The Beginning

 So.

Where do I begin this?

I was always aware of the possibility that I might be autistic, at least from the time I learned what autism was.  I was awkward, with my peers, always bonding more quickly and tightly with my teachers.  But with other children I found it impossible to master or judge social norms.  My interests were eccentric, esoteric, and frequently morbid.  I seemed to lack the instinct that told other children and adults what actions or words were or were not appropriate.  It was all something of a puzzle to me.  So when I reached my late teens at the very end of the 20th century and autism was becoming the de rigeur childhood disorder, it struck something of a chord with me.  I even told my friends that, had I been born twenty years later, I would like have been labelled autistic.  

But ADHD?

Ah, that was a different animal altogether.  ADHD meant the little boy in the classroom who couldn't sit still, the noisy and disruptive child, the one who couldn't even focus long enough to read a single sentence.  That was a label that seemed to fit my loud, gregarious, outgoing brother far better than it did myself.  I was a voracious reader, able to finish an entire novel within a day.  I could lose myself for hours in projects that interested me.  I was effortlessly got good grades in most subjects in school.  If anything, those around me said that I was too quiet, focused as I was on my books or my writing.  I remember sitting for half an hour at a zoo, waiting for a turtle to move off a rock.  Of course I was a dreamy kid.  I would make careless mistakes in my school assignments, sometimes to the point that I'd get a failing grade.  I would sail through subjects I was interested in, but struggled with those I disliked.  But that was just because I didn't apply myself.  I'd rather daydream through the class than listen to the teacher.  But ADHD?  Ludicrous.

The early 2010s were a bad time for us, both my husband and myself.  I went through a very traumatic event that sent me into a severe depressive episode, and I was eventually put on anti-depressants.  I lost several jobs.  I had a severe health scare and was hospitalised for about a week.  We moved from Canada to the UK.  My husband's health, mental and physical, began to decline.  And I was finding it increasingly difficult to function.

I was forgetting things.  My vocabulary, always expansive, was declining.  The car door would be left open after we came home, the keys dangling.  I would lose items I had been using less than a minute before.  Knowledge that it seemed I'd had near to all my life all but vanished from my brain.  I would lose my train of thought mid-conversations, forget promises minutes after making them.  There was a brief period where I considered some form of very early onset dementia.  My mind, my cognition, my knowledge...it was crumbling, the pieces scattering, dissolving like sugar in water, like pollen in a breeze.  I was losing myself.

It was my husband who said it.  "I think you should be tested for ADHD."

Really?  Me?

Even at the time, I found the idea rather laughable.  Even then, I knew ADHD was a lifelong disorder, and all of this had only happened in the past few years.

Right?

We were fortunate.  There was a temporary clinic doing consults in our town, featuring psychiatrists who specialised in both ADHD and autism.  My husband secured an appointment for me, and I received what seemed like reams of forms and questionnaires to fill out.  And I remember the growing sense of disquiet I felt as I read through them:

How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?

How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?

When you’re in a conversation, how often do you find yourself finishing the sentences of the people you are talking to, before they can finish them themselves?

When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?

How often do you have difficulty unwinding and relaxing when you have time to yourself?

The interview was more of the same.  Pieces of my life, issues I had always dealt with.  This is normal, it happens to everyone, I just have to push through.

And here I was, being told that it does not happen to everyone.

A childhood survey was sent to my mother.  Her responses were yet more confirmations.  I had been the stereotypical "Little Professor" so beloved of Hans Asperger.  I would throw tantrums if a single stuffed animal was missing from my crib, and would count them every night.  I flapped my hands to show excitement or eagerness.  I would much rather sit and discuss science and books with adults than I would run and play with other kids.  I would become fixated on projects or subjects and it was impossible to tear me away from them.  It all came together.

And so, at the age of thirty-five, I found myself diagnosed with both autism and ADHD.  

This blog is my attempt to process that.