ADHD and me

I only heard about ADHD when I was as teenager, my much younger step brother got diagnosed with it. Even back then (late 90s/early 00's) I had never met anyone else diagnosed with it. I heard adults describe it as a 'made up disease' and 'excuse for people who are bad parents' and 'he's just a normal boy'. I absorbed all of those opinions and I'll be honest, I held them to, for longer than I should have. 

That all changed when I began a new project at work, I am a senior project manager by day and counsellor by night. A role I've worked hard to achieve, for over 2 decades. I had all my counselling training, all my talk of boundaries and challenging my deep held beliefs. But that didn't protect me from stress and burnout. It was full on, delivery confidence was low, expectations were high and at first I loved it. it had all the elements I'm great at, emergency action, high stakeholder management and a reliance on my professional skills. But with a few months I had started to change, the urgency didn't stop, the job became my life, I heard the ping teams made in my sleep, in fact I wasn't sleeping very well. One week, three members of staff cried to me about the project, I felt a protectiveness towards them, I re-iterated you come first, not this delivery. But I couldn't follow my own advice - I became irritable and preoccupied in a way I had never been before.

Then the break happened, I went to my counselling class one Thursday night and couldn't stop crying when I was asked how my week had gone.  The next day I made an emergency appointment with my GP and rang my manager in fits of tears, telling him I just couldn't do it any more. I got signed off with workplace stress that day, something that has never happened to me before. Over the next 6 weeks, while I recovered, I really had to look at myself and what drove me to this place. Were there outside influences, of course, but I saw a  pattern I had never seen before. 

That episode of sickness was one of the best things to ever happen to me, I started watching facebook reels about ADHD, I don't even know why. But the more I watched I realised I had more in common with them than I didn't. I started to research what ADHD was, how it affected women and how it manifests to those not diagnosed until much later in life. It hit me like a ton of bricks, oh wow - that describes nearly everything about me. All the things I thought were personality flaws, my obsession over being early because otherwise I will constantly be late, my inability to pay attention to detail, being called careless, over dramatic, sensitive. Honestly I could go on and on about this and what criteria I fit with examples for it all. I started to accept I had ADHD, and told people I did. many people didn't believe me, a few questioned it and many more just didn't acknowledge it. I found solace in colleagues that also were self diagnosed and we spent time bonding over shared symptoms and hostilities we faced.