I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how easily we allow ourselves to become the stories we repeatedly tell about ourselves. That’s probably true for everyone, but I suspect it’s particularly true if you’ve spent years trying to understand why some parts of everyday life seem to take so much more effort than they appear to for other people.
Long before I knew I had ADHD, I’d already developed a whole collection of explanations for the things I found difficult. I wasn’t somebody who occasionally forgot to reply to an email; I told myself I was disorganised. I wasn’t somebody whose brain found transitions surprisingly hard work; I decided I was bad at coping with change. If I became overwhelmed, I assumed I simply wasn’t resilient enough. Every difficulty quietly became another piece of evidence about the sort of person I believed myself to be, and because I’d repeated those explanations often enough, I stopped noticing that they were explanations at all. They simply became facts.
Looking back now, I can see that I spent years confusing my experiences with my identity. At the time, I wouldn’t have described it like that because I didn’t have the language. I just knew there were parts of everyday life that seemed much harder than they ought to be, and like many people, I assumed the simplest explanation was that I needed to try harder, become better organised or somehow develop the qualities that everybody else appeared to possess naturally.
The first two weeks of this journal have introduced you to ten Monsters, each representing a challenge I’ve come to recognise in my own life. They’ve all been real enough, and I suspect most of them will continue to visit from time to time for the rest of my life. The Inbox Monster hasn’t disappeared simply because I understand him better, and the People Pleasing Monster still has an uncanny ability to persuade me that one more project is a perfectly sensible idea. Understanding ADHD hasn’t removed any of those experiences. What it has changed is the way I think about them.
These days, when one of the Monsters appears, I don’t automatically assume it’s telling me something fundamental about who I am. Instead, I find myself becoming curious about what’s happening around me. If the Sensory Overload Monster has arrived, I wonder how much filtering my brain has been doing all day. If the Rejection Monster starts whispering her familiar stories, I try to ask myself how much evidence I actually have before believing everything she says. If the Rumination Monster decides we’d both benefit from revisiting a conversation for the fifteenth time, I gently remind myself that thinking for longer and understanding more are not always the same thing.
That shift from judgement to curiosity has probably been one of the greatest gifts my diagnosis has given me. It hasn’t made life easier in every respect, but it has made me much kinder to myself. I no longer spend quite so much energy wondering what’s wrong with me because I’ve come to realise that most of the time the more useful question is what my brain might be trying to tell me. Sometimes the answer is that I’m tired. Sometimes I’ve taken on too much. Sometimes the environment is asking more of me than I realised. Occasionally I’ve simply forgotten that I’m human, and humans, with or without ADHD, have limits.
Barry has never seemed particularly interested in labels. He has certainly never introduced me by listing all the Monsters I know, and I’m quietly grateful for that. If you asked him who I am, I don’t think he’d begin with ADHD at all. He’d probably tell you that I like making sense of complicated things, that I’m endlessly curious, that I care rather too much about social work, that I have more notebooks than any one person could reasonably justify and that I get disproportionately excited when an idea suddenly clicks into place. Somewhere further down the conversation he might mention the Monsters, but they would never be the opening paragraph because, in Barry’s eyes, they were never the most interesting thing about me.
I think that’s worth remembering before we begin the next week of this journey. The Monsters make good stories because they help explain experiences that can otherwise be surprisingly difficult to describe, but they are not biographies. They don’t define who I am any more than wearing glasses defines somebody who is short-sighted. They tell you something important about how I experience the world, but they don’t tell you everything that matters.
Next week we’re going to meet a different group of Monsters. They’re quieter than the ones we’ve met so far, and perhaps because of that they can be harder to spot. They whisper about comparison, shame, masking and self-doubt, and unlike the others, they have an unfortunate habit of convincing us that they are telling the truth. Before we meet them, though, I wanted to pause for a moment and remind both of us of something that took me a very long time to understand.
I have ADHD, and I experience all the challenges you’ve read about over the last two weeks. I still have difficult days, I still lose track of time, I still overthink conversations and I still occasionally say yes to things that any sensible person would politely decline. None of those things, however, tell the whole story of who I am. They’re simply some of the Monsters I’ve met along the way. The web was here long before they arrived, and it will still be here after they’ve wandered off to bother somebody else.