The Year It All Made Sense
“You may be astronomically brilliant, but you have no common sense.”
“You’re the dumbest smart person I know.”
Two different statements, from two different people in my family, and heard across a span of about 25 years. Said with a mixture of love and bafflement and bemusement.
These questions begged the ultimate question: how can you be as smart as you are and still….
not notice things
forget so many things
not be able to think of the right words
take so long to catch on to jokes and conversations
For most of my life, I had no idea. There were periods when I felt like an alien on the wrong planet. Times when I felt like a complete moron. Social interactions and settings were difficult for me, which I always misinterpreted primarily as social anxiety. I felt like I was constantly missing the joke, struggling to follow a conversation, especially if it was noisy, or not able to think of something to say quickly enough to participate. It was incredibly frustrating… and eventually did lead to social anxiety.
In contrast to all of this I was, in fact, pretty smart. I was an avid reader. I loved school (the actual school part… learning and writing papers and all of that fun stuff). I did well in school (4th in my graduating class) without making too much of an effort. Things didn’t change much when I got to college.
I was also always hyperorganized. I was the one color coding everything, putting sticky notes everywhere, and always buying a new planner. This was always part of my nerdiness.
Things started to change a bit when I got married. Marriage is completely different dynamic than parents or siblings or friends or even roommates. The level of vulnerability and accountability and cooperation that is required is immense. And that’s when I started thinking of my communication quirks as something more than social anxiety. I wasn’t socially anxious with my husband after all!
I was in school and then working as an SLP at that point in my life, and I began to think about my own processing skills. “I’m a slow processor,” I would tell my husband when I froze in the middle of a tense conversation, unable to respond to what was going on.
And then there were the memory and attention and impulsivity issues (not that I would have called them that at the time). In our marriage, it was things like…
Mixing up our towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom
Needing to label our towel hooks or color code our toothbrushes to finally remember
Turning off a ceiling fan minutes after being told it was being used to dry clothes
Not noticing that the refrigerator door was left open (over and over and over)
Forgetting something I was supposed to get at the store because it wasn’t added to the written list
Freezing up in grocery stores if we went in without a list
And then a cycle began which is so common for relationships where one is neurotypical and the other is neurodivergent—the misunderstanding cycle. I felt like I was trying really, really hard to get it together and was frustrated that he couldn’t see that. He felt like nothing he said mattered because it seemed like I wasn’t listening or didn’t care. I felt like I didn’t have time to think and organize my thoughts during a serious conversation so that I could respond and participate appropriately. He felt like I was deflecting to get out of hard conversations. And we looped and looped and looped with no apparent answer to our problem.
Something started to shift a year or so. I had started looking much more seriously at neurodivergent affirming therapy services, which included learning a lot more about neurodiversity and the specifics of ADHD and Autism. The more I read about ADHD, especially how it presents in girls, the more the pieces started to come together.
One day, after watching a funnily presented social media post about ADHD in women, I looked at my husband and said, “You know, I’m starting to wonder if I have ADHD.” We kicked the idea around for a while and the more I read, the more convinced I felt. In the spring, after a particularly rough patch where I was crying regularly and feeling completely unworthy as a wife, I decided to make an appointment.
I was relieved when the first thing I did was a computer-based assessment because I was so worried that I would answer questions in a way that I knew would give me the diagnosis, even if it wasn’t completely true. At that point, I was doubting myself and my memory and my perception so much I didn’t feel like I could answer a questionnaire about myself and get a true picture. Getting put in a room and told to attend to this random little task for 20 minutes… that was something I couldn’t fake my way through. Sitting in the next room with an NP 30 minutes later and hearing actual scores—scores on things that I didn’t even know they were measuring—was the biggest relief and validation.
It’s been six months since I was diagnosed. I’m not taking medicine (because I can’t swallow pills and I just don’t like being on medicine. Insurance also doesn’t cover it, and it’s hard to stomach paying that much for something I don’t like and am scared I won’t stick to.) I’m still trying to wrap my head around what my diagnosis means.
Is this an ADHD thing? What about this one? Can I make this one better, do I need to accommodate it, or do I just need to accept it?
There have been times when I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. Because I better understand how my brain functions, I’m able to work with it a bit more. I’m able to advocate for what might help me more frequently.
But there are still plenty of times that I feel utterly lost.
Yesterday, on the way to my family’s house for Christmas, I cried again. I texted my husband and apologized for him marrying an alien. He didn’t know I was an actual alien when he married me, after all. I just had some quirks. But as I cried, I reflected on how I…
didn’t trust my memory for situations.
didn’t trust my interpretation of conversations and body language.
felt taken aback when I realized something I had done or said resulted in an unintended result because I didn’t predict the outcome or generalize something we had talked about previously.
struggled to understand exactly what it was that had triggered the negative result or response.
It’s still a process, obviously. But at least I have a bit of something to anchor me. I’m not an alien, my brain just works differently. And that’s okay. Insanely hard but okay.
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