It was the fall of 2021 and, by most standards, I had taken on a ridiculous amount.
I had just become CEO of PayNW. I had joined the IPPA board and immediately stepped onto the executive team. I had three kids at home, two in hockey, one in club gymnastics, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had this idea for a leadership development company, Värkrz, that I really wanted to get off the ground.
And as I looked at that list, I remember thinking:
If I got on Ritalin, I could probably do all of this.
Which, in hindsight, might be the most ADHD sentence I have ever said.
The funny thing is, at the time, I was convinced I did not have ADHD. I just thought medicine would upgrade my already busy operating system.
So I went to my doctor and told her I thought I might have ADHD. She handed me a questionnaire. My intention, honestly, was to answer it in whatever way got me the medicine.
Turns out, I did not need to exaggerate.
The questions started out easy enough
Some of the questions felt ridiculous.
“How many times have you been fired?”
Never.
Not once.
Honestly, I could not even imagine it.
I have only really had two jobs.
At first, the questionnaire almost felt validating.
See? I knew I did not have ADHD.
Then came the other questions.
“How often do you lose things important to a task or activity?”
Well…
I do not think I have ever completed a task without losing something important to that task.
Keys. A notebook. The one document I absolutely needed.
And my personal favorite: immediately buying a replacement for the thing I lost, only to discover it was somehow right there the entire time.
Apparently, most people do not repurchase things they already own simply because they temporarily disappeared into a parallel universe.
News to me.
Which also means my husband has apparently been right for years when he gets annoyed that I bought something we “already had.”
Although, in my defense, if I could not find it, did I really have it?
As the appointment went on, I started realizing something uncomfortable.
Maybe I was not trying to become more productive.
Maybe I was trying to solve something I had quietly been navigating my entire life.
Because the version of ADHD I grew up hearing about in the 80s and 90s looked nothing like me.
I could sit still. I was not disruptive. I was not bouncing off the walls.
I was just constantly trying to outwork a brain I did not yet understand.
And if I am being honest, the signs had always been there.
I was smart, but school and I were not exactly a match made in heaven. I did not have the grades to go to college, and at the time, that felt like failure.
For a long time, I quietly assumed that meant I just was not smart enough.
Now?
I honestly think it may have been one of the best things that happened to me.
Because my brain has never been the “learn from a textbook” type. My brain learns by doing. By building. By solving problems. By connecting dots. I learned far more in the workforce than I ever would have sitting in a classroom.
But school did teach me something important about myself, even if I did not understand it at the time.
Back then, insurance companies gave discounts for good grades. You needed at least a 3.0 GPA, and my dad had made it clear: no 3.0 meant no help paying for car insurance.
No car insurance meant no freedom.
Funny how quickly priorities shift when freedom is on the line.
After struggling through freshman year and the first half of sophomore year, I somehow managed to squeak out exactly a 3.0 every semester after that.
Exactly a 3.0.
Not honor roll.
Not a 3.4.
Just enough.
Because when something mattered enough, somehow I could always figure it out.
That is the thing we do not talk about enough when it comes to ADHD.
People with ADHD are not incapable. We are often incredibly capable.
The challenge is consistency. Interest. Urgency. Importance.
We can do extraordinary things when something matters enough. We just cannot always force our brains to care about the things that do not.
People with ADHD are not incapable. We are often incredibly capable. The challenge is consistency. Interest. Urgency. Importance.
The question underneath the question
Somewhere between that questionnaire and my doctor asking follow-up questions, I had a realization:
Maybe I really do have ADHD.
Because apparently, most people do not look at an already unreasonable list and think:
You know what this needs? More.
And suddenly, a lot of things started making sense.
Not all at once.
Not magically.
But enough to make me start asking different questions.
What if my brain was not broken?
What if it had just always worked differently?
Because for years, I had quietly assumed the hard things meant something was wrong with me.
That maybe I just was not disciplined enough.
Focused enough.
Smart enough.
But sitting there, for the first time, I started wondering if maybe I had been asking the wrong question entirely.
Maybe the question was not:
What is wrong with me?
Maybe it was:
What if my brain works differently than I thought?
And somewhere behind that question was a bigger one, the one I was not ready for yet:
What if ADHD had actually been working for me all along?
Gratefully,