What it feels like to have a brain on fire
ADHD is my favourite part of myself. Except for when everything in my life inexplicably crashes down like a Jenga tower, and I’d happily give away every penny in my bank account to trade brains with anybody else in the world.
Yesterday I had a panic attack, where I ended up hysterically crying on a train for literally no reason at all. I couldn’t explain what was going on in my body, except for the repeated thought of being trapped in it. I literally became paralysed and couldn’t move for 30 minutes.
It felt like I was literally on fire, both internally and externally. It was like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria multiplied by 39178208421, because it also involved countless other ‘obligations’ and expectations on me - most of them self-created and all of them too overwhelming to even start to think about. The mere thought of putting thoughts together, like how to move my body to get up and stop crying on this bench, felt like too much.
This time of year is tough, because it’s my birthday and Christmas and social obligations suddenly arise out of nowhere where we are ‘expected’ to have plans and see people. As I turn 30 in approximately 10 days, people keep asking me what I’m doing for it. Crawling into a hole because I literally cannot plan anything doesn’t seem to be an answer. They want to help. So I let them. Then organisational chaos kicks in as I change my mind 10 times.
I can write an entire book in a month, but I cannot for the life of me think ahead to one months’ time. I can’t comprehend the billion different options of what could be happening by then. I can’t deal with the Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria of feeling like I am imposing on people by inviting them to something I assume they wouldn’t want to come to. I can’t make any 'simple' decisions about where I want to go or what I want to do. I can’t trust myself to not change my mind, or not to somehow upset other people.
One question can send me into a meltdown. I end up socially withdrawing and working more, spending more time on screens and less in yoga classes, where these perfectly reasonable questions could attack my brain, letting them all pile up in my inbox.
The further you tie yourself into this hole of avoiding your feelings, the more they rise up around you, waiting to explode - which they will.
This is maybe how I ended up sitting in Hyde Park, begging the person I had a 'professional' chat about ADHD coaching with that morning (Clare Hester) to coach me. I couldn’t face the thought of sharing the full depths of irrationality with my brain with anyone who knew me 'well', knowing they would want to help and feeling even more guilty for being so un-helpable.
This is the prison of ADHD: it traps you in a web of being unable to ask for and receive help, because you don't know how to communicate what's going on in your brain to anybody else. If you don't trust yourself to be able to be helped, you are stuck: we need other humans.
From the outside, my life looks better than it ever has done before. I have nothing to complain about - these problems seem to all be completely self-created, so why can’t I stop them? Why does reaching a point of happy stability make my brain want to rip it all up?
I am running a successful business that helps lots of people all over the world. I am ticking all of the boxes society sets out for us, professionally speaking. I am just not able to actually enjoy any of it, because if I stop working, then my brain starts imploding on itself, because it doesn’t have enough to focus on. Dialling down my brain speed from 250%, to the 50% speed required to socialise with other people whilst overthinking every single word I say, seems impossible. So I avoid it.
My head is constantly disconnected from my body. Having ADHD can feel like I only exist in my mind: my body just slows me down. I don’t want to have to exercise or eat or sleep or go outside. I like running wild with my ideas in my mind and creating my own reality - but this isn't living. Real life is depressing, because I don't seem to be able to fit into it, no matter how many instruction manuals I write for myself (including one called the Reality Manifesto).
When Clare very kindly coached me yesterday, she asked me to listen to my body. It wanted to run away, to book a ticket to Australia, to get freedom from my own brain - but I know this is impossible. I genuinely couldn’t think of a single reference point for what freedom felt like until I thought about it: I have only been able to relax on 24-hour flights.
Where expectations stop and I can simply rest. I have a chair to sit in and I can’t move very far away from it. I can take all my books and watch all the movies I want because there’s nothing else I ‘should’ be doing. The only thing I have to do is breathe, eat and sleep. No one can contact me and time slows down: I get to be in my own bubble of reality. I don’t have to ‘do’ anything.
This is pretty sad for an almost-30-year-old who has somehow accidentally had a very objectively ‘impressive’ life to say: my happiest moments have been on flights where I can pretend not to exist. I was so anxious yesterday that I would have happily booked a return flight to Australia just for the luxury of 48 uninterrupted hours of peace. But I have to work, and they’ve now got bloody wifi on the planes anyway.
Ironically, by the time I spoke to Clare, a group of people next to me in the park had started doing ‘tapping’ exercises very loudly, shouting about how we needed to reconnect with our bodies. Whilst other people stopped and took photos, I started secretly copying them whilst hunched over, tapping my chest. Clare got me to move my body into shapes that I did lying down instead of standing up, safe in the knowledge that the people next to me looked much weirder than I did. I felt my body regulate itself. I felt what it meant to be in my body as she spoke about the hormones releasing themselves and told me what to do in ways I could actually follow.
I felt the tension melt away as I realised I could find that freedom where I was. I didn’t need to get onto an aeroplane - I could just start looking in different places. Part of the intensity of my anxiety was believing there was no one who could truly understand how ridiculous my life was, because I kept entering into the exact same patterns of self-sabotage - often in full awareness of what I was doing.
Last Sunday I chose to spend 12 hours writing two different new books at the same time instead of accepting invitations to see friends. These are all conscious choices, so I have no one to blame but myself. My ADHD. Whatever it is, it can be so unbelievably annoying. It can make you feel hopeless, numb, like we are destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Like we are trapped within the prisons of our own brains, that simply won’t do what they know they ‘should’ do. There is always someone that can understand what we're experiencing: ourselves.
Talking to Clare reminded me why I coach people: because sometimes we just need a different perspective to get us out of our own heads. We need someone to help us reconnect with ourselves, who won’t judge us as we explain to them how messed up our lives are, who can hold space for us whilst we climb down from the tornado of ADHD anxiety back to solid ground.
Someone who can remind us that although we may have had certain experiences until now, and we can’t control the circumstances around us, we can control how we respond to them. The past is not the present, or the future. We are not doomed to repeat our past, and things are different now - we just have to pause long enough to appreciate the small things, because these are the big things.
Living with ADHD can sometimes feel unbearably difficult, but it is worth it. Having a brain that runs at 19042102 miles per hour means that we can tie ourselves into intellectual knots, self-diagnosing every single possible mental health condition we can find on the internet. It's rare to be diagnosed with 'just' ADHD: the rate of co-morbidities are astounding, but these really depend on which person is labelling you.
Ultimately, we are all just on this spinning rock with these jelly bags of bones and dust and organs that somehow manages to keep us waking up as the same ‘person’ each day, as if by magic. The point of it is actually very simple: existence.
Life with ADHD will never be zen. You will never figure out all of the steps to ‘fix’ yourself, because you don’t need fixing: you are a perfectly imperfect human being. If life feels difficult, good - it means you’re alive. It means you care about something. If stopping still feels impossible, try to move your body instead. Just don’t forget to ‘be’ in it.
Remember that nothing lasts forever and sometimes, we just need to go to sleep. My best advice if you're struggling with the things I've talked about in this post is to stop intellectualising your thoughts and instead, treat yourself like a gigantic toddler. And maybe get some coaching with Clare Hester.
You can also join the ADHD course starting in 2 days here. This is how I met Clare, along with a new community of people that help to remind me that I am not alone in these experiences. Help is always out there, and you are so deserving of it.