Transcript:
Why are you becoming an Ambassador for ADHD UK?
Because I’m passionate about campaigning to whoever’s going to listen to me, to basically remove the stigma or any preconceived ideas that are associated with ADHD. I believe that ADHD in women and girls isn’t recognized enough in the UK. It’s often too often put down to like a personality trait in girls as being like too chatty, lazy or a bit spacey or shy. And in women are suffering from anxiety and depression which is mostly brought on by trying to mask the symptoms of ADHD, that they don’t realize are the symptoms of ADHD. And these labels aren’t hurtful, they can impact on our self-image and our self-esteem. So personally, I’d like to bring awareness that there could be another reason why women and girls display these traits and how we can harness the strengths of ADHD just to make us feel valued and admired instead of just inadequate and abnormal.
Tell us about your diagnosis journey.
Well, I’ve been advocating for my 12-year-old son to be assessed since he started school at the age of four. I could see him struggling with daily life and then in school the same way that I did. And I really wanted to ensure that he had the support that I didn’t get when I was at school. So after about five years of persistently asking for a referral, he was finally diagnosed last year, aged 10. And it was during this, his assessment, I kind of realized it was genetic and that I was displaying a lot of majority of the symptoms of ADHD throughout my own personal life. At the time, I didn’t feel like I needed a diagnosis myself and and known the long waiting lists caused by the pandemic, which was when he got assessed at the time I didn’t pursue it, and it wasn’t until I started a new role with my current employer, about six months ago and realized that if I was going to be successful and able to learn and retain new information that I might need some help. So following a private, a recent private diagnosis, I’m now in the process of obtaining some medication and just seeing how much this is going to help me with regards to work and also sort of my daily life as well.
What would you like to tell people generally about your ADHD?
That it doesn’t only affect young boys. That the symptoms people associate with ADHD, such as a boy bouncing off the walls, it’s generally not true for women and girls. It’s much more subtle than that. And years of perfecting kind of the art of masking means it’s, it’s likely to stay that way. And it did stay that way for me. I’ve kind of grown up with low self-esteem, a view of myself in the mirror that others don’t really see. And as a child, I was very easily distracted in class by any external events or looking out the window. Although I drift off into a world of my own. So paying attention to the task at hand is, there’s always been my biggest challenge. As a young girl, I was a sporty one, the one climbing trees, the one riding my bike, making dens with the boys, just being really physical and not doing the typical kind of girls things that society expects, like crafting and colouring and drawing. I was and still am highly sensitive. I’ve always felt things really deeply in some of my few childhood memories of hiding behind the sofa when Black Beauty was on or being banned from watching Lassie as I just start crying and not be able to stop. However, this has translated in adulthood into into true empathy, being able to read the energy in a room and know exactly what’s going to happen before anybody’s even spoken a word. And finally, I’m a maverick. I love being different and often don’t want what other people want. So it’s important for me to be original and just not follow the crowd. That’s what I want to tell people about my ADHD.
What would you like to tell your employers about your ADHD?
I think people with ADHD have a lot of strengths if they’re supported well by their employers. You don’t need a lot of extra resource to support somebody with ADHD. I’m personally really lucky. I work for the cliche engineering software firm, who does embrace the possibility that quite a high percentage of their workforce are neurodiverse.
I’m not an engineer, but I am a business analyst and I specialize in humor user and customer experience and research. So, you know, the main part of my job is putting myself in the customer’s shoes and that’s where the empathy comes in. My line manager, my HR are aware of my diagnosis. I’ve shared it with them. And we’ve actually worked through the ADHD UK pack, welfare pack that’s on the website which, which I think all managers in the company should have a read-through. So I’ve kind of shared that with our HR department. And my line manager, you know, it’s opened her eyes to, to any preconceived ideas of what she thought ADHD was, even though she’d been through line manager training. So we, they put them through neurodiversity manager training. I think the most important thing an employer can do is listen and have that conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation as well. There’s always going to be a need for adjustments throughout my career personally. And it may not always be clear what they’re going to be.
I’m also part of a neurodiversity resource group that we work through. I’m soon writing a blog and possibly doing a vlog about my experiences in the hope that it sort of highlights how damaging masking symptoms can be to our mental health. And although it’s not common knowledge, I’ve got this disorder. It’s going to be interesting to see what comments I get back from colleagues if I get any from those blogs. And I think my main wish for the future workplace is that people with ADHD are given the opportunity to shine, and just to use their incredible skills that we’ve been dealt to really make a difference and show future generations what we can really achieve with ADHD in the workplace.
What would you like to tell your school about your ADHD?
I think it would be having the awareness. If only, if only, and I still think there’s a big piece of work that the Department of Education needs to do around highlighting and spotting those different traits. Like I said at the beginning about the girls who are shy or quiet. They, they mirror other people, they mirror other people’s mannerisms, and so it’s really difficult to pick up ADHD in, in young girls, and I think just a bigger awareness piece about that would be a really big, huge step forward and just just highlighting to teachers and and to kind of to the the Sankhos in schools how to spot that.
What would you like to tell the NHS about your ADHD?
Stop taking the easy option and just prescribing women who come in with anxiety and related traits, antidepressant drugs or anti-anxiety drugs. Be more open to the possibility that women sat in front of you, potentially having a breakdown, might actually have ADHD. To ask GPs to ask more questions and highlight the same way to schools the traits of ADHD in women and girls. Like we’ve just said, sort of to train teachers as well, for the, whether the Department of Education does that or the Department of Health just to spot those early signs. So they have the same chances as their peers without having to do 100 percent more effort to achieve that same result. Make the route to diagnosis easier, more readily available. I know it’s all about funding, so it’s tricky. But even being able to support people without medication but at least having that diagnosis and having some strategies and awareness of it I think is a huge step forward. It’s a highly treatable condition and if you have the right there is support it can dramatically improve your life.
What would you like to tell your friends about your ADHD?
Don’t be upset or angry if I forget a birthday or an occasion that’s important to you. I do have ways in trying to remember dates and details but I regularly forget. If I forget the name of your child or your partner or your pet or your dog. I don’t mean to, it’s not personal. I just can’t recall that information quick enough.
Don’t ever make me go to quizzes with you. I can’t recall the facts, it makes me feel stupid. Don’t pressurize me to go to quizzes. When you talk, please know I’m desperately trying to listen. Sometimes I’m saying back in my head words so that I can keep track and stop not think about other ideas and thoughts that are whizzing around my mind. Equally, if I’m talking, please try and listen to what I’m saying. Instead of busying yourself with another task or because I get distracted by what you’re doing and then I lose my train of thought, which in turn makes me lose confidence in what I’m saying when I’m talking about something.
Forgive me if I recall a story that I’ve already told you. I’ve forgotten that I’ve told you that story. And I’d like to change comments like, “Oh, you’re moving house again”, or “Oh, another car”. It’s because I get bored, and I’m impulsive, and I like change. So it’s that awareness, really, for my friends.
What would you like to tell your parents about your ADHD?
I’d like to tell them it’s genetic. It is a real thing. Their generation, I still don’t think, really understand it. They’re in their 70s. It wasn’t available when I was a child. So I don’t blame them for not recognising it. I didn’t recognize it in myself, you know, for 45 years. I guess what I would love more than anything is for them to just read about it, research about it, understand the disorder so that they can just be more appreciative of why their grandson is the way he is and why that with support he could have the opportunities that I didn’t have. That’s pretty much what I would tell them.
If you could have a magic wand, would you entirely remove your ADHD?
No, I wouldn’t entirely remove it. Although I’m hoping that the medication still is allowed will allow me just to kind of keep the parts of my brain that I love and make the things that I find difficult easier. That’s what my hope is for the medication.
I wouldn’t keep everything. The parts I would remove would be the disorganization, my forgetfulness, the inability to retain information that we’ve talked about, losing track of what I’m saying when I speak, my time management, my indecision, procrastination, being easily distracted and getting bored if something doesn’t grab my attention are all kind of things that I would probably like to get rid of, although I’m managing them as best I can. The things I’d like to keep, would be my problem-solving, my thinking outside of the box, being able to see the bigger picture. Sometimes I can, I can see things that other people can’t see, being able to hyper-focus on something. So when something gets my attention and I will literally, time will pass like that in a second. My enthusiasm for change. Not scared of change in any way. Having a go at things other people would be maybe too scared to do or say. My innate empathy towards other human beings and a lack of ego. And I don’t know if the lack of ego is ADHD or whether that’s just a personality trait that I have. And I just see everybody else same as me.
Tell us about one of your favourite ADHD strategies.
So if all those things that I said I wanted to change and I’d get rid of, I have a strategy for pretty much all of them. I don’t know what I would say would be my favorite one. But I’ve got a focus timer on my phone. So when I need to concentrate on a piece of work that needs to all reminds me to drink water. So I’ve got a timer for drinking water. Apparently, I’ve only recently kind of found this out a typical trait for people with ADHD is that they forget to drink water. Didn’t know that. Listening to audiobooks rather than reading so that’s kind of a strategy I’ve always had piles and piles of audiobooks of books by my bed or my shelf half-read quarter-read. Three pages in, can’t, I read a page and I have to reread it three or four times because I’m thinking about something else by the time I’ve got to the end of the page. So actually having audio books kind of satisfies my desire to read. It lets me think about the book, keeps my mind on the book and not about the rest of the world and what’s going on. So I find that massive. That’s only recent. I’ve kind of got into audiobooks meditation. So I use the car map, and do a daily check-in that kind of helps again, helps me sort of clear my brain. And they will find it boring. And this, I find this a very difficult thing to do is always planning our meals and taking a shopping list and taking a photo of the shopping list on my phone. For when I forget to take the shopping list with me, and then go to stores as well like you know, Aldi, Lidl stores that have very few choices, minimal choice, it saves my procrastination. There are the beans and I just pick up the beans rather than me looking at the beans, and there’s five or six different types. And make and going into a world of procrastination about which kind of beans on standing there for five minutes. And so that’s a bit of a strategy. I carry toiletries in my spare toiletries in my handbag, so like toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorants, for when I forget to do that before I leave the house. That’s something that I end up doing, and it’s another strategy, we have a bowl of keys by the front door, that’s where the keys go, they must stay in the bowl, and they’ve all got fobs on them as well. Electronic fobs in case we lose them because that’s a regular occurrence in our house. And I guess birthdays was my another one is that I have a list of birthdays on my fridge, nothing else, just a list of my friends and family’s birthdays. So every time I go to the fridge, I check and look at the list and double-check whether it’s somebody’s birthday. I mean I can have it on my app on my phone. If I see it and then it’s gone. I’ve forgotten about it so that list lives on the fridge and I’m glad I’m now out of the cycle of children’s birthday parties, because I would be the mum who is basically buying the present on the way to the birthday party and wrapping it in the car park, writing the card out and buying sellotape and everything to wrap the present five minutes before and invariably getting the wrong time for the party and we have turned up at the end of parties in the past. So yeah, I’m glad I’m out of that spin of parties. I think I could go on a bit there kind of, I guess the things that I do regularly, like on a daily basis.
What is the worst thing that has happened to you as a result of ADHD?
I think something that I, I live with and it’s not a regret because I don’t think it would have been the right thing at the time,. But I had a place lined up at university to become a PE teacher. You know, taking in, you know, I did, you know, my A levels were all around sport. But just before I did my A levels, I did some work experience in my old secondary school. And one of the teachers asked if I wanted to take a lesson. I did a lesson plan, I did it all, and he said, do you want to run that lesson? And I did, but halfway through, I completely forgot what I was saying. They thought it was hilarious, the students, but they were only a few years younger than me at that stage, and I was so embarrassed. And I think it was one of those experiences that made me question my ability to be a teacher. So, you know, if I couldn’t recall any information of how, how can I possibly stand up in front of a class full of students every day and try and remember all this stuff. And recall it from my brain. And, so I declined the degree and the place on the course. And, and it’s a decision that I’ve, I’ve felt like I’ve always regretted. But now knowing that I’ve got an ADHD, I think I would have found it challenging anyway. And I think it might not have been a particularly good experience. So I’m kind of coming to terms with the fact that it probably, it may not have been good and I may have dropped out anyway. Rather than me living with that regret. And I think now hopefully with the medication that I’ll be getting, I feel confident I could probably go back and, and learn. And then maybe obtain a degree that I’ve always felt is kind of out of my reach. So that’s, that’s kind of, my hope really.
What is the best thing that has happened to you because of ADHD?
Probably that I met my husband bit cliche. And although he’s not officially diagnosed, he shares similar traits to me, and I think that’s probably what drew us together. And he’s empathetic, he gets me as a person. He gets how my brain works. And he listens to all my wild thoughts without judgment, and my ideas. I’m not saying life’s easy for us as a family. But we’re spontaneous, we have bonkers ideas, loads of energy, we love giving new experiences a try, we don’t sit back and think, well, this is it, we’ve got it, you know, we’re always enthusiastic about kind of what the future holds for all of us. So I think that’s probably the best thing that happened to me.