And somehow we’ve reached the end of October. When I started introducing you to the Monsters, I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when they were all in the same room. Twenty-two ADHD Monsters, an Emotional Sponge, one spider with a purple mohawk and an increasingly complicated web feels less like an awareness campaign and more like the beginning of a particularly questionable children’s television programme. Yet here we are.
Over the month we’ve met Monsters that interfere with time, attention, transitions, memory, sensory processing, emotions, decisions, relationships and the stories I tell myself. Some have been funny because humour is one of the ways I make difficult things easier to talk about. Others have been harder to write because there’s a significant difference between laughing about an Inbox Monster and looking properly at rejection, masking, shame or burnout.
What I hope has emerged is that none of them makes much sense in isolation. ADHD doesn’t arrive as twenty-two separate symptoms taking turns according to a convenient calendar. The Monsters bump into one another. Overwhelm affects communication. Sensory load reduces capacity. Rejection feeds rumination. People pleasing creates commitments. Commitments increase overwhelm. Hyperfocus can produce brilliant work while simultaneously making transitions almost impossible. Pull one thread and somewhere else on the web moves.
That’s why simple descriptions of ADHD have never felt quite enough to me. They can tell us what somebody does without necessarily helping us understand what it takes to do it, what happened immediately beforehand or what happens afterwards. Understanding begins when we become curious about those connections.
The Monsters have helped me do that because giving something a face and a name creates just enough distance to look at it without turning it into a judgement about myself. I can notice that the Time Monster has arrived without deciding I’m hopeless. I can recognise the Rejection Monster’s voice without automatically believing everything she says. I can spot Overwhelm before the whole crew has been invited round.
I haven’t defeated any of them, and that was never the point. They’re part of the landscape of my ADHD, and several of them are connected to things about my brain that I wouldn’t actually want to lose. Curiosity can become distraction. Sensitivity can become overload. Persistence can become hyperfocus. Caring can become people pleasing or emotional absorption. The work is not removing those parts of myself; it’s learning when they’re helping, when they’re costing me too much and what I need when the balance shifts.
Barry has spent the month doing what Barry does best. He’s never tried to straighten the web or turn it into a filing cabinet. He simply keeps helping me see the connections, find the thread I need and remember that a tangled moment doesn’t mean the whole structure has failed.
So I don’t think the final day needs a battle between Barry and the Monsters. I think it needs a party. The Time Monster will arrive at entirely the wrong point, the Side Quest Monster will disappear halfway through because she’s found something fascinating behind the speakers, Hyperfocus will take control of the playlist and refuse to surrender it, the Emotional Sponge will need reminding that everybody else’s excitement isn’t his to carry home, and Rumination will probably spend tomorrow analysing something somebody said near the buffet.
Barry will be somewhere above them all, purple mohawk immaculate, quietly keeping an eye on the web, and I’ll be there too: not cured, not fixed and not transformed into a perfectly organised person who always knows where her keys are, just considerably better acquainted with the creatures I’ve been travelling with all along.
Perhaps that’s what awareness should give us: not another list of things ADHD people supposedly do, but enough curiosity to understand why an experience might be happening, enough compassion to stop turning every difficulty into a character flaw, and enough practical knowledge to make things work a little better. The Monsters aren’t going anywhere, neither is Barry, and neither, thankfully, is the web. Welcome to the Monsters’ Ball.