I wish I had been more curious to find deeper answers sooner. I started taking antidepressants in my late teens. One didn’t seem to change much, so I tried another.
I kept asking for help, taking the medications I was prescribed, and waiting for the point when everyday life would stop feeling like a group project I was somehow doing alone. Some of those medications were incredibly difficult to come off of. And after all that effort, I was still exhausted.
Still wondering why things that looked ordinary from the outside took so much out of me. I thought I was depressed. Anxiety seemed possible, too.
Those explanations made sense with the information I had, so I kept trying to get better within them. When treatment didn’t change the parts of life I was struggling with, I didn’t think, Maybe there’s another question to ask. I thought, What the hell is wrong with me?
Then other people in my family were diagnosed with ADHD, and I began looking at my own history differently. I want to be clear: A family diagnosis didn’t diagnose me. For the first time, I wondered whether what I’d understood as depression had been ADHD all along — or whether ADHD explained the difficulties that treatment had never touched.
The picture of ADHD I’d grown up with was a little boy who couldn’t sit still. I didn’t know to look for a woman who could appear to be holding it together while privately using every last bit of energy to do so. A finished task looks like a finished task.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
