You Are Not Broken: Why Late-Diagnosed ADHD Can Leave You Feeling Lazy, Stupid and Ashamed

“I’ll definitely start that tomorrow”.

Tomorrow comes and goes.

Days (or weeks) later…

“Oh yeah, right. Damn, I was going to do that, wasn’t I? Right, I will absolutely start on that right after I finish this thing!”

If you have ADHD, or suspect you do, you know how this story ends.

Perhaps you push everything else aside to get it done immediately before you forget again. To deal with the shame of forgetting yet again, despite knowing the task was important to you or someone else.

Or perhaps you forget it entirely.

Surrounded in a whirlwind of things that need doing right away because you’ve put them off until you can’t. Or perhaps you’ve moved from one new interest to another and the task has fallen off the radar entirely. Or all of this.

If you’re late diagnosed, you’ve spent your life being constantly reminded by people or systems that you’ve forgotten again. You’ve had that twinge of shame over and over again.

Your negative self-talk can be brutal:

“I’ve screwed up again.”

“Other people can do this. What’s WRONG with me?”

“I really am useless.”

For some adults this can result in low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, addictions, loss of jobs and loss of relationships, to name just a few consequences.

You’re not doing it intentionally and yet no matter how hard you try it keeps happening.

Maybe you switched on to this fact earlier in life and cope by having everything in your diary, and without it you can’t function. Or maybe you have people in your life taking on this role, intentionally or not.

I’ll be real with you. I had this exact phenomenon about sitting down to write this. I’ve been telling myself I will do it for weeks now.

So WHY do we keep doing this?

We aren’t bad, lazy, uncaring, broken or stupid (insert your own insults you’ve been called here).

It’s our executive functioning that works in a different way.

Our brains are “Ferrari engines with bicycle brakes”, to quote Dr Ned Hallowell.

We aren’t incapable of focusing or remembering. That’s a misconception.

What we might struggle with, however, is being able to regulate that ability.

Can I remember random information about films I heard on a podcast? Absolutely.

Can I remember which food my wife told me needs using up in the fridge before it gets thrown away?

Absolutely not.

Will I feel ashamed that I have forgotten to eat that food, and upset my wife because it’s wasted? Almost certainly.

That sense of rejection can be very intense for some people with ADHD, and the term Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria was coined by researchers to help explain this.

The combination of a differently wired brain that doesn’t prioritise important tasks but interesting ones, and adding extra sensitivity to negative feedback, and it’s easy to see why we struggle so much.

Please understand: you are not broken. You don’t need to be fixed.

Be a little kinder to yourself.

You know exactly what happens when you aren’t, because you’ve likely spent a lifetime doing that already.

PS. If you’d like a little help figuring out how to work with your ADHD brain rather than against it, that’s exactly what coaching is for. Feel free to reach out or drop a comment below.

Photo by Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash.com