ADHD and me

What is it actually like to live with ADHD? Nicola Jayne Little is a social entrepreneur who set up the ADHD support group 'Celebrate Difference’, and Tania Martin works with organisations around neuroinclusion. They have both recently been diagnosed with the condition.

Nicola - It's like 3 billion thoughts all at the same time and never being able to get to the end of any of them whilst tripping down the stairs and not being able to find your keys.

Chris - Do you mean as in you've got so many things you feel you want to do, need to do, have to think about, that it's hard to prioritise.

Nicola - Absolutely. And there is never a time that the thought gets to the end of the thought because all of the other thoughts have barged their way in, uninvited mostly, and knocked the thing I was thinking about in the first place. And that could be anything. It could be, 'what am I going to have for tea?' And then all of a sudden I'm painting a wall. It could be 'how am I going to do this latest project at work?' And I end up in bed playing a game. There is never a time for me where one thing smoothly leads to a conclusion.

Chris - Your experience, Tania? Same?

Tania - Yeah. Very similar. I describe it as I've got a million little trampolines in my head and thoughts bouncing off these little trampolines. And I can go in all sorts of random directions and I never really know how I sometimes end up where I end up in terms of what comes out of my mouth. And the other thing for me is that I really struggle with time and a sense of time. So I don't really understand what time means. So five minutes to me could mean an hour in real life for somebody else because I could potentially get lost in time, in terms of what I'm focused on. On that as well, if I need to be somewhere and I need to be there in five minutes, I then potentially have a challenge in terms of getting there in five minutes because as I said, time means nothing.

Chris - Is that because you get sidetracked by things and then sort of go down a rabbit hole, almost like YouTube videos where you get sucked from one thing into the next, into the next and you lose sense of time? Or is it just that you have no sense of I need to hurry, I need to be somewhere and this is how long it's going to take?

Tania - It's the latter. I have no sense of time. So if somebody says to me, I'll meet you downstairs in 10 minutes, if I don't see what the time is on a clock, I won't know how long 10 minutes has been. So it means for me that I spend a lot of time staring at a clock and staring at a diary to make sure I'm where I need to be at the right time.

Chris - Have you noticed, Nicola, we've been on this interview for an hour now and Tania hasn't noticed.

Nicola - I mean, honestly <laugh> it could be years, it could be <laugh>.

Chris - But being serious again, Nicola, when did you realise that life was not like that for everybody you're describing sort of tripping down the cognitive staircase all the time, and Tanya's got a hundred million trampolines in her head. Was that always the case? And when did you realise that that might not be the norm?

Nicola - So I remember feeling different when I was nine or 10. To feel different is my norm. And then through my teens and twenties, I knew that the way I perceived things and the way I reacted to things, whether that's at work or outside of work, wasn't quite the way I thought everybody else was doing it. I had this feeling that I was never quite getting there. I was never quite achieving my potential, but I didn't understand why. So most of my life has been 'why does this keep happening?' And I had to ask my dad, 'dad, why do I keep ending up in these situations?' And then at 45 I read something, I'd been scrolling around and somebody had put a list of problems and challenges that she'd had. And if you just took her name out and put my name in, that was my list. That was my life. She had literally summed up in a paragraph 30 years of my questions. It was the most bizarre moment of my life.

Chris - Tania, did anyone hold up a mirror to you like that and say, this is the symptoms and you immediately recognised yourself? Or was your experience different?

Tania - I actually found out about my own ADHD when I was upskilling myself in my role. So I was having to learn about neurodiversity, which is that broad umbrella term that includes ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, et cetera. And when I was doing it, I was going down the list and I was like, tick, tick, tick, tick. That's me. It was like a bit of a light bulb moment for me. And I've also known for most of my life that there's been something that hasn't quite fitted. And in fact, I was actually diagnosed with anxiety and depression at the age of 13 and I have spent my whole life trying to fix that anxiety and depression because as I mentioned, I have a lot of thoughts. If those thoughts aren't good thoughts that can then manifest itself in potentially anxious and not so happy circumstances. So the ADHD diagnosis for me was a light bulb moment that shone a light on why I have struggled, as Nicola said, to fit in, you feel different. So I've worked in corporate for 20 years and I always felt like it didn't quite fit. Diagnosis gave me that sense as to why that was.

Chris - And Nicola, why did you decide to actually formalise your diagnosis? You read that list and you thought, yeah, that's me. A lot of adults would probably have said, 'well, that explains a few things, but life goes on.' So why did you actually decide to go and make this formal

Nicola - For me to get a diagnosis that gives me an explanation and a reason, not excuses but an explanation, and a reason for why my patterns of behaviour as they are gives me half a chance to do something about that. But if you're always guessing or never quite certain, for me, and this is probably my autistic self, I can't see how you can do anything positive with that. I had to have my diagnosis because until it was rubber stamped and someone told me, for sure it wasn't, or it may not be real.