Aware

Hi, Morag here! I posted this on my Facebook a few days back, so apologies to those of you who are seeing it for the second time. I just thought that it might be of mild interest to the sorts of folks who subscribe to an author newsletter. Plus who reads Facebook anymore anyway am I right? (Me it’s me I still read Facebook.)

So. Apparently October, in addition to being Black History Month here in the UK, is also 'ADHD Awareness Month'.

I expect many if not most of the folk reading this are pretty bloody aware of ADHD - a good chunk of you probably have it given its overrepresentation among creative types (which I’m sure many of you are).

The proportion who have a diagnosis however will be much smaller. This is for lots of reasons.

In part, it's because many of us grew up during a time when only disruptive, uncontrollable little boys got diagnosed with ADHD.

Girls generally did not, and nor did kids who were obviously very bright and higher achieving than their peers, but persistently falling short of their 'potential' due to perceived laziness, obstinance, carelessness, or lack of focus.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s I fell into both the above categories.

I was so frequently in trouble for being distracted and distracting others that my English teacher grandfather (who mostly brought me up) actually put me 'on report' when I was 8 years old. This was a disciplinary technique employed with badly behaved secondary school kids (presumably still is in some places). You had a little report book, and every day, you had to go up at the end of class (every class in the case of secondary school but for me at least this was just at the end of the day) and get your teacher to fill out a short form reporting on your general behaviour - attentiveness, talking, quality of work, etc - which my granddad would then review.

The (perceived) need for this was never seen as any sort of red flag. I was never assessed for any sort of learning difficulty or disorder - even though my granddad did worry at one point that I was dyslexic because while my reading and language skills were great my writing was for a while incredibly messy and I would mix up bs and ds.

Things got better when I moved to a smaller school in an island environment with mixed-age classrooms that necessitated a more 'project-based' learning approach - although I still got moved to a desk on my own facing the wall so that I wouldn't distract others, and I still persistently got in trouble for failing to do homework and for doodling or reading under the desk during class.

It didn't take me long at all to internalise the idea that I was just a bad person. It was clear to everybody that I was extremely intelligent. I could coast any arts, humanities or social sciences topic, and when it came to maths and science where I wasn't interested I generally exceeded the average even while being castigated for underperformance.

I wasn't inside other people's heads. I didn't know what it was like to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time, or to remember to do homework or take a specific item (a book, gym kit, etc) into school on a given day. I didn't know what it was like to be able to simply listen to everything someone had to say to me without my mind wandering, or being caught like a fly on some other thought. I didn't know what it was like to be able to shut down one's brain and sleep at night, to be able to put down a book once you started it, to be able to watch a film or start a craft project and also be aware of your surrounding stimulus, of time passing, of the need to put down the fun thing and do the other thing like getting your homework out of the way.

So when I didn't do those things - didn't do homework, didn't remember my gym kit, didn't listen when I was spoken to, didn't sleep right... I didn't know that it was harder for me, and nor did anybody else. We all - including me - thought I was just bad. Lazy, careless, thoughtless. Immoral.

But you know, I was smart. I was articulate. So I did all right anyway. I passed most exams. The things I enjoyed, I excelled at. The things I did not, I either scraped a pass anyway, or I failed miserably but on average it didn't matter. I was still dogged every step of the way, even in classes where I was doing well, with accusations of underperformance, of not trying hard enough, but in the end school was easy, so I coasted through to university without ever actually addressing any of my issues, and without ever looking deeper into why my brain worked - or didn't work - the way it did (or didn't).

When I got to uni, of course, like so many of us do, I hit a wall. Independent study felt impossible. Attending classes (without my granddad there to literally yell at me to get out of bed and bundling me into the car and driving me there every morning) felt impossible. Making every deadline for assignments felt impossible. Keeping any sort of day-night sleep pattern felt impossible. (I once woke up, saw it was 3 o' clock, and phoned my aunt in a panic because I was supposed to visit her that day for lunch. It was 3 o' clock in the morning.)

So that was uni. I scraped my degree somehow, rather belatedly, and got a job - eventually I even one where I wasn’t let go and didn’t rage quit. I was lucky enough to have partners who were very sensible and organised and basically functioned as the other half of my brain. I scraped on through adulthood by the skin of my teeth, and I DID form coping strategies, but still I had no idea that I wasn't just Bad. I was still lazy, and unfocussed and unmotivated, and I was still carrying the internal conviction that this was a moral failing on my part. The attainment gap between myself and peers of comparable ability continued to grow, and there seemed to be no explanation for it but my own temperament, my lack of ambition, drive, work ethic.

I was first diagnosed, through a private clinic, with moderate/severe ADHD in 2022. This year I finally got to the top of the NHS waiting list, and was diagnosed a second time.

I am 43 years old.

When we talk about awareness, this is why it matters.