If You Knew Me Before My ADHD Diagnosis, No, You Didn’t

I’m Coming Out Again..?

Have we met before? Even if the answer is yes, these days, I’d say, “No, not quite.”

You knew the version of me that overcompensated and overcommitted, would get nothing measurable done at work or in class and made up for it in the middle of the night, had imposter syndrome trying to learn and work the way everyone else does, dropped interests just as fast as he picked them up, had wild mood swings after hours or days or weeks of trying not to have wild mood swings, that turned to alcohol to subdue the feelings of overstimulation in social situations, and that consistently fit a lot of words into long, rambling sentences that meant a lot to me and almost nothing to anyone else. I am still very much the personification of a run-on sentence.

I am still very much the personification of a run-on sentence.

A neverending stream of TikToks and social media ads first inspired me to talk about ADHD with friends. As many tend to do, I downplayed these suspicions. All I could imagine was this vignette of a little boy misbehaving in class, whose frustrated parents said, take this Ritalin and shut the hell up. Also, Adderall (something I heard about more than I actually knew about) is a drug college…