The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

I was talking to a friend who was taking his middle school-aged daughter to be diagnosed as a person who lives life with ADHD.  I told him that I was fifty when I was finally diagnosed, and everyone said, “We could have told you that,”  But they didn’t. I also told him that I think society has a more complex assessment of girls with this neurodiversity than they do with boys. He said he would like me to say more about that, so I will.

First, I want to say I have had a very good life, and I believe that most people wanted me to succeed (probably overly optimistic, but I always navigated life from that perspective). I also, have never believed that any man nor woman held all of the power who made it their goal to make me feel diminished. That being said, there are some assumptions made within our culture by both men and women that shape how they interact with gender issues.  

For one thing, I think that little boys enter this world in a more neutral position than girls. They can move up and down the spectrum from good to bad and back again without much judgment.  “Boys will be boys,” and Little boys are made of Snips, Snails, and Puppy Dog Tails.  Compare that with the girl euphemisms that say “Pretty is as Pretty Does” and “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice is what little girls are made of,” then you understand that our culture has set up an expectation of behavior that is often difficult for all little girls to maintain and sometimes overcome. But added to the idea of “near perfection” is the belief that females keep things organized and set the bar for cultural behavior. Both are expectations that a little girl with ADHD struggles to live out in their own life, much less to keep the whole world moving smoothly.

Suppose the little girl is living out her life with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. In that case, she is often someone who feels like they are regularly disappointing those around them and themselves. As a child, I truly wanted to make people happy. I was a middle child as well as a person who knew I thought differently from others, even though there was no diagnosis or a condition people talked about. I came to think of myself as a people-pleasing non-conformist because even if I tried with all my might to fit a mold, in the end, I had to go with that idea that I believed to be the best way, even if no one else saw it. It was often a lonely journey, and when and if it turned out to be a good plan, since I had come in the backdoor, the credit was usually accredited to someone else.

The words that are used to describe boys with ADHD are noisy, restless, creative, and risk-takers, but little girls are seen as flighty, daydreamers, procrastinators, lazy, foolish, and not trusted to make their own decisions. Often, if they have an idea, it takes Herculean effort to prove it can be done, or if attempted, it is accomplished with little buy-in because it might be a waste of someone else’s time.

However, there is another issue for girls that I have never seen discussed in addition to those preconceived shortcomings: the added confusion associated with the onset of puberty. I do not know if this is true for other girls/women, but after puberty, there was one week out of every month when everything clicked for me. I could complete things, see dirt, and focus without hyper-focusing. The people around me were delighted that I finally responded to their admonishments and was pulling my life together.  I counted on that week, but unlike others, I knew that the reprieve was temporary, and for three weeks out of the month, I returned to my unorganized life, which confused and disappointed people around me. People who just wanted me to be successful in the socially acceptable ways of the world.

I purposefully said unorganized rather than disorganized because disorganized indicates that it was organized at one time. The best description of my brain function was that I had no easy-to-access template for accomplishing a task.  When non-ADHD people have tasks to perform, their brain organizes the steps in an orderly and prescribed way. Their brain moves from one step to the next without having to process each move, stop to evaluate, think whether there might be a better way, and then circle back to where they were before they got off track.  It is exhausting, and if your brain doesn’t spiral, whirl, and fling itself out only to slam back to the beginning, you have no idea what a person with ADHD is experiencing, and telling that person to focus or concentrate only exasperates the problem. 

I always thought I was lazy because I had such a hard time accomplishing an assignment until I began to watch people effortlessly write down their thoughts, and I realized I was anything but lazy.  I worked so much harder than others to achieve similar results. Forgiving myself was the first step toward not being my own worst enemy.  I remember the day my mother was critical that I had someone help me clean my house, and I said to her, “I do not criticize you for having your hair done by someone because you are ‘Not good with hair,’ Why is having someone help me clean my house any less valuable to my wellbeing? That was a step toward freeing myself from the shame of having a brain that did not function in a societally appropriate way for a woman.

After years of struggling with this reality and being told by multiple therapists that I did not have a problem. “Why, my goodness, look at what you have accomplished in your life,” they would say. I have multiple graduate degrees, held jobs with a lot of responsibility, raised children to adulthood, and maintained a marriage; what more could I expect of myself?  For starters, I needed some acceptance of the toll it had taken on my soul.

So, one last time, I went to see someone that several people suggested might help. I formulated three questions that I presented to him: Why do I have cyclical depression, why do I always need two places to live, and why do other people think I have so much more power than I believe I have?  I was fifty years old when he said, “Because you have ADHD,” and I broke down and cried. I looked at him and said, “I have been bringing the broken pieces of my life to people for years, and they have dismissed my struggles and pain with pep talks and suggestions of how to be better. Thank you. It is not that I did not need the pep talks and suggestions; I just needed to start from a place of understanding and acceptance for myself.

There are some things about my neurodiverse mind that I love. There is humility and acceptance in working with others that provides space for them to be different from the norm, as well. I love how it allows me to see windows and doors where others see only walls, and I love how it lets me laugh “with” myself rather than flailing at my limitations.  At the same time, I know I have to work harder than others to accomplish similar results, but it is a glorious moment when the sun breaks through on a new idea that needs to be explored. Peace and grace to us all.