Heedless..

It felt like a city full of people going about their lives, where each thought or idea was a car traversing the city at its own pace, zigzagging through the streets, racing to keep up with the others. Keeping track of what I was supposed to learn or do lost all of its senses, because I could not ever create a single stable mental space where I could focus, relax and get things done. I was therefore very easily misunderstood, as my parents thought I did not want to do my lessons, creating an imaginary world of my own. They thought I was pretending not to be present, when all I wanted was to be able to think clearly and have some sense in my head. In fact, thinking was often a painful process, resembling slogging through a pitch black bog up to one’s knees in mud. I soon stopped trying. And, this handicap remained hidden from me, as well as from others, throughout my first decades of life, only to become blindingly obvious in my adult years.

I was the kid in school who could not keep his butt in his seat and whose eyes were perpetually wooped out the window. Teachers and parents assumed I did not care. I was being defiant. Verbal assaults such as ‘Pay attention’; ‘Stop daydreaming and stop making excuses’ followed me around like a cloud. The truth was, I wished I could pay attention. My mind was a radio with many stations, all blasting at once. It was nearly impossible to focus.

At home, the effort to keep everything connected to the task at hand was thankless. I felt like I was failing less because I did not care and more because nothing I did seemed to stop my attention from ricocheting.
This experience of a constant battle extended far beyond the classroom: it spilled over into the rest of my life. I would experience conversations like I did in the classes: propelling myself headlong from one topic to the next in a sort of mental sprint, without even meaning to. While playing sport, I would often miss the key due to wandering attention.

Socially, it was difficult to keep up with established friendships. For my friends and peers, my attention span was and still is an enigma. I am that friend who begins a story only to detour halfway through before starting another. I am often assumed rude or oblivious. That’s my brain multitasking in real time.

In my adulthood, with more responsibilities, I was pushed to experience these difficulties more profoundly. Avoidance procrastination became an uninvited guest without my knowledge: tasks become more and more daunting as I put them off. I was not lacking willingness to do something but I became scared to do it because I knew I could only do it in a certain way. Often I could not, so that fear left me paralysed and resulted in late submission with a big pile of guilt.

Getting help was a turning point. I, underwent a series of evaluations and consultations with several mental health professionals before being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The diagnosis was eye opening and liberating. For the first time in my life, I had an answer about those patterns, and a reason why they had been there all along. I came to realise that the way my brain works is different, and with that realisation I was able to learn how to cope with my symptoms.

My ADHD diagnosis was a bit like trying on the right glasses for the first time after wearing blurry contacts for many years: it clarified things; many aspects of my difficulties suddenly made more sense. I learned that the very act of procrastinating was itself a consequence of my ADHD, not necessarily a reflection of my character, and that this was liberating. After I found my diagnosis, I was more forgiving of myself and kinder toward my perceived shortcomings.

But post diagnosis, I also saw the ways that my ADHD affected my self-belief and self-image: the thoughtless hurt of others who did not understand how my brain worked, the humiliation of not being compatible with expectations, this absolute tsunami of misapprehension that caused me to internalise the words that said: ‘You aren’t the same as us, you are somehow broken, your brain is not right.’ ADHD knowledge began to counteract the self-doubt, rewiring my self-belief to be grounded in acceptance rather than shame.

The most important was avoidance procrastination. Avoidance procrastination is different from laziness. It is the ability to recognise that it is going to take you such a long time to do a task that you feel overwhelmed. You simply choose not to do the task. That is the nature of avoidance procrastination, particularly common in people with ADHD. My issues with avoidance were severe because I thought differently. My flow of thoughts is rapid. I had difficulties imposing a priority to my thought processes, and in constructing and managing a timeframe. Things that seemed mundane to others could feel as if they belong to a different universe when I viewed them through the lens of my racing thoughts and fears of vulnerability and exposure as imperfect.

This would soon become a coping mechanism: I was avoiding the anxiety of inertia and the stress of persistence. Soon, I started to see this avoidance as less of a failure of willpower and more as a necessary response to the specific kinds of obstacles that ADHD imposed. I came to see my procrastination as symptom rather than flaw.

ADHD has been a constant challenge and a triumph because ADHD itself cannot be cured or resolved. It is part of who I am. It has been a long, winding road toward accepting that I must learn to manage my symptoms rather than attempting to solve the problem. But the journey has been worth it; it has allowed me to continue living and working in the world with a mind that never stops.

In hindsight, I now know that this was not due to being lazy or lack of interest in the material but a different way of processing. If there is one thing that I would tell my younger self, it is that being different is not something to be ashamed of, but rather something to be celebrated. I hope that by sharing my experience, others can relate to what I experienced and realise that they aren’t alone. With the right support and the right understanding, one can thrive with ADHD.