ADHD Saved my Life

Life has always been an uphill struggle for me.

I expect that is true of many people with neurodiversity, that what others take for granted we struggle with, the proverbial swan smoothly gliding and paddling furiously beneath the surface.

It was after my diagnosis in my mid-fifties that I started to explore ADHD in more depth though, and realised how much it had done for me as well as made life more difficult.

ADHD makes you tend towards being bouncy, whether you feel like it or not sometimes too. It can also make you feel very low and depressed by the frustration of the struggle to come close to anything considered normal. This means we can often feel like failures, but we’re not. The fact that we struggle makes us amazing, survivors, people who don’t give up, who have great perseverance and who are always looking to better themselves.

This is the exact opposite of those who are complacent and do little or nothing to work on themselves. Being normal comes easily to them and they think they have it sorted out. But they don’t either, in almost all cases.

Let me get back to the bouncy part though. I have also struggled with complex trauma and PTSD since early childhood. As I said life has been challenging. eras my parents thought they could punish and shame the ADHD out of me when all they did was add to it. But I endured and found ways to have a happy life in between the bouts of depression, and I put this down to the enthusiasm and general bouncy nature of my ADHD.

ADHD has given me these positive qualities

Endless curiosity which leads to impulsiveness, which leads to all sorts of mad adventures and projects, some of which come out triumphant and some of which flop impressively too. But they stop me being down on myself too much, well maybe not the failures, but then I’m immediately off chasing something new. That is very ADHD and can be very healing and restorative after a bad bout of self doubt and self punishment.

A lack of focus on past or future and a full engagement with the present. Now is all that matters. It can lead to a need for instant gratification but my mindfulness practice has taken care of that and I find I can stay present quite easily for much of the time. It is the distractability of ADHD which makes anything instantly compelling in this moment and can pull me into something new and away from the darkness which does gather around me

An inappropriate sense of humour which allows me to laugh at myself in spite of my difficulties — witness my self-label ‘old wobbly feelings thingy twithead’. See what I mean? Who can get down with that hanging above your head on the headboard of your bed, ( my husband put it there to make me laugh in a particularly difficult few days)? He would also give me lots of cuddles and re-assurance when I was particularly down on myself.

hyperactivity has always been a challenge, not being able to sit and watch tv even without having to get up or have something else to do with my hands and sometimes my mind too. Knitting is my go-to with this but hyperactivity itself is a positive. It means I am on the go and thus creating lots of positive energy vibes for myself from aerobic activity. It also keeps me fairly fit, and productive in my garden and vegetables growing, in my love for swimming and dancing, and my enjoyment of moderately long-distance walking, although that is getting harder now I have arthritis developing in many joints.

Having a mindfulness practice enabled me to recognise all these positives from being neurodivergent, and allowed me to embrace and accept it as just how I am and not deficit issues after all.

As I go towards the end of my seventh decade of life, I am still active and doing masses of things, sometimes too much and I get overwhelmed, but I am getting better at not letting that happen, and am very dependent on my diary to remind me of what I must do each day. Mindfulness also allows me to reset myself several times a day with a few breaths and a general letting go and re-centering process which allows me to keep the excesses of ADHD under some control too.

I am intelligent and although I find it hard to maintain concentration over long periods of time, I do absorb information that interests me like a sponge — still- after all these years I am always looking for books that give me new insights into life itself, this planet and its inhabitants. I am very aware of how insignificant we are individually or even as a species other than our ability to destroy all that is around us. This has led me towards being far more conscious and aware of the importance of how we live our lives, with the awareness of all others, of being environmentally aware and considerate to all others as much as we are able to be. Without ADHD I may have Sunk into complacency and lack of interest in endless searching out the new in my life, like so many people have done, just plodding through life and avoiding too much in the way of discomfort and challenge. Yet it is through these challenging experiences that we grow.

Do I want to not have ADHD and the possible bit of autism my husband thinks I also may have? No! Not on your nelly. But it is time we helped people with neuro-divergency feel valued in society, and taught mindfulness as a way of looking at life from early childhood onwards. That way I might have avoided the PTSD. But even the darkness has some value sometimes. Without mindfulness as a lens through which I could learn to accept and value myself and not denigrate myself as my parents and teachers did when I was growing up, life might have been a little easier at times, but who knows which lessons I might not have learned.

And without the ADHD I am sure the trauma, which would have been there anyway, would have killed me, defeated me, destroyed me. So yes I conclude my ADHD saved my life. Interesting isn’t it, when you take a look at your own life through a different lens, reframe it, explore the what-ifs and spin it with a positive lens.