I used to have a Livejournal, you know.
CW: Mental health stuff
A while ago, someone included me in a list of “people to follow” on Twitter. The comment that ran alongside the recommendation was something like “very wordy, but worth reading”. I was surprised by the “wordy” part, but I really shouldn’t have been.
My teenage years were spent glued to a Livejournal account, not to mention any number of forums and message boards. In the time since then I’ve found myself maintaining a blog or two, but it dropped off when I started writing stuff for a living. For the past few years I’ve only really shared stuff in tweet form, with the occasional overly-long tweet thread. (I’ve still been, uh, “prolific”. I looked up my stats, and I’ve averaged five tweets a day since I started the account in 2008. Blimey.)
Recently, I sat down to write some things about my mental health, and about some recent discoveries I’ve made. I only realised how much I’d written when Twitter stopped giving me the option to add more tweets to the thread. Horrified, I deleted the entire thing (after copying it into a word document) and immediately came here to set up a Medium account. Let’s face it, this is a much more appropriate medium (hey, I get it) for long-form rants and rambles.
So here we go. This story is that twitter thread, chopped and changed and edited maybe more times that necessary. It’s long-ish, but hopefully reading it will help contextualise some of the things I do.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with my mental health. Anxiety, depression, self-destructive behaviour. From my teenage years onwards, things have just been difficult. I’ve done at least three serious stretches of therapy (there may be more, but my memory is patchy in places). In my head, I define my teens and twenties as my “running through a minefield” period, where I was going from calamity to calamity, hoping everything would work out but secretly knowing that it was only a matter of time before The Consequences (of whatever) caught up with me.
I’ve always thought that I’m a person who has good intentions, and is good at his job, but is just generally a colossal screw-up. It’s a deeply-held belief, and it’s been exacerbated by the nagging thought that I’m not quite operating on the same wavelength as other people. Everyone else has always seemed to have their lives together. They’ve got their priorities straight, they make commitments and stick to them, they look after themselves. I just… haven’t done those things, a lot of the time. My brain’s always told me it’s because I’m flaky, or I’m lazy, or I just need to grow up and stop mucking about. Throw in a good dose of guilt because of all of the above, and you can see where the anxiety and depression come from.
When I’ve told people all of this, they’ve often been surprised. As with a lot of people who deal with these sorts of feelings, I’ve become quite good at masking them. I’ve always just had the ability to be “on” at a moment’s notice. I even manage to convince myself most of the time; I seem to have a switch that I can flick when I need to be enthusiastic and excitable, and it’s helped me get to where I am today. I don’t know where I’d be without that ability.
As a great example, I was recently invited to take part in a livestream, and we had a lovely chat about game design. The show started at 10pm. For most of the day leading up to it, I was in The Pit. Anyone who’s dealt with depression will know this; the general feeling that you don’t have anything left to give. The notion that everything is too much effort. The utter blankness. Before I found out what depression was, I thought it was just “being sad”, but that’s really not the same thing. Anyway, I’m digressing — the point is, I was really not in a good place.
Well, 9:45 rolled around, and I got onto the computer, and BAM! Excitable, engaged, interested James. I had a great time, really enjoyed myself from start to finish, and I was really happy with the stuff I was coming out with. The stream finished, and I collapsed into bed. The next morning, I was back in The Pit.
This is a familiar cycle, but I’d never really thought about it more than “James, you’re a bit of a mess, and you really need to sort yourself out”. Again, the idea that the answer’s there, I just need to stop mucking about and set things straight.
A few months ago, I read about someone I’ve got a lot of respect for, a talented, thoughtful, creative person, who’d been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. That seemed entirely dissonant to me. It was entirely at odds with my notion of ADHD; I’d never known much about it, or known anyone who had it, but in my mind it was something that mainly involved “difficult” children running around, shouting and being hyperactive. I’m ashamed to say that there was also the notion in my mind that it was often trotted out as an excuse by parents for their kids’ poor behaviour.
That shame was only slightly assuaged when I found out that ADHD wasn’t properly recognised in the UK until 2000. The US was doing better, having named the disorder in 1987 when they identified two separate things — Hyperactivity and Attention Deficit Disorder — as components of something larger. So I grew up with the idea that ADHD was some fad from America, an excuse for a medication-happy nation to drug their kids. I’m sure I can’t have been the only one thinking that, but it’s really not something I’m proud to admit.
So yeah, when I read about that person I admired being diagnosed with ADHD, I was confused. He was an adult! He was successful! I went and did some research on the disorder, and discovered that ADHD wasn’t at all what I thought it was. It’s very diagnosable, it’s very well-researched (in children, at least) and it’s not something that people automatically grow out of. It’s also not just about kids running around climbing the walls. There’s a whole list of symptomatic behaviours.
And as I read through those behaviours, they all started to feel eerily familiar.
I watched videos of people describing what might as well have been my own life. I’ve always been skeptical of self-diagnosis, so I did all of this with a very cynical eye at first, but the more I read, the more of it lined up with my own experiences.
One key factor was the fact that adult ADHD generally only exists in people who had ADHD as a child. Sure enough, in 1986, at the age of three, I was diagnosed with Hyperactivity. I’d been running around my bedroom at night, fighting things in my sleep. The doctor told my mum to cut certain food additives out of my diet (“E Numbers”) and the physical symptoms eased up. I still fidgeted a lot, and always tried to do three things at once, and struggled to focus on things that I wasn’t interested in, but the link was never made. (Remember, Hyperactivity and ADD wouldn’t linked until the following year in the US, and not until I was 17 in this country.)
I slowly began to come to terms with the fact that I might have ADHD.
As I write this, I’m waiting for a referral to a specialist. The wait times are pretty hefty, even with the Right to Choose route that cuts times down from the standard “several months to a couple of years” to “several weeks to a couple of months”. (To be very clear, I’m not blaming the NHS for a second! If we didn’t have it, and I had to pay for this, it’d most likely be a case of “well, I’m not on fire, so…”)
Some days, waiting to get a diagnosis feels worse than just being oblivious to it and wondering why I can’t function like a “normal” person. The knowledge that there might be some answers just around the corner is so enticing, and so frustrating. So I’ve decided to break the rule I set myself at the start, which was “you can’t just assume you have it, you’re not a doctor, you can’t diagnose yourself”.
I’ve done a *load* of research. I’ve gone through clinical self-assessments, and joined a couple of wonderful support groups.
While I’m still incredibly keen to speak to someone who’s qualified to give a professional opinion, my working theory in the meantime is that I have combined-type ADHD, significantly more severe on the inattentive side, but still very present on the hyperactive side.
This isn’t just something I’ve grabbed at after reading a couple of articles and doing an online quiz. I’ve put work into this. I’d never want to make out that I consider myself an expert, but I’ve weighed the options, and for the benefit of my mental health I think it’s better to work with that evidence-based assumption and use tools and strategies that are built to assist with ADHD, rather than to shrug and say “well, we’ll see!”.
So… why am I sharing all of this?
For starters, talking about this stuff openly has made it a lot easier for me to process. I’m slowly realising how much of what I do and how I think is given context when I view it through an ADHD lens, and I’ve found it harder and harder to not mention it to people when I’ve been talking about how I feel or why I’m doing something a certain way. I want to be more open instead of lying by omission. That’s the first reason.
But also, I know that just taking the first steps on this journey has had a positive impact on my mental health. Knowing I’m not just weird or lazy. Knowing that I’m not the only one feeling like this. Statistically, there’s a good chance that someone else who reads this will have the same realisation that I did, and that might help them start a journey of their own. Hopefully they’ll start it before they’re nearly 40, but hey, it’s never too late to discover things about yourself. (Side note: ADHD is a trait that is very likely to be passed down heretidarily, and a lot of adults get diagnosed as a result of their kids getting a diagnosis, so late-in-life diagnoses are increasingly common.)
I’ve spent so much of my life doubting myself and feeling so, so insecure about so many things. That’s not going away any time soon, but I’m finally building a toolkit to push back against it, and finding a community of other people who are going through the same thing. That’s been the biggest eye-opener, and the only thing that’s broken through that “you’re a lazy, flaky mess” internal dialogue. (It’s such a common thing that there’s a well-known book about adult ADHD called You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?.)
I won’t lie, the whole process has left me feeling raw and emotional for the past few weeks. Or exhausted and flat. I’ve cried a fair bit. It’s not been easy, but it’s a process, and I’m moving in the right direction. I can’t finish this up without adding that I don’t know where I’d be without Sophie. She’s always been the long whippy tail that has kept my sanity brontosaurus from falling over (this is a highly technical analogy), but she’s been an absolute superstar with all of this, from the moment I told her I had suspicions. She made me stop feeling stupid for bringing it up, and immediately went to work helping me with research.
Just… the most supportive human ever. Sophie is the best.
And that’s the end of my ramble about ADHD.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, here are a couple of videos that might be worth a watch. They definitely helped me. And feel free to drop me a message if you want to chat.
Right. I’m going to go and do some work now. Thanks for reading, and please share this if you think it might help some people.