Last year, at age 46, I was diagnosed with ADHD.

It was a relief more than a surprise. It answered so many questions and was a later-life gift I vowed not to squander. I hoped this was my chance to become consistent enough to get traction, the way I’d seen I could if the conditions were just right…

For years, pursuing my goals has felt like driving a supercar with a faulty fuel gauge. Moments of greatness, so much potential, but often spluttering and stalling before I’d reached my final destination.

For me, and presumably, others who flew under the neurodivergent radar for so long, my ADHD did not show up in the typical ways I’d read or heard about.

• I was not physically hyperactive or a non-stop chatterbox
• I was not easily distracted
• I was not a space cadet who was always zoning out
• I was not always losing stuff

In many ways, I was the exact opposite: highly observant and detail-oriented.

My brain runs an operating system that generates ideas easily and starts projects with enthusiasm and passion, but regularly used to stall at 98.5% complete, leaving a shame-inducing graveyard of projects behind.

Each node of my mental mindmap clicks open to hundreds more. As a creative, it’s amazing. As a business owner, it had become exhausting and maddening, like trying to climb an icy slope.

I’ve explained my experience of ADHD to friends and family as “a self-trust disorder” and “a disease of underachievement”.

I find certain “difficult” things like solving complex tech problems easy and fun, yet some “easy” things have for years felt near impossible.

For example, I found it extremely difficult to manage projects. The advice to “just break it down into smaller steps” had me internally screaming “but how?!“.

I don’t naturally see linear steps on a timeline. I see the big picture, sometimes with 360-degree clarity. I just have to dive in and swim around in the experience for a bit, knowing the details will arrive as I need them. I can’t get to the details until the details get to me.

Conversely, I’ve worked with colleagues and students who can’t get started until they identify and are comfortable with every step, start to finish.

Neither approach is wrong, but both can cause undue stress and overwhelm if you’re forced to use the one that isn’t natural to you.

ADHD time is either “now” or “not now”. Between the two is a huge unknowable void. This means it was basically impossible for me to judge how long a project would take to complete (because it totally depended on how interesting I would find it as it went along). Usually, I just guessed. I told clients a project would take X days/weeks. Then I did as much as I could right away before the first rush of that New Project Smell faded, and prepared myself for the inevitable all-nighter to bite me in the ass the day the thing was due (or the day after, for extra adrenalin).

Once you get old enough and wise enough to realize what you’re actually capable of, it’s maddening to see that you’re the one letting yourself down.

I tried not to beat myself up too much and got better at reaching out for help.

Along the way, I got some solid mindset work and business skills under my belt. It all made sense theoretically, but somehow I was never able to apply it consistently enough to get any traction.

Thankfully, with the right medication and lifestyle changes, those days are safely behind me. I’ve been able to apply all the stuff I know I need to do, and I’m now easily able to grab a single idea from that big swirling orb of them above my head and transform it into a linear step-by-step to-do list. AND see it through to completion. Each small step I complete gives me a dopamine hit of satisfaction – just like a standard issue brain. The feedback loop now works.

All the inner work that I “got” yet had found so hard to apply/stick with has fallen into place like a well-rehearsed performance. The curtain’s up, and I’m finally able to meet my commitments to myself and to others with consistency. When I hear myself say “I’ll get it done by the end of the week”, I actually know I will.

As a former natural health practitioner, I was that person who wouldn’t consider taking medication because I believed there was a natural and most likely superior solution out there.

I’m so glad I got over that BS narrative and gave the meds a try.

I would say it’s given me my life back, but that would imply there were “before” times when this wasn’t a problem, and that’s not the case. I’ve never known anything else.

It’s not that I had no willpower to do things I found boring, far from it, I wanted nothing more than to fulfill my promises to myself and others. If only to escape the cycle of shame.

I read productivity books and downloaded apps and timers. I would sit at my desk and prepare to start, seriously “applying” myself (as my school report cards urged me to from a young age), but unless I was working on something I found genuinely fascinating, my brain fogged up and refused to work properly. It was like trying to accelerate with the handbrake on. My 50 open browser tabs (“leave it open so you don’t forget!”) became the mental equivalent of opening the fridge and quickly forgetting what you were looking for, over and over again.

What was happening?

Well, it turns out our brains need dopamine to function properly, just like they need oxygen.

Without properly functioning reward circuitry, that feeling of satisfaction when something is completed? It doesn’t happen. The only dopamine comes directly from enthusiasm for the work itself. For a while, I called it Intention Deficit, but now I know it’s got more to do with dopamine uptake than anything else. Put really simply, the neurons that fire and receive dopamine are what create the feedback loop of reward circuits that keep us going, even when things are boring or hard.

The research shows that with ADHD we either don’t create enough dopamine in the first place to run this system and/or we do but our receptors can’t receive enough, so it doesn’t reach where it needs to go. Therefore, only tasks that provide a good amount of dopamine upfront (something that excites us) can fire up the engines and allow us to concentrate and take action.

It is so hard to explain this condition without the underlying feeling that people think you’re just lazy/unmotivated/flaky/or somehow otherwise weak-willed.

In these early days, I still need to remind myself that it’s no different from the way I need glasses. Nobody feels people with vision problems should just try harder to see better. They accept the solution and get on with their lives.