What I Mean When I Tell People I Have ADHD
By: Kyle William Durham
Tags: Self Improvement, Personal Growth, Life Lessons, Personal Development, Mental Health

When I tell people I have ADHD, I feel the words fall flat. It’s an almost subtle eye-roll from even the most well-meaning of people. It’s not that I am filled with an offended rage when people say things like “Oops, sorry, ADHD moment.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a great feeling.

My problem here is when people make assumptions about what ADHD looks and feels like. Like all learning challenges and neurodiversity, ADHD isn’t just one thing, it’s many. Even though I have struggled with it profoundly, I have never been good at standing up for myself. When it comes to other people they are a dog and I am John Wick.

The reality is, I know many individuals with pervasive anxiety, morbid depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, dyslexia, and other neurodiversity. Somehow, knowing even a small sliver of their troubles makes me hesitate to really become an advocate for ADHD. Once I started to realize that I am just defending myself, it became easier to do so.

I was diagnosed with ADD, now called “ADHD Type 2” when I was in 4th-grade. I was on and off of pills and my mood and personality showed it.

While every case of ADHD looks very different (think spectrum) mine had some distinct pros and cons. Of course, I had plenty of cons, and my GPA showed it.

I was a gregarious and personable as a kid by all accounts. I could talk to (and at) anyone who had an ear. I was more socially aware than a child had any right to be and I could pick up on emotional nuances in other people and social situations.

I was your friend the second we started a conversation, and the rest of the conversation was spent making you mine. When I took my meds, however, I became “normal”.

ADHD has different “types” and each one has it’s own symptoms. Some people with ADHD are physically hyper, some are overweight. Some have issues regulating their emotions, while some are wellsprings of positivity. I am trying to not write a book here, so I will only focus on my experience.

While ADHD isn’t necessarily a superpower that makes you more fun per se, it does have a lot to do with how we see “fun” in the first place. Dopamine is heavily involved in the pleasure center’s of the brain for everyone, but it works differently in the ADHD brain. Most people can delay gratification so that when they receive their reward, they get an appropriate dopamine hit. Plenty of substances including drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes increase this same feeling, which is why they can be addictive.

According to Healthline:

Dopamine allows us to regulate emotional responses and take action to achieve specific rewards. It’s responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Scientists have observed that levels of dopamine are different in people with ADHD than in those without ADHD. Some researchers believe this difference is because neurons in the brain and nervous systems of people with unmedicated ADHD have lower concentrations of proteins called dopamine transporters. The concentration of these proteins is known as dopamine transporter density (DTD).

People with ADHD have a different relationship with dopamine than their neurotypical peers. This can cause us to look for the dopamine hit in different ways than other people. We are in some ways deprived, so we seek after it differently.

Some seek the dopamine hit that comes with activity, so they are very active. Some find this hit with food or vices. The most common response to this, and this is true for me, is impulsivity on a general level. The opposite of delaying gratification, I looked for it everywhere and I needed it yesterday.

This wasn’t an ideal disposition for the classroom, so there was an attempt to regulate it with medication. But on medication, I was quiet and reserved and constantly socially exhausted.

I felt like a different person.

This wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I wasn’t moving to a new city and school district. I was looking down the barrel of going to a new middle school that was full of new people.

It didn’t matter if I was wrong, I was convinced that I just wouldn’t make any friends if I was medicated. Add to that some pretty severe emotional side-effects and it became more and more obvious that I needed to try and survive on my own. I decided to tell my mom that I didn’t want to continue taking the medication.

Now, many parents are heavily criticized for medicating their children, and there is no shortage of data to back this up. This, thank God, was not my experience.

My parents did the best thing that any parent could; they listened to me.

This was important because pouring those pills down the sink was the easiest thing I have ever done… for me. My mom, however, knew that the storm was coming. The decision itself may have been easy, but the results would change my life forever. Little did I know as I played 007 Nightfire on my PS2 (weird flex, I know) that I would go to sleep and wake up to a whole new reality. And it would prove to be anything but easy.

Middle school was a nightmare.

I know that this is a common experience, but it was a full-on social and academic disaster. I went from being in the “gifted” classes in elementary (before and while taking medication) to bombing almost every class.

The most common conversation between teachers and my mom was “High school is what matters anyway, let’s focus on that.” I kept thinking to myself “How am I picking up every little nuance that you think is flying over my head because I am a kid, and I am still not passing Biology?”

I have had my battles on the field of self-hatred, but somehow I just knew that I wasn’t dumb. I could be lazy, I didn’t like to wake up in the morning, I sucked at and hated mowing the lawn. As far as kids go, I beat myself up more than average. But I never thought I was dumb because I wasn’t.

With my mom as a no-nonsense companion (general), I marched toward freshmen year like a soldier on the losing side of a war.

There’s a feeling that comes with trying your hardest and failing anyway. It’s rock-bottom, but it’s the bottom. As the years went on, college started to seem more and more impossible.

Eventually, something changed. I decided to play to my strengths. The charm and charisma that failed me in middle school propelled me to a very comfortable social rank in high school. I wasn’t a popular jock but I wasn’t a pariah either. I had to focus too hard in class to have time or energy to be a class clown. My GPA slowly but surely crawled its way from a 1.7 Freshmen year (that’s not a typo) to 3.0 Junior year. I didn’t talk my way to better grades, I focused on grades that would be reliant upon my talking.

I got involved in theater and music and eventually settled into focusing on video production. The teacher didn’t punish me for my talkativeness, instead, he gave me a camera. I started high school with a pretty bad poker hand but I ended it as the co-host of the school’s TV show.

Then, I went on to study film at USC and work on all of the new Star Wars movies. Just kidding, stories involving neurodiversity rarely end that way. In fact, very few good stories end that way. Instead, I entered into what I dubbed “The Community College Purgatory Pit”.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I eventually made it through community college and transferred to a liberal arts university to major in English. Once I learned how to write, I realized that my incessant need to connect with people could be done in a new and valuable way. This didn’t happen because I simply tried hard enough. It happened because I was constantly redirecting myself and working on my executive functioning.

Then, I decided that I wanted to be the person I wish I had when I was younger; I began my grad school journey to become a teacher. Grad school without medication was like climbing Everest without an oxygen tank. I did it. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t side effects. I was able to train my brain for over twenty years to be able to do this. My brain felt like an old car overheating on a hot day.

And it felt like this every day.

Eventually, I made it through both the credential program and my Master’s program with the first 3.8 GPA of my life. While teaching and working with college students with special needs I realized something that would change the way I think about my ADHD forever.

It’s easy to forget that people who have had to work harder than their peers for their whole life have been working harder the whole life.

This seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But the realization that I had been walking the same track with weights on my ankles, freed something in me. Something that was always there, but thought that it was unworthy.

This change in perception has been the biggest game-changer of my late twenties. Suddenly all of the nights I spent crying while trying to do the simplest homework, every time I beat myself up for leaning on unhealthy coping mechanisms like cigarettes and coffee, every time my feelings were hurt because someone said that I talk too much. Suddenly all of this meant something. It meant something because I chose to let it.

I had come to realize that although I learned through different avenues, I had developed a superpower of sorts. Not because of the ADHD but because I was strong from fighting against it.

While this was an important revelation to me, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t exhausting. Sure, I have become clever and I have developed incredibly important skills. I can think on my feet, I am good in a meeting, I can connect with people uniquely. I have gotten to the level where I can successfully fight my ADHD and win. Every single day.

The catch, however, is that at the end of the day, the wheels are still turning. I have built a fast car but the steering is tricky and sometimes the breaks don’t work.

About a year ago I started to take a hard look at myself and my relationship with attention. I explored medication after fifteen years without it. I found that a mixture of medical advancements and my reasonable level of maturity gave me a much different view of the medication. I learned that I am perfectly capable without it, as well.

Whether I decide to explore medication further or to stick with my self-discipline, one thing is clear. I am who I am because of ADHD and I wouldn’t have it any other way.