Post by Mya on Feb 14, 2022 8:20:28 GMT
Growing up, I remember feeling unheard, but now as an adult, everything clicks. For example, I don’t like water. Like when people flick water at you? That brings me to pure rage; I do not like to be wet. Even doing dishes, which as a young girl in a Black Dominican culture was difficult. My family would have to bribe me to wash the dishes.
I sometimes go through ADHD paralysis where I’m thinking of all the steps that it takes to do something, so I’m stuck in place. My mind is going one thousand miles per hour. For example, when I’m thinking about food, I’m thinking I’ve got to get up and put some clothes on. Not only do I have to put on some clothes, I just have to get up. That’s the first step. Then I’ve got to put on clothes, I’ve got to go downstairs to check the refrigerator. Now I’m thinking if I want to actually go through the process of cooking anything. If it takes too many steps, I will legit come right back upstairs and eat nothing for hours because I burned out from ADHD paralysis. Sometimes I couldn’t even get off the edge of the bed; if anyone else saw it, they would say I’m just lazy. They wouldn’t understand everything that just went on in my brain and that now I’m frozen in time.
I brought it to my therapist’s attention; I wanted an assessment to dig into this. My therapist said, “If you would have never asked, I never would have thought that you had ADHD, I would just think you have anxiety and depression.” But looking at my history as a child, it makes a lot of sense.
ADHD looks so different for everyone else, especially girls, especially women as adults, especially people of color — than it does for just white males. I’m extra-feminine, and oftentimes feminine-presenting people aren’t associated with having ADHD. When I would say I had ADHD to people, they’d be like, “Oh, but you’re not like my nephew, or you’re not like this person I know, you’re just a chatty Cathy.” But in reality, it’s ADHD, it’s my brain. A lot of us aren’t bouncing off the walls and are super-hyperactive — you could have a more calm demeanor, you can be a lot more shy.
With this in mind, I knew getting diagnosed would give me extreme validation, and I wanted my therapist to help me figure out if what these TikTok creators and these videos on ADHD I watched fit me. There’s an assessment questionnaire that my therapist did. I can’t remember the questions to save my life, except for one of them, which I thought was pretty funny: “Do you interrupt people?” and I was like, “Girl, you know I do.” The following week, we discussed my family history more in depth and reviewed past files from previous sessions to see how it compares to my current answers. From there, we were able to come up with a diagnosis; she told me that I was on the lower end of the ADHD spectrum. There’s this whole negative stigma around getting diagnosed for ADHD, but who cares about what anybody else has to say? Just do it. This diagnosis is one of the best things that has happened to me and all I did was ask.
www.thecut.com/2022/02/black-women-diagnosed-adhd-as-adults.html
I sometimes go through ADHD paralysis where I’m thinking of all the steps that it takes to do something, so I’m stuck in place. My mind is going one thousand miles per hour. For example, when I’m thinking about food, I’m thinking I’ve got to get up and put some clothes on. Not only do I have to put on some clothes, I just have to get up. That’s the first step. Then I’ve got to put on clothes, I’ve got to go downstairs to check the refrigerator. Now I’m thinking if I want to actually go through the process of cooking anything. If it takes too many steps, I will legit come right back upstairs and eat nothing for hours because I burned out from ADHD paralysis. Sometimes I couldn’t even get off the edge of the bed; if anyone else saw it, they would say I’m just lazy. They wouldn’t understand everything that just went on in my brain and that now I’m frozen in time.
I brought it to my therapist’s attention; I wanted an assessment to dig into this. My therapist said, “If you would have never asked, I never would have thought that you had ADHD, I would just think you have anxiety and depression.” But looking at my history as a child, it makes a lot of sense.
ADHD looks so different for everyone else, especially girls, especially women as adults, especially people of color — than it does for just white males. I’m extra-feminine, and oftentimes feminine-presenting people aren’t associated with having ADHD. When I would say I had ADHD to people, they’d be like, “Oh, but you’re not like my nephew, or you’re not like this person I know, you’re just a chatty Cathy.” But in reality, it’s ADHD, it’s my brain. A lot of us aren’t bouncing off the walls and are super-hyperactive — you could have a more calm demeanor, you can be a lot more shy.
With this in mind, I knew getting diagnosed would give me extreme validation, and I wanted my therapist to help me figure out if what these TikTok creators and these videos on ADHD I watched fit me. There’s an assessment questionnaire that my therapist did. I can’t remember the questions to save my life, except for one of them, which I thought was pretty funny: “Do you interrupt people?” and I was like, “Girl, you know I do.” The following week, we discussed my family history more in depth and reviewed past files from previous sessions to see how it compares to my current answers. From there, we were able to come up with a diagnosis; she told me that I was on the lower end of the ADHD spectrum. There’s this whole negative stigma around getting diagnosed for ADHD, but who cares about what anybody else has to say? Just do it. This diagnosis is one of the best things that has happened to me and all I did was ask.
www.thecut.com/2022/02/black-women-diagnosed-adhd-as-adults.html