ral-across-the-universe:burningbee: I figure out I had ADHD last year, but I didn’t seek an of
ral-across-the-universe:burningbee: I figure out I had ADHD last year, but I didn’t seek an official diagnosis and medication until this year. I’m 30 years old, my school days are long behind me. I slipped through the cracks because I have predominately inattentive type and I was a quiet little girl. Having ADHD does not mean you have to be hyperactive and loud, it means you have a processing problem in your brain that doesn’t allow you to regulate your focus or emotions. Mental health even now is still taboo to talk about. People are more open now than ever about it however and that gives me hope. This is a profoundly personal comic and it only reflects my own experience with ADHD. It is on a spectrum with a wide range of personalities. But if my story connects with someone else and helps them, that would mean the world to me. THISTHIS THIS THISThe first day I took ADHD medication 5 years ago, i was astonished. I told people, “It’s like i’ve been wading through hip-deep mud my whole life, and I never knew other people weren’t. I couldn’t figure out why i could never keep up, I just tried and tried and tried harder, but it turns out they never had to wade through the mud at all.”I didn’t even test positive for ADD because all the questions were about hyperactivity and not inattention (”How many times during a meeting do you need to get up and pace around the room?” What? None. But I can’t keep my brain from wandering off for more than three minutes). I’m so glad the psych i saw believed me enough to try it. I never would have been able to go back to school without it, i wouldn’t have survived. It’s not perfect, I still have to wade through the mud sometimes, and sometimes it’s still rough without the mud anyway - but goddamn, the difference is amazing. Just over 2 years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD.I was feeling overwhelmed and depressed—which was not super surprising, because work was crazy and my mother was going back into chemotherapy again—and went to see a psychiatrist. And while he spoke to me about depression and stuff, he mentioned he thought I might be ADHD; being ADHD himself, he was more sensitive to those things. I was pretty skeptical; ADHD was that whole ‘can’t stop moving, rowdy and uncontrollable, etc.’ thing, which wasn’t me. I was the daydreamer who had trouble keeping my thoughts on track and things organized, except for those times when I’d seize on something and stay up for three days straight working on a project. But he said that was a form of ADHD too, so… hey, he’s the psychiatrist.He had me take a test, which I have described before as “the most infuriating video game ever”: a screen would show you a colored shape for a moment or two, then it would vanish, then another would appear. If the next one that appeared was the same, you were supposed to push a button. It also had a sensor tracking your head movement, to see if you could pay attention to the screen or if you found yourself looking elsewhere. And this would go on for like… 20 or 30 minutes, but it felt like 10 hours. At the end, he remarked that I tested as borderline ADHD, but probably didn’t require medication. Life went on.And then a month or so later, when I showed up for my appointment after work, he was puzzled by the fact that I had little bloody fingernail-marks in the palm of my hand and asked about it. And I mentioned, as though this explained everything, that I’d had a two-hour meeting at work that day. I was a theoretically-functioning adult, but it had somehow never occurred to me that other people did NOT need to dig their fingernails into the palm of their hand to use pain to keep their mind from wandering off in meetings. (You know, that “oh, someone said