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My ADHD Diagnosis Took Nearly 30 Years
The signs were there growing up, so why was it so difficult to spot my symptoms?
I knew something was desperately wrong with my memory the morning I forgot to attend the first day of classes in my second year of grad school.
I didn’t merely oversleep — my brain simply didn’t register that going to school that day was even an option. In my nearly 20-year educational history, I had never missed the first day of a new term. As I lay in my bed and thought through all of the options, I settled on setting up an appointment with my therapist. The morning’s rigamarole confirmed what I had suspected for the previous few years — that I had ADHD, and now it was affecting my life in ways that seemed beyond my control. It was time to get answers.
After graduating from college, I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. (ADHD is typically comorbid with various mood disorders.) Due to my previous diagnosis, doctors chalked up my increasing inability to concentrate as a symptom of bipolar depression. It took me a few years to admit to myself that while, yes, I suffer from bipolar depression, not being able to concentrate was depressing me further — it had become a feedback mechanism. I could take inventory of my life before the onset of my bipolar II disorder and the present, and I knew there had been some major changes in my day-to-day life. I had gone from a college student who never needed to keep a calendar to remember my appointments to a young professional who would leave my keys on top of my refrigerator. At work, I would constantly lose time — I’d start a task and instantly begin daydreaming, and before I realized it, hours had gone by. Working as an editor proved difficult when I couldn’t concentrate long enough to thoroughly read everything — or even realize that I hadn’t read everything. At home, it meant that my room was in a constant state of disarray. I constantly felt like I was playing catch-up and that I was expending every modicum of energy I had just to keep up — it was exhausting.
According to the statistics, I’m not alone. I was one of an estimated 4 million women with ADHD who are undiagnosed. Fortunately, that underdiagnosis rate is slowly changing. A 2018 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined…
