ADHD & Me

Six symptoms which define my mind

I was diagnosed with ADHD in the spring of 2023 after the masquerade of me being a neurotypical person became impossible to keep up. The three years since have been a bit of a minefield of trying to figure out what the almost forty years of near-constant braincobblers have meant, what I do to deal with it in the moment and what coping with it looks like going forward. I can’t be medicated due to other, less whimsically framed health issues, so here are the SIX main symptoms I live with and if you are undiagnosed and read through all this (or most likely skim over it) and think “but Owen… everyone experiences this” then my friend, you almost certainly have it too. Soz… but also welcome to the club.

Symptom One - Overthinking

BrainCobblers

I’ve always imagined my teeming racing endless mind noise as being like physically dragging around an unwieldy sack stuffed with thoughts. Robin Ince defined his own ADHD as like having five conflicting internal voices all loudly talking to you at the same time and this is quite a good way to imagine it. It really is like a constant noisy babble composed of; harsh self-critiques, endlessly repeating snippets of half-remembered music or quotes, humorous asides, SUDDEN TERRIFYING INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS, dense philosophising, predicted dialogues both real and imagined and maybe twelve to fifty other things. It’s an exhausting internal world that needs constant venting, hence the near infinite stream of babble I’m able to emit from my face, but letting air into the thought-sack inflates it and the more I talk the more kind of… overwhelmed and giddy I become. The teeming thoughts become unmoored and roll around bashing together in a dizzying miasma and trying to keep focus is really hard. To pick just one out of all of the whirling thoughts is not in my wheelhouse because of …

Symptom Two - The Total Inability to Prioritise

The self-made wheel of distraction

This (alongside intrusive thoughts) was the symptom that caused me to seek a diagnosis in the first place. I’ve literally never been able to adequately prioritise anything and it has a serious detrimental affect on every single aspect of my life. The shape of the thing I need to do or I desperately want to do is the exact same shape as a billion other things both real and imagined. It takes serious amounts of willpower and energy to pick a task or an object. So largely I don’t. I’ve built myriad elaborate lists and systems to take the anxiety out of choosing things and these Rube Goldberg contraptions then often trap me in them and prevent me from getting on with what I actually needed to do in the first place.

“But Owen… you’ve managed to fully write a whole substack post, surely you chose to do that?”

Oh my sweet summer child. This blog post is also part of an elaborate system and I’m sat here writing it instead of doing a million other things. The wheel of distraction turns and I cannot move..

Symptom Three - Hyperfocus

The living statue

The oft-referenced squirrel-like attention span of the ADHD mind is easy to spot, easy to mimi -Wait what’s that outside-?! …what was I doing? Oh, right, this. What’s harder to quantify is the exact opposite which is also a thing. A razor-sharp terrifyingly all-consuming focus that will occasionally allow long endeavours like this to actually get finished. My flesh turns to stone, the world disappears, I completely forget that I need fluid and sustenance or whether it is night or day. I am the void. This could actually be construed as useful if I could turn the damned thing on at will, but I can’t. I enter this void at random, and very frequently I do at inopportune moments. It can be legitimately physically dangerous. WAIT THAT OUTSIDE NOISE EARLIER WAS A GIANT CRASHING ZEPPELIN IF ONLY I’D MOVED! OH THE HUMANITY. Thankfully I had begun to fidget so much that it missed me...

Symptom Four - Restlessness

The ADHD-topus

Now this is your classical attention deficit symptom, I was diagnosed as a “combined type” which means I display a mix of both hyperactive and inattentive symptoms. I’m a slovenly gentlemen with a horizontal aspect which makes it harder to spot my jitteriness than it would be in a purely hyperactive individual, but I DO JITTER. I jostle and jiggle. I jump and clap and stamp and I drum the table so constantly that in my teenage years I ended up panel-beating my preccciousss One Ring into a “One Triangle”. Post diagnosis these restless movements feel less like "vibing with the invisible rhythms of life” and more like constant impulsive tics. Autistic people frame these unusual compulsive subconscious movements as “stimming” and this description makes sense to me. Squeezing my hands, big squinty blinks, restlessly clicking my fingers and sometimes actually just getting up and wandering off…

Symptom Five - Impatience

off he goes

I think this one is a heady mix of a learned behaviour and the old neurodiversity, but I have a deep and serious lack of patience. I find it almost physically painful to wait for anything, especially if I don’t have something (or better yet several somethings all at once) to distract me. I get what I call an “itchy brain” when things are happening too slowly or if there’s any form of repetition which bugs me no end. This indefinable itchiness, an internal jitteriness if you will, undermines most of my earnest endeavours including this one. Because now I’m going to impatiently wander off this very topic and into a brief tangent about a some dark aspects of my character. These ominous traits are known as “oppositional defiance disorder” and “pathological demand avoidance”. I have a deep hostility towards being told what to do or even being externally defined in any real way. I feel it in my bones and doing some things is like making two wrong-ended magnets meet. It can’t happen. This doesn’t produce very likeable behaviour so I tend to mask a lot of this away with silly talk, with stupid pictures, with barked asides. Wait… do you hate me now?

Symptom Six - Rejection Sensitivity

Finally… this is the one that really hurts and maybe, of all the symptoms, has had the most severe impact on my life. Fear of rejection, or fear of the fear of rejection. It’s a hard one to define but it’s definitely a neurotic overreaction to perceived social rejection and it has led to lost or abandoned friendships, serious professional disagreements as well as a severely limiting fear of trying new things. If I feel overwhelmed by this feeling (or by outside feelings generally) I go into a sort of inattentive fugue and clam up totally. For some reason it always takes roughly fifteen minutes to shake it off and feel things again. I don’t love it, but the people who love me have seen this side of me in motion and they forgiven it and through them I have learned to forgive it in myself somewhat. Which, at the end of the day, is all we can really do to move forward.

In Conclusion

I’m disabled, man. I have been for much longer than I first realised and I’m only on the first steps at the bottom of a massive pyramid of self understanding. There is always more to know as our cultural and medical understandings of these conditions expand. The first thing is to accept it in yourself, to embrace it as a truth and to move forwards with it unashamed.

It is at times, terribly terribly hard to live like this, without the option of medication and with the state of mental health support being as it is in the UK. Part of the reason for my swift diagnosis was getting into a seriously dark place with it all. I’m here now because of my indescribably luminescent partner Jazz, my everglorious daughter Astra, my supportive mum, my omnipresent childhood friends and emotional sounding boards Robbo and Richard and a breathlessly wonderful pantheon of lovely people both new and old who fill my life with meaning and who are nice to me and who I want to be nice to back. I can’t do it without you. This life, I mean.