Accidental ADHD

Another non-injury related anecdote that I retell quite a bit, both professionally and personally, is about when I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’m not sure the qualifier to use for how it came about; “accidental” isn’t quite accurate because I paid quite a bit of money and had to schedule a lot of testing sessions for the pleasure of being informed. “Out of spite,” is a little closer but still not fully accurate: although it was a tactical move suggested by a lawyer to get a couple of licks in on our new landlord who was evicting us to move his daughters into our building. To be honest when our lawyer asked if my wife or I had anything remotely considered to be a disability, I snorted and said, “I always joke about ADHD; my friends say seeing a movie with me is really annoying because I don’t stop moving.” Eventually I’ll figure out the right descriptor to open the story with, but ultimately it doesn’t matter too much. What matters is I found out I had ADHD at age 38 through unusual circumstances.

My wife and I lived in San Francisco for over a decade - 14 years for me, both as a single man and as a family man - and my wife a year or two longer than me. We made the typical urban living progression: first with friends, then with each other in a one-bedroom, and then with a larger 2-bedroom flat. We pounced on the place right after getting married; it had been on Craigslist for an absurdly long time (we discovered later it was because the landlords were maddeningly anal about hedging their bets about everything) and we managed to get it. After having our daughter, we began to wrap our heads around staying in this place as long as we could. We were saving money in a city like San Francisco, our place was rent controlled, and it was big enough we wouldn’t grow out of it anytime soon.

Then they sold it, and the new landlords made it very clear they’d be booting us, post-haste. As personal as it felt - and it felt very personal, even though this kind of stuff happens in cities all the time - we tried to be as even-tempered about it as we could. We hired a lawyer whose entire law practice was San Francisco real estate, specifically dealing with tenants being evicted. He was almost friendly, and helped us figure out our options moving forward. There weren’t a ton.

Landlords attempting to evict a tenant without cause don’t have a ton of options either. They can either pay through the nose, in the form of just evicting a tenant, which results in not being able to condo convert or sell anytime in the next lifetime, or having to keep the place off the rental market for 5 years. Or they can pay through the nose by having a relative move in - this allows you to condo convert or whatever immediately - and paying the existing tenants a relocation fee. There’s all sorts of things that force the landlord to pay more in relocation fees that I don’t recall (I do remember it being laughably long) , and one is a tenant having what could be considered a disability.

When the lawyer brought that up we scoffed, and he said something along the lines of “You’d be surprised what is on the list. Glasses.”

Then I made the aforementioned joke about ADHD and we were off.

I had to do the testing after work, which meant long days and feeling not unlike a burglar creep, skulking around an off-the-beaten-path office park after hours, trying to figure out how to get in for my session. After administering so many standardized tests in my classroom to determine a student’s academic level, it was a dizzying sensation to be on the other side of the table. I broke into laughter more than once when presented with a memory task that I just absolutely could not do. Performing in a vacuum - no, not exactly that; performing for a cypher on the other side of the table, with no clue as to how “right” my answers were - was a surreal experience.

After a week or so, I had a phone session with the psychologist. I remember sitting on our couch in front of bay windows, watching the sun begin its descent into the sea, the ocean air blasting through an open window as it did every night. I don’t remember the precise words, but she confirmed that, all jokes, restless legs in movies, inability to focus in college lectures, trouble sleeping, interest I was sure I would stick with this time, argument with my wife about not feeling like I was listening to her, difficulty with completing unpreferred tasks, and tendencies to completely check out aside, I had ADHD.

I can and do joke about it now because I’ve figured out how to integrate it into my identity. It makes sense, and I’d like to think I’ve shaken hands with it. At that moment, though, I had a very real “life flashed in front of my eyes” moment. Immediately, I bounced through my memories, off of scene to scene, sense memory to sense memory; each excruciating second I recalled trying to do something I desperately wanted to do, and failing every time. It wasn’t your fault, I heard myself tell myself. You were trying the best you could. It wasn’t because you weren’t trying. It's because you couldn’t.

I think my understanding of what it means to have ADHD has helped me immeasurably. It’s given me a frame to use if I’ve frustrated someone by my behavior. It’s given me a way to harness it, deliberately, so I can do my difficult, pants-on-fire multitasking job really well. But it’s also helped me have more empathy for the students I work with, and they in turn feel seen by me. Because I know that flavor of shame you feel when you’re trying your hardest but you just. can’t. get it. done. You feel like it’s a failure, a lack of willpower. Clearly I must not want to, otherwise why haven’t I? And then that pattern continues, and you feel more shame, and that quality of disappointment just becomes part of what you do when you do stuff, so expectations better be tempered.

So, in the interest of ADHD Awareness month, I guess my parting bit goes something like this. I wish I had known sooner. I spent a lot of time not liking myself as a direct result of not understanding this part of myself. I’m glad I know now, and it feels good to understand myself more fully. Not to be corny, but to anyone who’s been diagnosed later in life: I see you. And I see that thing over there. And I see the laundry I forgot to fold because I was about to feed the cats but SHIT the water’s boiling.