T
he first semester of my se-
nior year was, academically,
the worst semester of my life.
I was enrolled in only six credits but
found myself in a deep depression spi-
ral, unable to do anything — to focus,
do any work, care about my passions
like writing and The Michigan Daily,
but mostly I couldn’t take good care of
myself.
Writing and photography are the
only things that come naturally to me
and are what I want to spend my life
doing. But when my journalism pro-
fessor messaged me on Slack to say,
“We missed you in class today. Could
you respond to this message so I know
you’re okay?,” my partner had to draft
a response as I drifted away, lost in the
shame and embarrassment of it all.
“I can’t have another semester like
this one,” I said to her after she sent
the message.
“I know. You also don’t have to. It
doesn’t have to be this bad,” she said.
And after months of resisting, be-
lieving I deserved it all, that was the
advice that clicked. I made a psy-
chiatry appointment to see what was
happening in my head. Hopefully a
doctor would know. It was certainly
a deep depression slump, something I
know well, but also a new surprise: an
ADHD diagnosis. Combined, the two
knew exactly how to turn my brain
into scrambled eggs, but I didn’t be-
lieve the therapist, and I didn’t want
medication.
How can a deficiency of norepi-
nephrine in my brain cause me to lose
my object permanence; brown out or
dissociate during sober, everyday con-
versations; forget to eat and struggle
to even start basic tasks? I understand
the chemical imbalance of my depres-
sion, and I’m finally starting to accept
that it is, in fact, an imbalance, and not
me making it up. But the day I was di-
agnosed with ADHD, I left the Zoom
call, closed my laptop, and thought,
I know ADHD exists, and I wouldn’t
doubt someone else who has it, but for
me, it’s not real. The therapist was
personable and the session informal.
I sat there fidgeting, worrying I was
wasting her time, wasting insurance
money and calling attention to myself.
My partner, of course, found the
right words again:
“Whether or not you believe the
diagnosis, or whatever the diagnosis
is, you just don’t have to struggle like
that,” she said. That’s true, I thought.
I can accept the help while retaining
the stubbornness my mother gave me.
“I’ll try medication temporarily,” I
said, “But this isn’t a long-term thing.
And I don’t believe that everyone’s
brain doesn’t work like this.”
I’ve watched my mother’s organi-
zational habits my entire life, haunted
by her ability to just cross things off
lists and get things done. Coupled
with her inability to understand how
I can’t just do the same, I’ve chalked
it up to having less self-discipline. I’ve
come back to the feelings of laziness
and incompetence.
Or, people will scoff at the topic
and say something along the lines of,
“Well, now everyone has ADHD ap-
parently. Did you know that diagnoses
have skyrocketed lately? It’s just ridic-
ulous.” There’s even an Atlantic article
professing that ADHD is actually just
childhood narcissism. But in reality,
there are around 4 million, or about
50-75% of women, living undiagnosed
with ADHD in the United States.
There are two realms of the disor-
der: hyperactive and inattentive. Hy-
peractive is the stereotypical image of
a young boy who can’t sit still in his
seat, is loud and can’t focus enough
to get work done. This demographic
was the preliminary demographic for
the first ADHD clinical studies in the
1970s. In her Atlantic article “ADHD
is Different for Women,” Maria Ya-
goda quoted Dr. Ellen Littman, who
explained these initial studies.
“These studies were based on re-
ally hyperactive young white boys
who were taken to clinics,” Littman
said “The diagnostic criteria were
developed based on those studies. As
a result, those criteria over-represent
the symptoms you see in young boys,
making it difficult for girls to be diag-
nosed unless they behave like hyper-
active boys.”
But for women, ADHD may pres-
ent itself differently. Dr. Priti Shah, a
professor of psychology at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, explained to me
that women are more prone to the
inattentive type of ADHD, making us
more forgetful, scattered, sometimes
impulsive and, more importantly for
diagnosis, introverted. I call it my
scrambled egg brain. And it wasn’t
until reading this article that I real-
ized how much cultural expectations
for girls had delayed my diagnosis.
“Whereas boys with ADHD tend
to externalize their frustration, blam-
ing the ‘stupid test,’ acting up and act-
ing out, girls are more likely to blame
themselves, turning their anger and
pain inward,”Rae Jacobson of the
Child Mind Institute writes. “Girls
with ADHD are significantly more
likely to experience major depression,
anxiety and eating disorders than girls
without.”
All of this results in later diagnoses,
conflation with other mental health
issues and a starkly shaped self-es-
teem for young women.
“It’s this sense of not being able to
hold everything together,” Littman
said.
Art & Design junior Erin Ruark be-
gan running into problems during her
first semester of college. She only pic-
tured the aforementioned stereotypi-
cal ADHD that many of us are used to
imagining, and that still causes prob-
lems in her coming to terms with her
own diagnosis.
“I’m torn between (feeling like)
an imposter,” Ruark said. “Maybe I’m
just faking it. Maybe I’m exaggerating
these problems. Maybe it’s not a big
deal. And I’m just going to be wasting
everyone’s time.”
It was as if she’d plucked the words
from my own mind.
***
L
ike many others, I’ve spent a
decent chunk of the past year
scrolling through TikTok. I’d
initially resisted downloading it, but
a friend made me an account when I
wasn’t paying attention. So I dipped
my toe in.
And I found people living all sorts
of lives, showing them to others in
1-minute increments. I stuffed my
liked videos page with people explain-
ing their mental health symptoms, as
I slowly realized other people’s brains
do work like mine.
One video was a woman with
ADHD explaining her concept of
time. “It’s either ‘now,’ or ‘not now,’”
she said. And again, someone’s expla-
nation clicked. Unless something is
pressing — as in currently in my hands,
due in the next hour or in my line of
sight — it’s part of the “not now.” And
“not now” tends to be a wasteland of
forgotten dates and deadlines, unan-
swered texts, unwashed dishes, coffee
gone cold, leftovers abandoned in the
microwave, four dramatic lost wallet
stories, bags of spinach gone moldy
and Trader Joe’s frozen food for when
I forget to eat until 6 p.m.
I explained my theory of time to
LSA senior Ellie Scott and watched
her laugh on my computer screen.
“I’ll clean my room or I’ll eat or
something,” Scott said. “And then
I think to myself, why do I have to
do that again? Didn’t I just clean my
room, didn’t I just eat lunch? Why is
my room dirty again? Why am I hun-
gry again? But it turns out (with my
room) it’s been two weeks and it’s
been three hours (since I last ate).”
What began as an interview turned
into a conversation between two girls
in their bedrooms, and at times the
Zoom screen became a mirror.
I wish, like a lot of other things
in life, that I could’ve been handed a
manual next to my diagnosis. “Here
are the things that are ADHD,” it
would say. “Mark which ones hap-
pen to you, and now you know why,
and you can start fixing it.” But that
obviously didn’t happen — so I made
my own. It’s a running Notes list in
my phone called “Is it ADHD or am
I just weird,” currently resting at 500
words. It always elicits a laugh when
other people see me adding to it. But
I’m genuinely confused at what’s nor-
mal anymore, and since I have ten
seconds before it becomes “not now,”
I have to write it down.
“I constantly have struggles that
people don’t realize are part of ADHD,
like I have no object permanence, I
have tics and am just constantly mov-
ing around … and people think it’s just
not being able to focus,” Scott told me.
I agreed. The second half of the
Notes title seems like a joke, but I
genuinely don’t know what is normal
anymore. I’ve spent 22 years in this
brain — of course it’s all normal to me.
“It’s just so frustrating and it feels
very unfair that other people are born
with normal brains that function and
have the right amount of chemicals
and do all the right stuff at the right
time,” Scott said during our conver-
sation. “And I have to take a bunch of
pills to even everything out and then
have to deal with side effects. It’s a
whole other arena of life that I have to
constantly monitor.”
That said, it’s not all bad, of course.
“There seem to be some strengths
associated with ADHD,” Shah told
me. “There has been a lot of specula-
tion over the years that people with
ADHD are more creative than the
typical person, and also that they
sometimes have these special abilities
to focus even more.”
ADHD and creativity is something
that sparked Shah’s interest nearly 20
years ago. She and her team at the Ba-
sic and Applied Cognition Lab began
studying college students with ADHD
compared to those without using
standardized measures of creativity,
like “thinking of as many uses that
you can for a bucket,” she said with
a laugh. The students with ADHD
had come up with more ideas for the
bucket and more creative ones than
the students without.
But Shah also went on to test real-
life creativity by having two groups
of students invent a new kind of cell
phone. And, as she’d expected, the
group with ADHD “created more
unique, novel features of cell phones
and things that hadn’t been invented,
but were still thought of as useful.”
“So students with ADHD also had
greater creative achievement in life,”
Shah said. “We have a series of papers
that show that people with ADHD
performed better on creativity survey
measures and laboratory tests.”
Shah and her team also began
studying hyperfocus, a part of ADHD
that can be both helpful and harmful.
My hyperfocus mostly strikes when
I’m supposed to be doing something
else — if I have all the time in the
world to think about my photography,
it’s more of a task. But if I’m avoiding
something else, it’s an indulgence.
Hyperfocus is something that’s com-
monly talked about with ADHD, but
there wasn’t much research on it until
a few years ago.
Consulting with her colleagues,
Shah developed a scale to measure it,
and determined that there are both
positive and negative aspects to ex-
hibiting symptoms of hyperfocus.
“Sometimes it can be negative,
when you’re going down a rabbit
hole on the internet and come out
and don’t do your homework,” Shah
said. “But it could also be a positive,
like you’re able to write a new piece
of music because you’ve been able to
focus on it so deeply.”
Ruark told me about her after-
noons spent in the School of Art & De-
sign studios, fueled by her hyperfocus.
At times, it can be the secret ingredi-
ent in the work process, especially if
the work is creative. And I wouldn’t
be able to call myself a writer without
it, because honestly, I would never fin-
ish an article.
***
R
uark and I spoke over Zoom,
of course, and she walked
me through her thoughts.
We were diagnosed around the same
time, but following the statistics, it
should’ve been much earlier.
“I first started to suspect things
back in high school, because I would
have these moments where I’d be try-
ing to talk to someone one-on-one. I’d
want to show them that I’m listening
and be attentive, but I could not stay
focused during our conversations,”
Ruark said. “It was really frustrating.
And I did well in school. I still do well
on tests. And I was polite. So before I
was diagnosed, people really doubted
it a lot.”
“And that was part of what made it
difficult for me to feel like I should go
get help,” Ruark continued.
“It’s a little delegitimizing,” I
chimed in, too excited that someone
was sharing my thoughts while trying
to remember proper interview eti-
quette. “‘You’re doing well in school,’
they say. And I’m saying, ‘Yes, but my
brain is scrambled eggs. It’s not good
up here!’”
Ruark’s face lights up on my com-
puter screen. “That’s exactly what I
say!” she laughs.
I’m at a point now, several months
into working with a psychiatrist,
where I’ve started to see improve-
ment. But the stigma around ADHD
runs deep — far deeper in myself than
I’d anticipated. I couldn’t do basic
tasks, like keep track of due dates or
my keys, and the endless to-do lists
weren’t helping. But the worst part
was my explanation for these stresses:
that they were my fault. I was lazy,
unmotivated, apathetic and incompe-
tent. Except, I did care. Why couldn’t
I get the two forces in my brain to
cooperate? I didn’t want to turn in a
paper late, but it felt like I wasn’t the
one in control. I wrote emails to my
professors, explaining that I did care
about their class, time, profession and
respect, and apologized over and over.
I must just be a bad person.
Shah explained this feeling of op-
erating outside the realm of normal
and feeling as though it’s our own
fault.
“We’ve created a school system in a
world that is really well-designed for
neurotypical individuals,” Shah said.
“But I think there are also people that
will think outside the box, think of an-
other way to do it, will question why
you’re doing it. I think that there are
all these strengths that we don’t nec-
essarily value.”
The idea that a person didn’t “care”
because they didn’t reach expecta-
tions was something I’d internalized
long ago. It seemed to be the only
explanation I was offered, and when
you’re operating like a neurotypical
among neurotypicals, it’s impossible
for others to understand something
like badly wanting to start a paper, but
feeling physically unable to begin. Or
forgetting a deadline for your favor-
ite class, and being so consumed by
letting your professor (and yourself)
down that you can’t attend the next
class and look them in the eye.
“I have a really hard time writing
emails to professors. It’s my worst
nightmare,” Ruark said. “It’s like, if
I bring this up now, I’m going to just
sound like I’m trying to get out of
something. So sometimes I just don’t
bring it up. And it’s my fault. But it’s
also a little bit like a stigma thing and
a guilt thing?”
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
What happens when you can’t trust
your own brain?
BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
Wednesday, March 31, 2021 — 11
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com