Sinéad Molloy

I wasn’t the picture of an ADHD case. I was bookish, a diligent student and had graduated with a double first from a well-respected university. Yet, here I was, sitting in a hard plastic chair in a village near Chelmsford, being handed a prescription for a drug called Methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. It felt surreal. 

Focus wasn’t always a problem. When something grabbed me, I could disappear into it for hours, impervious to the world around me. On good days, I understood myself as a creative type. Expressive, full of ideas, energetic and animated. Though less generous people might have called it restlessness. And then there was the trouble with staying organised. Dates missed, emails long-forgotten – all casualties of a mind that darted from one thought to the next like a tiny, caffeinated, hummingbird. I worked so hard to stay organised but was never on top of anything. But my job, at a newly-formed creative charity, was hectic and unstructured. I imagined everyone felt like this. In anxious moments, I supposed I was just worse at stuff than everyone else. 

So my diagnosis wasn’t without evidence. But still, I felt like an outlier. This wasn’t helped by the prevailing image of ADHD as a childhood disorder, a label reserved for rowdy boys in the back of the class. ADHD in women, with its quieter challenges, remained largely invisible. I told a friend about starting medication and she claimed it ‘was impossible’ I had ADHD, bewildered because I’d got straight A’s at school. Well, I thought, maybe the doctor was wrong. And so began the imposter syndrome, a companion ever since.  

Eight years of trial and error later, I have cobbled together a system that works with my brain. I no longer take medication, but I exercise most days, do my best to keep consistent routines, and I don’t drink (an excellent, if irritatingly virtuous, remedy for impulsiveness). I write everything down, schedule walking meetings, and use a digital orchestra of reminders and alarms to keep the chaos at bay. Most days, it works. 

But some days, the office is too noisy. Conversations bleed into one another, and the background noise makes my thoughts inaudible. Tasks multiply and I’m paralysed with indecision, staring at the computer screen or washing machine or the long list of unanswered texts, unable to know where to start. And then there are the offerings to the gods of absent-mindedness – keys left hanging in the front door, cold tea still stewing in the kitchen and lunch a charcoal briquette in the oven, because I’d been distracted by a whatsapp, or email, or something I said yesterday.

I know this happens to neurotypical people too. Recently a colleague asked me how ADHD was different to ‘normal’ distractability or overwhelm. I was a little stumped, and fumbled an answer. I only know my experience, and I’m not sure what ‘normal’ feels like. In fact, there’s really no way for me to know if everyone feels like I do. It could of course all be in my head and ADHD could be an illness of the social media age and, uhoh, there’s that imposter syndrome again. 

The truth is, imposter syndrome is what’s prevented me from talking about the fact I have ADHD. Especially now, at a time when the rise in diagnoses amongst adult women has given birth to a public scepticism which asks “doesn’t everyone have ADHD these days?” And because I’ve learnt how to mask it well, I worry, perversely, that people won’t believe me if I tell them the truth. But here’s what I do know: the conversation around ADHD needs to invite more complexity. We need to expand the narrow definition of who gets to ‘have’ ADHD, so that other quiet or creative or distracted – and often successful – people might experience the flicker of recognition that says, “hey, me too”.