Until recently, my life felt full of contradictions. I’m an optimist and thought nothing of managing a house extension while solo parenting a newborn and a two-year-old, nor flying to France as the sole adult surrounded by my three young children. But if the printer packs up or I misplace a notebook, I’m liable to feel overwhelmed.
I focus intently on work, which is such a pleasure as a writer, but when it comes to even-entirely-predictable admin I find deadlines pass me by and I’m left frustratedly paying fines for late tax returns and parking tickets.
I love it when our home is clean and tidy, yet I lose hours regularly looking for lost glasses and car keys, despairing of myself in the process. My husband Mark kindly keeps a power pack charged up that he regularly hands over, bemused, because I frequently find myself with an uncharged phone just as I’m leaving home. Three months ago, I turned our house upside down in search of a poem my eldest daughter Astrid had put huge effort into writing and felt so disappointed that even something that meant so much could somehow disappear (it’s now found and framed, much to my relief).
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If this sounds like the efforts of someone who hasn’t quite graduated into adulthood, I should tell you I’m 46 and I’ve had a lot of practice. I work even harder now that I have children; I never want them to experience the flustered always-a-bit-late feeling that accompanied my early adult years, so I put extra effort to get them into school early. I sometimes wonder how the remembering of PE kits and snacks and getting the right child to the right place at the right time seems so effortless for other parents.
It was when I started paying attention to the number of ADHD posts popping up on my social media feed that I realised how many traits with which I identified. Scattered conversation – tick. Love of deadlines – tick. Bump into furniture (especially on my period) – tick. Sensitive – tick. I started questioning: am I neurodivergent, or simply creative? Do I spend so long looking for my glasses because I’m exhausted, or because I’m neurodivergent? Is it normal to feel overwhelmed as a perimenopausal woman with three young children in a society that offers parents minimal support, or is this a sign of having inattentive ADHD?
There has been a sharp rise in ADHD diagnoses over the past decade, and this is steepest among adult women; according to NHS England, the number of women in their 20s and 30s receiving medication has risen tenfold, from 4,300 to 44,400 in the past 10 years. To try and unpick my own tendencies, I spoke to clinical psychologist Michaela Thomas – who is diagnosed with ADHD herself – about the possibility that I had signs of ADHD.
On our initial call, she asked whether there’d been signs in childhood. The only thing I could remember was how one nursery told my mum that I didn’t rotate around different things to play with, like the other children, but just drew and drew. They were complaining that I was using too much paper and suggested I should try fancy dress, too. My mum told them I was very clever to have such a concentration span (I just wanted to perfect my drawings of raindrops). Recalling it, I suddenly felt emotional: had I been trying to fit in all my life without really realising it?
However, she cautions against self-diagnosing from Instagram reels. ‘Sometimes they’re over-inclusive, suggesting if you ever knock into furniture you must be neurodivergent, because some people with ADHD have poor spatial awareness so many bump into things more often,’ she explains. ‘But that doesn’t mean everyone who does this has ADHD: we have to be careful when interpreting information and make sure it’s from a credible source.”
Michaela only takes clients through to paid assessment when she sees signs of ADHD on her initial call; the way my conversation leaps around subjects makes her keen to explore neurodivergence with me. She offers online assessment or in person. The NHS also offers ADHD assessments; services cannot keep up with rising demand but Right to Choose, where people can choose their provider once referred by their doctor, is free and can mean people receive an assessment sooner (within months rather than years). ‘It’s not the case that there are more people with ADHD, rather that the backlog of people who were missed when growing up are now being seen,’ she explains.
I opt to visit Michaela at her Bedfordshire home one day in May, where we chat extensively about my childhood, relationships, parenting and work – even why I don’t like pubs and prefer saunas – and go through assessment forms and a structured diagnostic interview. I admit I’m sensitive to criticism but try to hide it; how my brain whirs more with perimenopause, but I’ve always had a tendency to ‘overthink’ and hope I manage it well; how my hormones seem better regulated with HRT. I wonder whether I’m going to get a diagnosis of parenthood, or, even, middle age. I hope so. I suddenly want to be told I’m normal – whatever that even is.
We spend the whole day together, have follow-up calls for further questions and she speaks to my mum and brother about my childhood, and my husband Mark about my life today.
After all these conversations, she diagnoses me with inattentive ADHD, meaning I don’t display enough hyperactive traits to meet the criteria for combined type ADHD, which is inattention and hyperactivity. It all feels curiously un-earth-shattering. I’m still me. Crucially, though, I feel I understand myself a bit better and am trying to be more forgiving of myself when I lose something. More surprisingly, I feel a bit more capable of tackling admin and pay off four parking tickets that I’ve been ignoring for far too long. I haven’t thought about medication; my instinct is that simply understanding how my brain works is enough.
Michaela explains there’s a common misconception that people with ADHD aren’t able to focus at all. This is not true, and I’m very grateful for my ability to hyperfocus. ‘It’s about how you regulate attention,’ she explains. ‘So you might focus too much on something because it’s interesting and stimulating, and then struggle to focus on something else. It’s not about the task not being important, it’s that we are stimulated or motivated by novelty, urgency, challenge and interest.’ Which explains those late tax returns.
I ask Michaela how she distinguishes between everyday overwhelm – exacerbated in my case by perimenopause – and ADHD. ‘I see a lot of women who have masked and held their ADHD traits in all their lives as they’ve been conditioned by society to be ‘good girls’ and ‘people pleasers’. They just can’t do it anymore. In their 20s, they could work hard and then rest at the weekend, but as a parent, there’s no respite, you’re burning the candle at every end. Hormonal changes can make underlying ADHD symptoms more noticeable, which is why many women seek answers in midlife. A diagnosis is about getting the right support.’ However, coping mechanisms can camouflage neurodivergence – and it’s important to make an accurate diagnosis. ‘Many women mask their ADHD and use intelligence and empathy to scaffold their lives, so sometimes it is difficult to identify,’ she admits.
She says that everyone feels overwhelmed occasionally. ‘We live in a fast-paced society and our brains don’t get a rest. Part of this is modern parenting, where we all try to be more attuned with our children; part of this is having 12 different inboxes to manage. Humans are built to handle temporary stress. But if you’re neurotypical and overwhelmed, you probably focus better when your plate is a little bit emptier and stress reduces a little. Whereas with ADHD, the focus can be very unpredictable and the overwhelm doesn’t always correspond with the stress of the situation,’ she explains.
While people with ADHD ‘tend to feel overwhelmed by things that other people can sometimes handle’, many experience a positive side to this, too. Michaela says: ‘People with ADHD often thrive in fast-paced, busy environments, such as the emergency services when they run towards a burning building rather than away from it. Neurotypical people tend to be overwhelmed by a crisis, but we often cope well.’ With my diagnosis, the seeming-contradictions of my life have faded: at last, I realise it’s not confusing that I don’t blink at taking three children through a crowded airport on my own, but feel overwhelmed when I can’t find the outfit I’d planned to wear that day or by an easily-fixed printer. It’s simply my neurotype.
