You Weren’t Too Sensitive. You Were a Kid With Undiagnosed ADHD.

For parents raised as girls who recognize themselves in their child’s diagnosis

If you are a human who was born with a uterus, perhaps you noticed somewhere around middle school that the other kids seemed to know social rules that you didn’t. Maybe reading text for class was boring and stupid and you had to reread the same paragraph five times and still didn’t understand what it was saying. Perhaps other people told you, not infrequently, that you were “sensitive,” and that your emotional reactions did not make sense and “normal” people do not respond to things the same way you did. You may have also had some subjects that you performed really well in and loved intensely, and others that were like reading Greek and in which you were not remotely interested. Maybe you worked really hard anyway and got good grades, but maybe your grades were all over the place, generally reflecting subjects you were and weren’t interested in. 

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While much of what is described here is often understood as ADHD, you might recognize yourself in these experiences even if your story includes other forms of neurodivergence. The point isn’t limited to one label. It’s that something real was missed.

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You may have developed anxiety and/or depression, and felt deeply moved and upset by things happening in far corners of the world that your peers could not relate to. Perhaps you frequently lost your keys, ran over your cell phone with your car, misplaced school assignments (or didn’t do them at all). Perhaps you experimented with substances and discovered that it enhanced your social abilities and turned off your brain for the moment. Of course it makes sense if this feels like a win-win.

At some point, you may have developed strategies or skills to help you manage (or not). You found a career that provided enough novelty and stimulation to regulate it, and things may have worked okay in adulthood for a time. Maybe you found yourself in a job that had too much stress and demand, and you landed in burnout. Alternatively, you could have found work that did not have enough stimulation, and you quit jobs frequently.

Perhaps you became a parent, and found that you were overstimulated and overwhelmed constantly with the demands associated with caring for a tiny human. You wanted to do it right, and you loved your kid deeply, but you couldn’t figure out why you sometimes yelled at your toddler, or became unhinged when you tripped over a lego. Other parents who seemed calm and chill may have perplexed you, and you wondered, again, if other people knew something that you didn’t know. 

Your child started school, and you were excited about it (but also devastated, because they’re getting older). It meant less demand on you and you didn’t have to pay for full-time childcare and someone else could entertain your kid for a bit. But then you started getting phone calls from the teacher about how your kid did something “wrong” in class. Eventually, you may have gotten tense any time you saw the school’s name pop up on your phone, because you learned to expect that on the other side of that phone was an adult calling to tell you your kid was an asshole.

Eventually, “all five year olds are like that” didn’t work any longer, because other kids were settling down and able to sit in chairs in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade, but your kiddo treated the classroom like a game of the floor is lava. If your kid was flagged as needing support, perhaps the school suggested an evaluation and a 504 plan or IEP. If your kid wasn’t, maybe an annoyed teacher suggested you should “get that checked out,” and your pediatrician administered a Vanderbilt scale that registers your child’s ADHD as off the charts.

You start to learn about what it means for your kid to have this operating system, what kinds of support they will need in school, and what you may need to adjust at home in order to make it work better for your kiddo. You may also start to wonder… does this fit me too? 

A period of hyperfocused social media and internet research ensues (or maybe books or podcasts), and you find new folks to follow on social media who are talking about “neurodivergence,” and your brain literally breaks in half to accommodate this new information. A period of deep grief, with bouts of intense rage, may ensue. You may begin reviewing every moment of your life, and understanding your challenges in a whole new way. You may be incredibly fucking angry that there were so many adults around you: parents, teachers, team coaches, doctors; and still no one caught this. 

You may stay in this space of processing your grief and rage for a while, and you may even try to explain it to your parents or your siblings, hoping that they will see the light and treat you with more understanding and empathy. You may not be able to make them hear you, even though you try really hard. You may also start noticing how much you have spent your life working really hard to seem normal, often to your own detriment.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. You might land on ADHD as an explanation. You might not. Either way, these patterns are worth paying attention to. As Gen-X or Millenial neurodivergent humans with uteri, please remember that the adults were not aware that we existed when we were kids. ADHD was considered a phenomenon reserved for boys who couldn’t sit still in class and talked too much, and girls went unseen. Period. A handful of us may have been caught in adolescence or early adulthood and had some awareness around it. Most of us didn’t, and we were left with the shame and guilt of not being able to stay organized. We were sure that our need for rest and social breaks was just because we were lazy. Our struggles with brushing our teeth, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, and putting laundry away meant we were broken.

But we are not broken. We’re just differently wired, and we have needs that are not accommodated in the world as it is designed, and we swim in the bullshit of ableism every day of our lives in a culture that hasn’t evolved since the days of the Puritans. We have experienced great harm in educational systems, by medical professionals, in our places of employment, from our families, from the media, and from every built structure in our society. 

When people have been harmed in community, it can be a natural tendency to go inward and reject other humans before they can reject us; however, our greatest healing and liberation can actually be in community, with other neurodivergent humans. It does not have to be a whole group of people, but just one person who gets it can be such a balm. Being with someone and not having to explain that you need the lights to be soft, that it can’t be too loud, and that you’re going to look at every damn person who walks in the door and you’re not being an asshole is a healing social experience. Laughing with other people about the number of root canals we have had performed, or how fucking hard bedtime is, or how dumb it is that we have to cook dinner every. single. day. can be the beginning of a whole new life in which we learn how to adjust our environments to support us, how to build things within our control that feel acceptable to our bodies, and how to recognize the ableism around us so that we can make choices in how we respond to it. Not feeling alone in our suffering can light the flame of building a whole new life in which we experiment and set limits and prioritize our energy so that we can have a life worth living.

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— Megan Mitchem Clinical MSW Student Intern, Divergent Path Wellness

Megan offers sliding-scale individual therapy and facilitates the Messy Moms+ Compassion Club, an in-person peer support group for ADHD parents (no formal diagnosis required) in Charlottesville.

If this resonated, you can find upcoming group dates on our Events Calendar.