ADHD - a feminist issue

 Women/girls were not included in an Adhd study until the 1990s and were only included in a larger study in 2002. Most dont get diagnosed until after they've had children.

What makes my blood boil about that, is that i am told time and time again that feminism is unnecessary. The patriarchy no longer exists. We are all equal now. 

I wandered around the school corridors, lost, unable to find my classroom in year 9. I was in a school for 3 years and still unable to find my classrooms and dealing with the shame of that would have been ok, it meant I missed a single PE lesson which was no big deal and they were my thoughts sitting on a step in what I thought was the PE department. A teacher found me, in tears and questioned if I was a new student, I wasn't. She looked at me confused and irritated and i felt humiliated because I had no explanation for why I couldn't do something as basic as find my own class. There was a map in my planner. I couldn't explain to her why I didn't understand it and it didn't make any sense to me. I felt even more humiliated and ashamed. I think if id walked over to the nearest window there and then and started licking it she wouldnt have been surprised at all, she would have expected it.

Being unable to produce a decent piece of work in English until it involved a creative design for an advert and the English teacher being genuinly surprised that I wasn't thick as shit after all.

Crying at a wedding because someone said "it's got nothing to do with you"

Hearing Oscars crys in the white noise, hearing him crying when he wasn't crying

The front part of my brain actually hurting as I forcefully push cars around with him

Needing to spend days in bed at a time to recover from single parenting for months

Missing or being late in baby classes and play dates with friends from time blindness and forgetfulness with no explanation at all them believing you simply don't care. 

Having absolutely no capacity to be a partner as well as a mother. 

Having no capacity to be or do anything other than be a mother. 

My marriage breaking down

My divorce overwhelming me to the point of 0 productivity whatsoever

Not allowing myself a break because of the pressure I put on myself to reach a neurotypical standard

Distracting myself from divorce that I burn myself out hyper focusing, painting an elephant, because I have to achieve something, anything. 

Im annoyed that I never got my adhd diagnoses till a few years ago because im still figuring out what I can and can't do. I'm still setting myself an agenda that only a neurotypical person could achieve and giving myself a hard time when I don't achieve it. 

I have a friend with fybro myalgia. At its worst It's pain all over the body. On a really good day, she feels as though she could run and walk like a normal person without the condition but if she did that, she would suffer greatly with an immense amount of pain after. That's the same for me. if im having a good day, I'm like, great, I'm basically neurotypical and then i burn myself out and have to spend days in bed recovering from the overwhelm. 

I set myself unnatainable goals and then shame myself for not being successful in them.  I'm like a disabled hamster that puts myself on the wheel, that then cries because it's not moving. 

My point is this, if I had been given my diagnoses much earlier on. If I could have told that teacher that I wasnt broken in the head, that I had ADHD which is too much all at once in the head and quite the opposite of broken. 

If I had known how overwhelming having a child was going to be, I could have been better prepared, I would have asked for more help instead of shaming myself out of it. I would have made so many different decisions and made so many more requests and asked for so much more help because I would have had a reason to ask. 

Not an excuse. A reason.

You don't know how long you've been masking, how long you've been shaming yourself out of or into something until it becomes so overwhelming that you have no choice but to drop the mask and let it go. 

The patriarchy HAS impacted me. It has impacted all of us undiagnosed ADHD women. The chaos and the carnage in our lives that has been caused by a lack of diagnoses, by mostly the shame and the pressure we have been putting on ourselves for years.

I don't regret how my life has turned out. I am by no stretch, successful by societies standards but I have travelled the world and had some amazing experiences and memories. i have produced some amazing photos and works of art, i am learning to figure skate, i have an extensive knowledge in narcissm, Vincent van gogh  and i know enough Spanish to get a pregnancy test and get by in a Spanish speaking country.  

I can Irish dance a little, I play piano by ear, i sing, I can make a window seat and the list goes on, all because I have ADHD. because I'm a risk taker, because im impulsive and because I can hyoerfocus on a topic of interest at the time so much I can be or produce wonderful things. 

Im lucky that my parents always encouraged my new interests and always encouraged my creativity and pushed me to travel and that has allowed me to celebrate my ADHD and im grateful.

But I still wonder what my life would have been like, had they included girls in ADHD studies as well as boys in those first ADHD studies.