What does progress look like with ADHD?
what they definitely don't tell you when you get diagnosed
When I first got my ADHD diagnosis, I had already spent months researching it. I was deep into my obsessive fact-finding journey, inhaling all the knowledge I would need to successfully defeat this life obstacle like I had defeated all the others. I’m smart, I’m capable, I have three young children…I can handle anything. Bring it on, ADHD.
Two years later, and I’m here to tell you, with all the confidence in the world, that I haven’t even begun to defeat ADHD.
In fact, if an outsider looked at my life now and compared it to my life two years ago, they might think ADHD was on its way to defeating me.
But here’s the thing they don’t tell you when they hand over your diagnosis: progress, when it comes to ADHD, looks nothing like what you expect it to.
What I expected were outward signs of a somewhat linear progress: more focus. less overwhelm. folded laundry. a tidy house. After all, those were the most frustrating things about my ADHD. Shouldn’t progress involve some evidence of those things getting better?
If only it were that easy.
Here’s what actually happens. You finally get a diagnosis that explains why seemingly simple things feel so difficult for you, why you struggle in social situations, why it takes you twice as long to fold laundry, why, despite sprinting to your car and driving 12 miles over the speed limit to make up for lost time (wherever it went) you are still 5 to 7 minutes late for everything, and you slowly begin to release your white-knuckled grip on the frantic semblance of a functional life you’ve clung to for so long (you also come to peace with long, rambling sentences).
Instead of running yourself ragged with the expectation of a neurotypical life, you can finally say to yourself oh, this isn’t the life I’m meant to be living!
Instead of beating yourself up for the doom piles all over the house, you look at them and think that’s just another ADHD thing, I shouldn’t be ashamed of it.
Instead of pushing through exhaustion to tidy the house for an hour before bed, you pay attention to your brain’s cues that it’s time to rest and decide the mess can wait until tomorrow (or the next day).
All the little things you used to try to change or hide (in the world of neurodivergence this is called masking), you slowly learn to accept as part of how your brain works.
I will say from experience that this acceptance is not always freeing. In fact, after my initial relief upon diagnosis and subsequent hyperfocus (another ADHD term I’ve learned) on information gathering, I went through a time of situational depression. While it is a relief to have an explanation for why you blurt out inappropriate jokes before thinking or why you have to leave the room when anyone in your family is eating an apple or why your body absolutely under no circumstances could possibly manage to be completely still, the explanation does nothing to change the existence of such traits, nor does it lessen the consequences of them.
Truthfully, at times I find myself thinking I was better off before diagnosis, before I noticed just how much of my life was affected by ADHD. It was much easier to ignore the signs and symptoms when I didn’t know to be looking for them.
While I know that isn’t true, there is some reality to the fact that ignoring my struggles, masking them, pushing past them and running myself ragged to overcome them, made them seem less significant. Because with the gradual acceptance that comes with diagnosis, as I begin to see myself rightly, these traits can actually look like they are getting worse.
As you accept the traits as part of who you are rather than trying to hide or fix them, you begin to let go of the illusion that you can simply will them out of existence. You stop trying to hide, to overcompensate, to pretend that things you’ve been told your whole life should be easy don’t feel like pulling teeth to you. You stop looking at your chair covered in unread books or your unfolded laundry or your uncleaned dishes as a condemnation and learn to say to yourself, there’s my ADHD again! Instead of frantically organizing or folding or washing, you cut yourself some slack and let your house look just a little bit less neurotypical.
And here’s the thing I want to say—this is progress. And of course it doesn’t look like progress as we’re used to seeing it, because our entire lives we’ve believed that progress lies in looking or becoming more neurotypical. Our entire lives we’ve tried to force our neurodivergent brain into a neurotypical box it was never meant to fit into in the first place.
So this first step, this acceptance, is all about peeling our brain out of the box we’ve been smashing it into all these years. And that’s bound to be a little bit messy. Not to mention, there’s not a nice, clean, perfectly shaped box waiting for it once we get it out of the old one.
I wish it were that easy. If it were, ADHD wouldn’t be a diagnosis. It would just be a different way of living, and we’d all skip off into the sunset with rainbows coming out of our ears. But just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean it’s not possible to learn how to thrive—or so I’ve been told.
I’m not there yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this acceptance we’ve been talking about is an important step in the process. I don’t think I’ll ever be team “ADHD is my superpower!”, but my hope is that someday I’ll be able to look back on this time and say you know what, past Wesley, you were right, acceptance was the first sign of progress, and we’ve come a long way since then.
In the meantime, I’ll just be here typing away at my little Substack while my dirty clothes stare at me longingly from the floor of my laundry room.
xoxo,
Wesley