For the first 5 years of my adulthood, I truly thought I just sucked at it.
In childhood, I was always the quiet kid who got straight A’s and never got in trouble, but the adult version of me procrastinated on every single responsibility I had. Struggled to study and show up to my college classes. Had a bad habit of being late to appointments. Let every morning drag on foreverrr before finally taking a shower and starting the damn day.
I just couldn’t make myself DO things like other people seemed to be able to (even things I genuinely wanted to do).
Once I started to suspect having ADHD, I put off pursuing a diagnosis. (Which is kind of the ultimate irony in itself.)
I told myself that I just lacked grit and convinced myself I was looking for excuses for my own poor behavior.
Turns out, there are a lot of ways you can convince yourself you DON’T have ADHD when you actually do. These are the things I told myself were just a “me” problem for the longest time… but were actually ADHD all along:
Procrastination bordering on self-sabotage
I’ve earned the official title of “procrastinator” in my family – like, it’s been a longstanding joke how I’ll wait until the very last second to start something, or continually push off small tasks (like washing dishes, for example).
I thought everyone experienced the same level of resistance towards tasks as I did, but that they were just “better” at pushing through it than I was.
I mean, everyone talks about how “not everything in life is fun” and “sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do” right? So I believed what I had was mostly just a lack of self-discipline (which explains why I fell hard into self-improvement content that, spoiler alert, never fixed the problem)
But it turns out that procrastinating to the point of making yourself feel sick and/or self-sabotaging isn’t normal.
When your brain literally cannot access the motivation to do something – even when you desperately want to – that ain’t normal.
Jumping constantly from hobby to hobby
Every new interest or hobby I’ve ever gotten into has started small before somehow blowing up into a full-blown hyperfixation.
But with the exception of writing (my ONE consistent throughline since childhood) it usually only ever lasts for a month. Maybe two months if I’m reallyyy feeling it.
I’ll randomly get obsessed with drawing, or painting, or writing, or a new video game, do the thing constantly for a few weeks, and then… completely lose interest.
The inability to stay invested in hobbies used to make me feel like such a flakey person.
New hobbies, interests, and creative practices always have so much novelty at first. But once that novelty wears off, my motivation to pursue them drops off a cliff. Which is why I’m always picking up something NEW to try and access that feeling of novelty again – because it gives my brain the dopamine it’s desperately craving.
A deep sensitivity to criticism or rejection
One of my very first memories of being called out for something was in kindergarten when I accepted a piece of candy from a boy in my class when I was NOT supposed to be eating candy. My teacher corrected me, and I had a pretty…disproportionate…meltdown.
I still remember the look of absolute shock and bewilderment on her face when she saw how upset I was. LOL.
Even as an adult, I find that I often get disproportionately upset if I feel I’m being critiqued unfairly. For a long time, I thought I was just an overly-emotional person – too sensitive.
Now I know it’s RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which commonly accompanies ADHD) – and it’s why my nervous system can sometimes go into full fight-or-flight mode because someone gave me negative feedback, or because someone unfollowed me on Instagram, or because someone unsubscribed to my newsletter.
This has thankfully gotten a bit better as I’ve gotten older (I attribute it to my frontal lobe developing and just not giving a fck anymore), but it still affects me more than I’d like to admit.
The inability to conceptualize time
I’ve always felt that the way I experience time is odd. Sometimes a small block of time feels like it stretches on for hours…while other times a whole day blinks by in what feels like half a second.
This has often led to me wasting entire days doing nothing but bedrotting, being late to things (important things!), and just in general not prioritizing my time well.
I also have a bad habit of severely underestimating the amount of time a task is going to take me, which has gotten me into some sticky situations when it comes to important deadlines.
When I learned about time blindness (another common symptom of adult ADHD), my struggles with planning and prioritizing things suddenly made a lot more sense.
And with medication, they also got a lot more manageable!
Turns out, it wasn’t grit I was lacking
…it was dopamine.
I got my diagnosis at 23 after yearssss of feeling like something was wrong with me – and suddenly, all of these weird things about myself that I dismissed as “me” problems suddenly made sense.
I realized that I wasn’t actually lazy. It wasn’t that I sucked at life or just lacked the “grit” that other people around me seemed to possess.
Now I know that my ADHD brain is just wired differently. I’m working with less dopamine and executive functioning – and not even medication will ever truly “fix” it. But having that explanation has been priceless for me, because it’s given me a level of self-understanding that I never had before, and the self-judgment these days isn’t quite so loud as a result.
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