A new kind of ramble- My ADHD journey

Why now? 

I have largely left this blog untouched since 2017 (yet another dropped hobby) but now I feel an urge to take it back up again. An urge to share what my personal journey has been over this last year and ultimately what I have been unknowingly waiting for my entire life. To shine a light on my ADHD and what this journey of discovery has been like is my new compulsion so we'll see how long it lasts!

I would like to be a voice to those who have experienced things similarly to myself and to be honest just unload my mind as all of my new knowledge and understanding is just bouncing around my head 24/7 with nowhere to go so here you are. I am hoping this will start a new series of rambles that loosely covers my learning journey and helpful topics and information I've gathered along the way. It probably won't make sense and I will mostly waffle my way through but I am letting you know now so don't say I didn't warn up. Anyway that's enough of an intro, onto the "interesting" bit..... 

The beginning

Like many other adult ADHDer’s my journey began with the pandemic. I had been pottering my way through life as an outdoor instructor through the year and the winters as a carer. Very active, on the go jobs that were challenging and enjoyable. Then bang! World wide lockdowns, panic and loss. I lost my career, my physique and myself. I found myself moving to a youth worker role which was at first largely home based then office based. This is when I really started to notice my struggles.

I had always been aware I had no filter and saying and doing random things, I had lots of energy, I had strong emotions that I struggled with; these things were always my quirks, what made me me, they were and still are humorous to many. I always had some insecurities about myself and some shame and embarrassment about the daft things I would do/say but life and people had taught me to laugh at them, it was just me and my random personality after all.

But now my ‘personality’ was becoming disruptive. I had little motivation on my own, spending large amounts of my working days doing nothing or watching TV, feeling so low, lacking self-esteem and just feeling useless. Once I moved into the office it got worse, I distracted myself constantly, my colleagues constantly, I was too loud, too energetic, too much. I found I would eat and snack constantly when left to my own devices and I struggled to have the motivation to exercise. It all doesn't sound like a lot or that drastic really but as a person going from being constantly active all day surrounded by people to being largely alone or doing dull laptop work I felt like I suddenly didn't seem to be able to function in 'normal life'.

I began to see many videos on social media that I really related to, I’m sure this will sound like a familiar story for many. It feels a bit cliché now but at the time seeing those videos and seeing myself in them was my first small step towards truly beginning to understand myself. People had always joked that I was different and now I was beginning to see it. Maybe there was something in this, was it more that just 'me'?

I dilly dallied for a long time about getting an assessment because I felt I wasn’t justified, I thought that if I did have ADHD then it wasn’t effecting my life that much! Or was it?

Eventually I contacted the GP and they requested extra information for my referral and sent it all off to Psychiatry UK without even an appointment or a discussion. A very different story from many I know, ironically for me my fight didn't begin until treatment whereas I know many people struggle to even get past gate keeping GPs to access a referral. Psychiatry UK soon got in touch with a portal account and a load more documents to fill in and send off- these took some serious concentration let me tell you! Under desk treadmills have saved my working life. Once completed the wait began.

I know many feel that you don’t need the formal diagnosis to begin learning about and managing your ADHD but I felt like such an imposter, that I needed the validation from an expert to confirm what I was thinking. Because who did I think I was coming along labelling myself!

Throughout my 6 month wait I found information online, social media accounts and podcasts to listen to and really tried to absorb what I could of people's lived experiences with their ADHD and began to understand more fully the different symptoms and the reasons behind them. That really helped me begin to see what ADHD actually was and recognise it more and more in my own life. A series of aha moments and pennies dropping you could say. 

In the hopes of not boring you all to death completely I will do this in short and easy posts because if you're anything like me I hate being faced with a huge block of writing. Follow on for the next installment about my diagnosis and struggle for treatment.

If anyone has actually read this please pop a comment in as it would be great to hear if this resonates with anyone or if there's a topic that would help for me to talk about.