I'm finally on ADHD meds.

Ok, so I've spent years being fairly confident that I have ADHD, and it's taken me until my first semester of college to get formally diagnosed and medicated. It all started during the pandemic, my mom had to become a lot more present in teaching my sister now that we were all stuck at home. My sister's teachers had said many times that she likely had ADHD, but my mom didn't believe it until she had to be the teacher for a year. My mom quickly had my sister diagnosed and on meds once the problem became this relevant for her. Upon finding out about all of this, I did a lot of research on ADHD so that I could understand what was going on better... Only to realize that the problem was likely way closer than I previously thought. And here's the thing, I totally understand that it's bad to form medical opinions based on what google says, BUT THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! I found out that ADHD was genetic, and that there was such thing as inattentive ADHD which often when unnoticed, especially in girls, and everything about it made my life make so much more sense. I eventually told my mom that I wanted to be tested too, and she said, "You don't have it, you do too well in school to have ADHD', and that was the end of the conversation. Later on in highschool, I asked again, same answer, to the point where every summer I would start a conversation along the lines of, "Hey, so I'm going to be taking much harder classes next school year, and I barely got by this year, and I think being put on meds would help a lot." and then I would get immediately shut down. Now, skip forward to this summer, I am right about to go into college, and this time the conversation about getting medicated is a lot more important for me. I ask, waiting to get told no again, but instead my mom says, "You're an adult now, so you can do what you want, but I'm telling you, they're not going to diagnose you with ADHD, and if they do it's not going to be bad enough for them to put you on meds". I book a consultation a week later. I finally have my appointment and I'm talking to a real psychiatrist about this, I tell her about my life, how I've had terrible brain fog for years, had over 100 missing assignments (and somehow all A's and B's) my junior year, how whenever my teachers are talking everything just goes in one ear and out the other. I say all of this fully expecting her to say, nah you're fine, like I've been hearing for YEARS, instead, he immediately starts talking me through what medication she thinks would work best for me, and that all she needs to do before putting me on it is to run a few tests on me. After all of that, I finally pick up my ADHD meds for the first time. AND HOLY SHIT GUYS, I AM SIGNIFICANTLY LESS DYSFUNCTIONAL! I didn't even realize how dysfunctional my life was before meds, I just knew I was a bit of a wreck at moments, and now looking back its like, how the hell did I get anything done before this. My horrendous brain fog? GONE! I still have a hard time staying on track some times, but not nearly as bad as before! About an hour after my first dose, I noticed that it genuinely felt like my brain was thinking differently!! It went from like 30 things all going on at one to combine into a single, fairly incoherent thought to just one straight line of coherent thinking, and its amazing! I was worried that I wasn't going to be as funny or creative or that it would change my personality, but its like everything is still there, it's just reformatted so much nicer! Like putting a messy rough draft essay into APA format. My brain is just so much easier to access now, and it kills me that it could've been like this for years.

The one thing about getting diagnosed way after I realized that I had ADHD is that I spent so much time worrying that I was faking it, or that the people around me thought I was. Especially right now, with mental health terms being turned into buzzwords online under the mask of bringing visibility to certain conditions, genuinely thinking you have a mental health condition is rough. All of the sudden, in an attempt to destigmatize mental health, people have been doing the opposite, and hearing people say, "all these kids just think they have ADHD because its trendy" genuinely made me question myself. And having adhd symptoms as someone who was self diagnosed all the time made me worried that I was just being performative and didn't know it, and I was constantly worried that by claiming something I did was related to my adhd would hurt people who had been formally diagnosed or make them get taken less seriously. Luckily, my adhd symptoms were very real, and on the rare occasion that I would mention that I was worried that my adhd wasn't real and I was just using it as some internet buzzword while undermining people who actually had adhd, my friends who had to deal with my unmedicated adhd on a daily basic confirmed that it was very much real, and that there was no way in hell I was secretly faking all of that. Getting formally diagnosed didn't just help me with my symptoms, but also being able to acknowledge that I have adhd without feeling like I could be lying and taking away credibility from people who actually do have it. After being diagnosed though, I have started getting annoyed with the people online who like to claim neurodivergence to be quirky or call anyone who is slightly different neurodivergent. Not the people who just say, "Hey, I think I might have this mental disorder, I'm not sure though but I'm fairly confident", especially if they don't have the resources to get diagnosed, because knowing that something is potentially there can help you work around it if it is. But the people who claim adhd without the slightest bit of research other than watching a single video with an overgeneralized, and stereotypical depiction of adhd and won't shut up about it annoy me, because their behaviour made me genuinely doubt my own struggles and often make it harder for people who actually have adhd to get diagnosed. Along with that, they are often spreading around false information, and generalizations that just make people with real adhd look bad. But, yeah, I am so happy that I'm finally on meds now, thank you for listening to me rant!!