I had my ADHD assessment this morning, and I absolutely have it. I was fairly sure, but the assessor marked me high on hyperactivity, which came as a much bigger surprise than the inattentiveness.
It turns out that hyperactivity looks very different in girls/women to boys/men. In general, boys are physically active and loud, whereas girls are more mentally active – prone to daydreaming and bouncing from one idea to the next. We twirl our hair or jiggle our legs. We pick at nails and skin. We chew the rubbers off the end of school pencils (hi!)
All that said, the question of whether I’d ever hurt myself doing something silly made me laugh out loud. I was fairly sure that jumping from couch to couch, then missing and breaking my leg fell into that category. I was 3 years old.
Something else that I’m surprised at is how I feel now. Yes, I was 99% sure of being diagnosed, but that has been the end goal. Only it doesn’t end there. In fact, it begins. I’m going on to medication which takes trial-and-error to get right, and requires me to monitor my blood pressure. I need to learn how recognise what’s my ADHD and what isn’t.
And there’s an awful lot of learned behaviour to unpack. Stuff that came up in the assessment, like staying inside school at playtime to avoid being bullied, and what’s come up in counselling. I’m having to deal with not being okay and that going back decades. I will get better, though.
