If you're overwhelmed by ADHD, know that you are not alone.

Dear Leanne,

I know you weren’t expecting the £400 an hour psychiatrist to say you had ADHD. You’ve been procrastinating over telling someone how terrible things truly are for so long, so to be simply told your problem is basically procrastination seems a bit too obvious. I know it's also frustrating, because he wouldn’t even give you the medication until you retuned from holiday. Apparently ADHD can’t be diagnosed in one session.

You will go on holiday and you won’t come back as planned. You will keep running, because confronting this is scary. It means letting go of the beliefs that plague your life and keep you trapped in self-sabotaging cycles, to accept that maybe there is something you can do to change it. Living in victim and survival mode is all you know.

This ‘ADHD’ thing won't define you, but it can give you the answers you are so desperately looking for. It can explain why you wake up every morning terrified of what you'll do by the end of the day. Why you feel like a goldfish swimming the wrong way in an ocean of salmon. Why it’s always felt like everybody else had a manual to life that you didn’t.

You’ll understand why it feels like your brain has been permanently hijacked by the worst DJ in the world. When you do return a year later, you will finish that diagnosis, because this conversation planted the seed in you that will continue to grow. When things become so terrible that you don't want to live again, the sprout will pop up annoyingly. A reminder that maybe there’s hope. Maybe things could become better. Maybe there’s a life worth living out there for you. You could be ‘normal’.

Things won’t improve straight away. The medication will literally open your eyes to the mess other people always complained about, but that you simply couldn’t see. You will marvel at what it’s like to have a brain that’s not constantly blasting 150 different channels. To be able to hear the sounds from the outside world and see the dust being lit up by the sunlight streaming through the window. To be able to hear yourself think.

But it won’t be a magic fix. Emboldened by your new found confidence in being diagnosed, you’ll continue making all the same, if not worse, lifestyle choices. Ironically, you’ll believe that now you ‘know’ about ADHD, you should make impulsive decisions like quitting your job, because now you ‘in control’. You're 'normal'.

Then you’ll be gobsmacked at being expected to pay £300 a month for this medication, forever. Your mental health will suffer significantly as you try to ration it out, sending your brain spinning on a broken rollercoaster ride. You will lose 10kg, get acne, have panic attacks, and argue with the people in your life who say you’re being exploited. It will be really difficult to know who to believe, because the psychiatrist just keeps trying to up your dose, despite you being obviously unwell.

Either he’s right, and there’s hope, or they’re right, and there’s none. Either you’ve already wasted £1500+, and there are no answers at the end of the tunnel, or you need to rip everybody out of your life who seems to care about you and start all over again. You will feel like your head is exploding and your life is falling apart. You will feel lonelier than ever, because you have zero reference point. You know nobody with ADHD and mental health isn't something that's discussed much in your life.

But.

You have ADHD. You don’t think about the future. You thrive in chaos. You will accept the situation, and take your own means of control. You will take this pain and turn it into lessons.

You will demand a letter for your GP, and submit yourself to the apparently endless wait to be re-diagnosed through the NHS. You will get yourself off those tablets and start learning about ADHD for yourself. You will discover that there’s much more to it than just procrastinating.

You will agree with yourself to try just 1 month of taking the medication every day at the same time, on the lowest dose, under the supervision of your GP. Unlike what you were told, they didn’t need a re-diagnosis to prescribe you it at £10 a month. You’ll agree with yourself to go to hot yoga every day at 8am for 1 month, with no alcohol. You'll stop trying to make everybody understand and looking for external advice, and start listening to yourself instead.

You’ll decide that if your life is still horrific after then, then you can go and sit on the beach until you run out of money, forget this whole ADHD thing and die. Seriously.

Your life will transform with this new structure, routine and acceptance. You'll even get a ‘real’ job and ‘real’ hobbies. You’ll feel like the Disney princess who found a happy ending in normality, and forget all about ADHD, never to be mentioned again.

That is, until your new GP tells you that their waiting list for an ADHD assessment is 7 years long. You tell them you’d be dead if you’d had to wait that long. You’re so furious on behalf of all those people that you head home and start writing. 3 weeks later, you’re looking at 85% of a book explaining how someone can survive despite having a brain that works against them.

The fear of ever letting anybody else see this declaration will be too much, and you won’t touch it again until the end of the year. By this time, your ‘normal’ mask will be too much to handle. You’ll have found an ADHD Coach to help you, which reignites your passion for this book. They will hear your story, validate your experiences, and help to eradicate the immense shame you feel for being who you are. This will transform you more than any tablet ever could.

You will eventually choose to take your mask off. Embracing your ADHD will allow you to embrace what makes you different. You'll decide normal isn’t for you. There’s a creative, dream-packed life waiting for you outside of the box you’ve so painstakingly built for yourself. You will take all the strategies and learnings of how to ‘manage’ your ADHD, and you’ll use them to harness it in a life where you do get to do what you love, even if that doesn’t fit into a box.

The reason you had no idea what to do with your life is because you didn’t know you had ADHD. The reason you couldn’t find the answers in any of the millions of self-help books you've read is because there wasn’t one on ADHD. You wrote that book, and with it you’ll help countless other people to avoid going through the same pain and suffering that you had to experience.

It wasn’t for nothing. I know you might look back at your life in anger that you’ve had to get yourself this support and figure out these answers by yourself, but look at where you are because of that. If you’d had a ‘normal’ life, things would have been pretty boring.

You will not feel the same crushing loneliness, sadness, confusion and overwhelm forever. I promise. There's no happy ending, just the journey of self-acceptance you get to live every day.

Being neurodiverse isn’t a bad thing. It’s a brilliant thing, because it makes you ‘you’. Eventually, you'll see that who you are isn't so bad after all.

Love,

Leanne