January 7, 2024
It’s January 2024, and I am thirty-four years old.
I no longer believe in setting “New Year’s Resolutions” for a lot of reasons. When I was younger, I often set resolutions I couldn’t come close to achieving. But as I grew up, began to understand myself better, and developed a healthier relationship with myself, I started setting much more realistic and applicable expectations.
Some years, I’ve set intentions. Other years, I’ve simply kept trucking along with whatever was important to me at the time. This year, it’s a bit of both. I know what I want to prioritize in my life—things that fill my cup and help me grow. I also know I want to give less of my time to things that drain my energy or don’t add value to my life. However, there is one very specific thing I’ve resolved to do this year: I’m going to seek an ADHD assessment.
I’m a millennial woman in the TikTok era, and I know I’m not unique in wondering if I might have ADHD. The thought first crossed my mind in 2018 when I became friends with a woman a few years older than me who had recently been diagnosed. As she shared her experiences and described symptoms she’d previously dismissed, I saw myself in her stories. Although I related to her, I didn’t mention it to anyone else. I assumed I was over-identifying or trying to make her situation about me—something I’ve often accused myself of doing.
Then something happened online. As the pandemic unfolded and people began focusing on mental health, more and more stories of neurodivergence started popping up. I could be wrong—maybe this content had always been out there, and the algorithm just got better at delivering it to the right people—but it seemed like everyone was finding out they had ADHD.
For me, it started with a few videos and memes that felt uncomfortably relatable. Gradually, it infiltrated the mental health and self-help content I found most insightful. Soon, I was casually discussing it with friends who shared similar feelings. That led to more videos, more memes, and eventually, books—fictional and educational—featuring neurodivergent characters. Without trying, I even attracted more neurodivergent clients into my coaching programs, many of whom also shared experiences that mirrored my own.
The more I learned, the more certain I became. But with that certainty came fear.
I get overstimulated by noise, especially competing noises, like when two different sources of music are playing at the same time.
I can’t listen to music while I eat.
I procrastinate on important tasks by meticulously completing less urgent ones, like cleaning my house or organizing files.
When I focus on a task, I tend to hyperfocus—forgetting to eat and obsessing over perfection.
I’m constantly a few minutes late for almost everything.I have time blindness and often misjudge how long things will take.
I talk to myself. I tell long-winded stories and get lost in the details. I interrupt and finish other people’s sentences, sometimes with mixed reactions.
I am forgetful, and have to leave things out as visual reminders. Like the reusable container my sister-in-law filled with Christmas leftovers; I washed it, left it on the table, and still forgot to return it for nine weeks—even though I visit every Tuesday.
Every day, memes, reels, and TikToks about ADHD and neurodivergence hit me with something that makes me feel seen, heard, and called out. But so do posts about trauma, anxiety, and other mental health content.
With all of these concepts bouncing around in my brain, I've hesitated to seek a diagnosis for some time. I felt like I had to decide whether I wanted to believe that the way I am is something that can be labeled or diagnosed—or as the accumulation of everything I’ve experienced and how I learned to survive.
If I’m honest, I know both can be true. But they feel different when I hold the weight of them in my hands. That likely has a lot to do with the stigma surrounding these diagnoses—and my own internalized ableism. I’m working on it.
It also comes down to control. I couldn’t control the trauma I experienced at home as a young person. I couldn’t help growing up in a society that taught me my value as a woman was based on my appearance and that I was simultaneously too much and not enough. But now, through years of therapy and personal growth, I’m reclaiming control.
I’ve fought personal battles, grown, set boundaries, improved my communication skills, built a healthy relationship and a small but growing business. But I’m still always running late. I’m hypervigilant. I procrastinate. I forget to eat. I constantly lose my phone. I have trouble wrapping up big projects or getting started on new ones. I regularly worry that people are pretending to like me or just being polite.
At any given moment, my thoughts and feelings swirl in my brain like a game of musical chairs. When the music stops, I’m left standing—fitting, since I have trouble sitting still anyway.
In the moment, these experiences feel normal—not in the air-quote “normal” sense, but in the sense that they are my normal. I’ve accepted myself as an anxious, clumsy, overthinking, highly sensitive, recovering people-pleaser with poor time management. To me, that’s just who I am. And after all the therapy, self-reflection, and affirmations, I’ve learned to to have compassion for even the most challenging parts of myself.
I decided to bring my ADHD questions to my therapist first rather than my doctor because, ultimately the idea of being rejected or invalidated is what has held me back from speaking these concerns out loud up until this point. My doctor has not necessarily given me a reason to think she’d dismiss me, but I don’t feel entirely safe from her judgment. My therapist, on the other hand, has always made me feel validated—even when offering necessary reality checks.
This fear isn’t new. It’s the same fear I’ve had all my life: fear of the reaction more than the thing itself. I’ve always felt the need to explain myself—to justify all of my actions and choices before I'm even questioned on them. I mentally prepare to defend my every decision as if I do not have the right to make them for myself.
I’m afraid of being judged for self-diagnosing. Afraid of being seen as attention-seeking. Afraid I am attention-seeking. Afraid I’m wrong and there’s no explanation for how I feel.
At the same time, I’m afraid I’m right—and I’m not sure what that means.
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