way of acknowledging the quirks of our brains in a way that isn’t constrained to thinking of ADHD as a disorder.