Adult ADHD – Page 6 – ADHD surprise

How Undiagnosed ADHD Impacted My Home Life

As you seek an ADHD diagnosis, your doctor or psychiatrist will ask about how it is impacting your home life, as well as work or school. The challenges we face which drive us to seek mental health services will almost always stem from one or more of these major arenas. And as you look closely, you will find the impacts of ADHD in all areas of your life.

As my diagnosis of ADHD-Inattentive came well into adulthood at age 37, I have found plenty of signs of its impact at home, work, and school. Though I of course experienced them all as they happened, I accepted what I had always told myself: that these were the simply signs of a good-for-nothing, lazy, and possibly incompetent person. Someone who did not care for his things, his family, or himself. A person lacking motivation to take care of even simple, every day tasks that every adult is simply expected to do.

As ADHD was given this camouflage of laziness, it wreaked havoc on my home life. After my therapist brought up ADHD I was able to begin to see all of the damage that had been done. Here I share some of the major areas of impact that I have observed in my home life as an adult.

Organization

I have always struggled with organization, and my adult home is no exception. First off, I own too many things. There’s a massive sense of guilt attached to letting go of anything that might one day be useful, and a great deal of nostalgia surrounding a multitude of belongings I’ve kept since childhood. I have collections gathered from many, many past fixations that are neatly stored and awaiting the day when the fixation might resurface.

All of these belongings greatly exacerbate the general state of disorganization that permeates the house. The farther you are from the front door, the more my belongings exist in piles. Historically this has been worst in the garage and an extra bedroom which came to be known as “the storage room.” Both areas tended to grow in clutter until I literally just threw items through the door onto the pile because either the mess was so bad the extra item wouldn’t be noticed, or because I could no longer enter the room without stepping on something.

My own bedroom has often gotten to a state where (predominantly) clothes dominate the space: in baskets, on the floor, or piled on open drawers. Tops of dressers and night stands are covered in clutter accumulated by dozens of drive-by drops as the rest of the house gets “cleaned.” Even the cleaner parts of the house like the living and dining room will collect small piles of clutter around the edges of the room and on top of flat surfaces. These get somewhat spruced when the infrequent guest stops by, but often are ignored as we become blind to the existence of the smaller piles.

I can clean and organize things, and every now and then I will muster up the drive to do a massive cleaning or organization project and I can completely fix a room or two over the course of several hours. But typically that is a one-shot deal and within a week or two the room has returned to its usual cluttered state.

Lack of maintenance

I always admired my dad for how well he took care of his things and family. Our house and acreage, many cars, various pets, and of course us humans in the home too. He was always working to improve and/or maintain things. For example, with his cars he kept a notebook for each one where he would log the maintenance he performed. These notebooks existed for the entire time he owned each vehicle. If anything became broken on the property or on a vehicle, it was fixed almost immediately.

I have always felt like a failure compared to him. No matter where I live, my home or apartment is in a constant state of decay, and though I may even notice what is happening I simply don’t have the drive to do anything about it. Many home-improvement projects are lying around started but unfinished and there are several items that are broken and have been awaiting repair for years.

This lack of maintenance also extends to myself. Routine things regarding self-care are very difficult to sustain with regularity. I have developed a few routines that help me (usually) stay on top of the basics like brushing my teeth and showering. But ‘bigger’ self care items like going to the dentist and doctor are put off for years in favor of the “go when it really hurts” plan. It’s not a great way to stay healthy.

Relationships

My undiagnosed ADHD was particularly challenging for my partner and my kids. My fixations were often all I could think about and took all of my time and attention, usually taking priority over all family matters. I would rarely help with chores around the house unless I was asked. I simply didn’t feel any drive to clean and do dishes or laundry. And when I did resolve to make changes, they would only last days or weeks.

A big part of my ADHD is emotional dysregulation. My emotions run very close to the surface and that means that anger, frustration, fear, happiness, sadness-any or all of these can come rushing out. While I can usually hold things together at work throughout the day (where there are real world consequences for ‘losing it’), I tended to lose it at home instead, where the immediate consequences for doing so are less severe. This often meant yelling at my kids or being surly with my wife when they weren’t really the source of the frustration or anger.

Managing life tasks

Poor executive function is the culprit for a lot of things I struggle with. I have low impulse control and tend to spend money on frivolous things or items related to my current fixation, whether we can afford them or not. I completely forget about or am slow to pay bills even when I have money to do so. An incredibly poor short term memory equates to a lot of broken promises to family members and many forgotten and neglected responsibilities.

Time blindness is another hallmark of ADHD. For me it shows up in a few ways. When I’m hyperfocused, I lose track of time completely and hours may pass. If I’m doing something that’s required or imposed, time my drag on and 10 minutes can feel like an hour. It also impacts larger passages of time. While I may think I called my dad earlier in the week, if I check the call log, it may show that as much as two months have passed. I’m horrible at keeping up contact with family and friends who are long distance.

What now?

This list surely isn’t exhaustive, but I believe it gives a pretty good picture of the major impacts that undiagnosed ADHD had on my home. I hope that reading it helps you identify some of the ways ADHD has impacted your home so that like me, you can begin to make changes for the better as you gain knowledge and supports to combat your symptoms.

Just discovering you have ADHD can be life-changing, as you can begin to build supports and routines into your life to counteract many of the symptoms. But for me, treatment through therapy and medication have been necessary. What isn’t helped by medication can be supported through therapy as you break down mental barriers and create new routines together. Things aren’t perfect for me at home yet, but I am seeing a huge difference for the better as I’ve begun treating my ADHD in earnest.

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Signs of ADHD From Before I Was 12

At some point in your ADHD journey, you’ll need to consider the subject of this post. It’s an important topic, and one your doctor or psychiatrist will likely ask you about if you’re seeking an ADHD diagnosis as an adult.

Why is this so?

ADHD doesn’t come out of nowhere. Yes, the symptoms can be masked and/or may not have a significant impact early in life. Especially those ADHDers with the inattentive sub-type like me can often go undiagnosed until we hit “the wall.” This could happen in middle or high school, college, or that first high-expectations job. But that wall will eventually present itself and you’ll realize something is wrong.

For me the wall came in college, when I nearly flunked out my first semester. That’s an easy enough thing to point to and looking back, the struggles I had were clearly due to undiagnosed ADHD. But as I mentioned, ADHD doesn’t just suddenly appear late in life. So as you examine your life before age 12, you should be able to identify symptoms of ADHD, even if they didn’t necessarily impede you from obtaining early success in school.

Possible indicators of ADHD from before I was 12

I was terrible at keeping up with homework
I was a heavy procrastinator
I would struggle with large projects, being indecisive about how exactly I wanted them to be done; initially wanting perfection, but often settling for whatever I half-assed at the last minute
I was drawn to screens. Typically video games or cartoons. Saturday mornings I would get up by myself (even though I had three siblings) and I would watch cartoons starting at 6:30am until about 11am (when programming switched to daytime TV). When I realized there was a cartoon at 6, I got up earlier. And then 5:30am. I had to get as much as I could.
I was prone to addictive behaviors with my fixations, which at various ages included Dinosaurs (ages 3-5), school, reading, video games (original Nintendo!), Cub Scouts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cartoons, Legos, baseball – both playing and collecting cards, and food – especially sweets.
Low impulse control overcame personal values. I would often lie in order to cover up school problems and I frequently stole items related to my fixations.
My room was typically a messy disaster
I struggled regulating emotions, and when I got angry I would slam my bedroom door and throw my belongings around my room
I was asked by peers about my showering habits (in 3rd and even 7th grade)
I had private violin lessons for years but only practiced independently a handful of times
I had very few friends
When given the opportunity I would play video games for hours. One day in the summer I played the original Legend of Zelda from breakfast until dinner, not realizing that I’d developed a painful blister on my thumb from doing it.
I was very sensitive to social rejection and would often cry because of it
I preferred my fixations to my peers, at times even reading on the playground rather than engaging with others

When you look at that list it can seem like a lot of negative. There were a lot of great things about my childhood – they’re just not the focus of this post. When I went looking for ADHD in my early life, that’s what I found. In an earlier post, I discussed why I didn’t get diagnosed when I was younger. That one covers the other side of things – the behaviors that helped cover up these symptoms.

In fact, when I first shared my ADHD with my dad and a couple of my siblings they were surprised to hear about it. Because as extensive as this list seems, and as much impact as ADHD actually had on me, it was covered up by early success in school and a lot of little lies at home.

So is everything on that list exclusive to ADHD? No. You can lie, steal, throw tantrums and love cartoons and video games and not have ADHD. But when all of this evidence is taken in the context of my life since then, as well as the continued struggles that emerged from these early indicators, it’s clear that they fit the pattern of ADHD and help to complete the puzzle that is my life.

Examining your childhood for ADHD

As you consider your life before you were 12 looking for signs of ADHD, some helpful questions might be these:

Did you have any fixations that lasted for months or years, where that was all you wanted to do or learn about or talk about?
Did you struggle with organization and planning at home and/or school?
Did you have low impulse control, possibly giving in to lying or sneaking and stealing to get what you wanted right away?
Did your bedroom look like a tornado went through it, even if you cleaned it earlier in the day?
Did you struggle with regulating emotions – where you were often overcome by anger, sadness, or even happiness to where you weren’t in control?
Did you have trouble keeping up with mundane tasks like homework, chores, and self-care?
Did you feel socially isolated?

Though this list is neither diagnostic nor exhaustive, I found some of these questions helpful in guiding me through the process. I hope they will also help you as you work to connect the dots between being an adult with ADHD and discovering the child you were with ADHD.

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ADHD Voices: Corrin

When I was 12 years old, back in 1998 before computers and internet access were a household reality let alone necessity, I was sitting in my social studies class as a lecture was going on. My teacher, whose name I can’t remember now (and that is probably for the best), would sit at the front of the class and just talk at us for an hour and it was usually agonizing to sit through if I wasn’t daydreaming.

Thing is I was always daydreaming. And one particular day I was doing just that when she called on me to respond on something she just said. But I had no idea what was going on. I froze like I normally did because that was how I was conditioned. She looked at me with disgust and said I was going to grow up and just flip burgers at McDonald’s for a living. The whole class laughed at me. I was so angry and hurt. I also thought to myself that if she weren’t so boring maybe I’d pay more attention.

Back then I didn’t know I had ADHD, among other things, so that constant daydreaming in her class wasn’t entirely my fault. I didn’t get my official diagnosis for ADHD until May of 2019, when I was 33 years old and in my second year of college. I didn’t even know what ADHD entailed until I really started to struggle. College schoolwork and situational depression were taking their toll.

My psychiatrist didn’t explain all of ADHD’s symptoms to me even when I kept telling her I was struggling to focus and concentrate—that it had always been that way. I thought things should have improved by then since supposedly I was on the right medications for my bipolar disorder.

Everything I know about ADHD I have learned from other ADHDers on Twitter and articles and a book or two. All I had been waiting for and all I needed was an explanation of ADHD and its core symptoms. Suddenly, more of my life made sense. I’m far better off now that I have my ADHD medication and some answers.

Growing up

CW for childhood abuse. I’ll avoid graphic details obviously but I didn’t have a good childhood growing up and ADHD played a role in that. I didn’t deserve to be treated the way I was treated and if you had a bad childhood too and also have ADHD know that you didn’t deserve it either. You should have been loved and cared for unconditionally regardless of what you could or couldn’t do.

Many things were demanded of me and I was constantly set up for failure. One of my two abusers really wanted that anyway, and no one cared enough to look for the underlying problems I was having or to bring me to a mental health care professional.

When I hit puberty, things got worse

I was actually really successful in school up until then, but at the time I didn’t realize it because of many factors: I had always struggled with math, was constantly talking in class, was often caught not paying attention, and had emotional outbursts. A few times I was sent to the school guidance counselor or the special needs teacher in order to relay troubling behavior that was happening at home.

All of these things always got me into trouble at home despite all the A’s and B’s I was getting in school. They didn’t matter because I got a C in math and I was again reported for talking in class. The school reports always said the same thing, “Very bright, but doesn’t try hard enough.” What I heard at home was worse—things a child should never hear from caregivers. When I entered sixth grade I just stopped trying all together, which of course, only made things that much worse.

That wasn’t my fault though and if you have ADHD and was in the same boat I was in, know that it wasn’t your fault either; people should have realized you needed help and love and that you not trying at school was a cry for help. Someone should have helped you. You deserved to be cared for regardless of your behavior.

ADHD and being transgender

I’m transgender; a non-binary trans man who very recently figured out that I have a complex gender dysphoria. I’m talking about this because the emotional issues that come with ADHD played a role in delaying my understanding my gender identity and the complex feelings that I have as a trans person. When you have ADHD you sometimes get stuck with emotions that you have no explanation for feeling and have to play detective and figure out what caused them.

I had many signs growing up that my assigned gender wasn’t what I was.

When I was twelve and sitting in that social studies class, I thought about how I didn’t feel like a girl but I also didn’t feel entirely like a man. I tried to draw that in order to understand my feelings. Someone saw what I was doing and was very cruel to me. In shame I got rid of the drawing and forced myself to not think about it.

At twelve I had no idea what being transgender was let alone that there were more than two genders. I would grow up with a lot of complex feelings and at times a blunt affect for reasons that I couldn’t explain. I thought I was a misogynist because I got angry whenever someone referred to me as a woman or used my deadname–which literally means ‘girl.’ I also got very hostile when my mom wanted me to wear more feminine clothes.

Figuring it out

I never completely made the “I’m non-binary transgender” connection until I was 30 and trying to work through some trauma in a workbook designed for women that my therapist gave me. I was being very snarky—so angry at having to fill out questions that I wasn’t really thinking about my responses to them. Then I got to a question that asked, “What makes you a woman?” Before I realized what I was doing I very angrily wrote “I’m not a woman” in jagged, frantic letters. I remember freezing after that and thinking, “Wait, what? What does that mean?” and spending the rest of the day contemplating what I was if not a woman.

That day was four years ago, and the time in between has been, well, somewhat odd. I realized I was non-binary that day, but it wasn’t until months later that I realized I was transgender. I came to that conclusion when I realized that the only reason I wanted my breasts was because my marriage partner liked them. I certainly didn’t, and don’t. Thankfully my marriage partner, or my ringmate as I call him, loves me for me—regardless of my gender and how I present. Due to the emotional dysregulation from my ADHD, I didn’t realize I had such complex dysphoria until a month ago just before I turned 34.

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Having ADHD has made life quite a trip and I’m still figuring things out. If you are struggling to figure things out and need someone to talk to, you can reach out to this stranger on the internet at @ArtistSomeday on Twitter. I may not know what to say but I will certainly listen and care about your problem and hopefully help you find an answer or something like it.

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ADHD Voices is a series dedicated to sharing the stories of folks like you and me who have ADHD. Posts in the series are written by guest authors, sharing windows into their lives and struggles, written by them, for you and me. If you’d like to share your story, please contact me on social media or through my email, ADHDsurprise @ gmail.com

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