ADHD Origin Stories: How Isabelle & David Each Learned They Had ADHD

Joined by Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, who also has ADHD, Isabelle and David explore their origin stories in the first recording of Something Shiny ever (from over 3 and a half years ago). Isabelle describes how she first became more familiar with ADHD through working with David and working with clients who had the diagnosis, turning to David for help. She would then come home and tell Bobby the tips and kept telling him he had ADHD, not like it was some bad thing, but like it would only help him to know. She started noticing how sessions with her clients with ADHD had a different feel to them, and she really enjoyed them (as well as sessions with her neurotypical clients, it just had a different speed). One day, after about a year of this more focused work, she was talking to a fellow clinician who was sharing her ADHD origin story with Isabelle. She described what it was like to go into a room to get a cup of coffee, only to clean the kitchen, only to pick up three things and forget what she was doing. Isabelle started shaking and realized it was just like her. She had a flash and thought “somebody else does that?” She came to David the next day and said, “I think I have it” and he said “I know. Welcome to the tribe!” And she cried and felt so welcome and love it. She wonders how she went so long without getting diagnosed. Her mom was called into a parent teacher conference when Isabelle was in preschool, thinking she would need ESL support (English is Isabelle’s second language, her parents are Polish immigrants), and the teacher’s feedback was that Isabelle would not stop talking. She would get this feedback throughout her schooling and recognized that she was always talking and distracting other kids, but she was really lucky to have teachers who would redirect her, give her extra work, let her read and hyper focus on what she wanted to do. She then wonders how she got through Harvard, and realized retrospectively that she was prescribed Wellbutrin, which is a medication that also helps with ADHD. After weaning herself off of it, she was running around to her friends describing that she thought she had ADHD, who dismissed it as withdrawal symptoms; she accepted this explanation at the time, though she could not longer focus and magically do her work, and then went all over the place the next couple of years. After landing a corporate gig, she was able to focus on pretty boring stuff, but she had undiagnosed hypothyroidism, and any time her meds would increase to bring her thyroid to a normal level, she would again notice ADHD symptoms increase dramatically. David and Isabelle clarify how the hypothyroidism, which would normally produce lethargy, was taking away Isabelle’s impulsivity and ADHD symptoms, working like a lead vest. When Isabelle started to suspect she had it, she came home and cried and Bobby thought she had cyberchondriac’d (see definition below) herself into a diagnosis, because he saw her as focused. He had just come to terms with his ADHD and couldn’t believe his wife had it, too, because she seemed so different to him. Then she suddenly appeared to have it, very obviously, seeming much more scattered and he wonders if its because she didn’t have to fake it anymore (see Masking definition below). Isabelle notes that her and Bobby are a very small sample size, so she only has to be more focused than him to appear focused. She resonated with David describing how you can self medicate with anxiety, she noticed that she did it all the time to leave the house and make transitions. This connected to how when she realized she had it, she unmasked and suddenly didn’t want to use anxiety to help her transition anymore, making it harder for her to do things like leave the house. David then shares how he has symbol recognition disorder in 5th grade, and it was never validated that he had ADHD and was labeled as lazy or like he wasn’t trying. The struggles in school got significantly worse as he got closer to high school, and the group all agrees that no one ever says that middle school was the BEST. David wasn’t testing well, he went to a really prestigious school with all the resources, and he was never diagnosed because he was deemed ‘too smart.’ However, freshman year, he got the label of having behavior disorder, which meant school got worse, really fast. He ditched school, got a ‘screw you’ attitude, playing Mortal Kombat with all the delinquents and got kicked out of high school. He was kicked out of school because of behavior problems and sent to an alternative school, still without an ADHD diagnosis, but he had a much better time in school. He got his homework done because all homework was done in class. In his previous school, he would go home, not do his homework, and then be too ashamed to go to ...