Similar to the experience of many others, a late diagnosis of ADHD has me trawling back through memory after memory, now equipped to see things differently. The common themes of realizing somebody had become annoyed by me or I appeared to have shared some information or opinion that had not been well received all started to make sense. Academically, I had always been taught to be open and honest because it is only these things that can form a solid foundation for further inquiry and understanding. I have always had to be analytical in social situations, not just to understand other individuals, but also how they behave in groups, and I then relied on this analysis to determine how I might function within these dynamics. Consequently, I always had social analysis to hand and would share if prompted, backed up by those academic values of being open and honest. Needless to say, I both endeared and offended, and I have never known which would result. The diagnosis itself cannot provide a roadmap through this terrain, but it is more satisfying than simply feeling eternally weird.
I’m still struck by what I think is an ironic name for a disorder, because as a child I never felt a deficit in attention; I was laser focused on some things, just not the things that other people had decided needed my attention, and I think I would have subconsciously accepted the idea, without caveats, that it is normal to not pay attention to things one finds uninteresting. During my undiagnosed years at the end of high school, it was exhaustion and sensory issues that plagued my mental health, a time when I began consuming large volumes of strong coffee. Frequently, I found myself in the company of confused and annoyed teachers, most likely as a result of poor academic performance, which in turn confused and annoyed me. One thing I never seemed to be able to get across was that I was trying, and every now again, when the stars aligned, I could get good grades. I had begun to realize that if I could control my environment, get the solitude that I needed, and spend enough time with the material to be able to see and understand it in a way that worked for me, then a measure of success was possible. My personal mantra going into my adult years just became find your own way to do it.
Now, after twenty years of this approach, I now have an arsenal of coping mechanisms and I am maintaining the steady course of a medication that works. Adderall is not a forgiving drug if missed, but the changes in my professional life have been extraordinary. In my capacity as a science and medical writer, I can see and hold onto the overall message and aesthetic of a document while I delve into a granular analysis of each section. The error rate of transferring numbers from data tables into narrative descriptions decreased, and the repetition of information now aggravates me to levels previously unknown. Managing my ADHD has allowed me to become better at one of things I love most in the world – writing.
These changes, coupled with my pensive nature, has turned my attention to how I have communicated and expressed myself most of my life in speech and writing. I can rule out an analysis of fashion sense or cosmetic artistry because there I have always been quite boring, except perhaps for a tendency to prefer black clothes. I always considered writing to be the most satisfying means of expression. The practice of sitting alone with my thoughts and determining the best way to express them was therapeutic and enjoyable. I suppose it stands to reason that a precocious mind, prone to sudden flights of fancy, would benefit from a practice that distills ideas and experiences into written and unchanging structures.
My high school focus became science, but I was always privately irked that I had not had much academic success with English and language studies. At university, after initially enlisting for a business education, I could no longer ignore my need to gain a level of mastery over writing and read the kind of books I considered the most important. This began a love affair with the lives and thoughts of authors and thinkers. I am now familiar with the written voice of a few key writers, notably Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, and sometimes I like to read anything by them just to glide over their sentences and thoughts, even if I have no idea what they are writing about. Their sentences, their choices, and their attitude remain a source of speculative bemusement.
Until recently, I never really thought about my voice and how I have learnt to speak, but my ADHD has been at work here, too. I have often felt that my voice comes with a forever depleted battery and after some conversations, I simply feel unable to talk anymore until I recharge. Attempting to join work conversations on those difficult mornings and insert myself into the dialogue has sometimes felt like I’m at the back of an aircraft hangar and I have to fight against a bungee rope all the way to the entrance at the front to join the storm outside. This would explain why I feel the need to pad out my work calendar around meetings for time to psych up and then retreat into solitude. When exhausted, I also sense an explosion of emotion threaten to overcome and tear my voice apart if I am being pushed to use it and further a conversation I have long lost interest in having. In addition, I have also experienced almost vocal paralytic silences when a response is being requested from me and I am convinced there is too much to process in order to formulate an answer.
I can also see that my preference for writing clearly substituted for speech during emotionally challenging moments in my life. Passing girls notes in school; feeling the need to share something important with an authority figure and doing it by handing them a page of scrawl; and in the days of letter writing, carefully crafting long streams of consciousness to friends or romantic interests. Even now, I prefer to text over talk for sharing ideas, and if I do need to meet with people, I prefer one on ones where we can connect and I am not distracted by the untamed presence of competing parties.
With these challenges, I seem to have semi-consciously determined that when I do speak, I have to make the most of it for the sake of time and for satisfying those needing to hear (from) me. This has resulted in my tendency to go for dramatic statements with as much meaning as I can pack into them, which often has the effect of preemptively silencing any further interest in my contribution for fear of having to interpret another verbal sledgehammer. The dramatic statements come direct from my essay-writing acumen, where I have constantly fought for the best articulation with the best word choice for maximum impact. These high-impact contributions, ironically coupled with the majority silence, has often resulted in me being seen as a character, which again, can endear or offend in a way that I cannot predict. And further, in addition to the dramatized content, I have modified my voice to sound maximally silky, with care to take pauses after the set up and before I deliver my key message. So, all of the troubles I have had with speaking, throughout my life, have culminated in a unique and carefully crafted voice as a way to thrive and survive in those public spaces I must attend.
These traits I have discovered in myself are also traits that have been said of many authors for years. It is not uncommon for an author to become a recluse, experience long depressive episodes in solitude, or simply opt for silence while their work is still percolating in the mind, on their desk, or as the public digests it following publication. This control over the delivery of information is what gives some writers that air of mystery, especially when the prolonged silence gives way to explosive revelations that either further intellectual discussions or simply result in unbridled joy and merriment. Some of our best writers and thinkers had ADHD? Of course they did!
These realizations about the modification of voice, sent me to the scientific literature to see if ADHD has been linked to peculiarities of speech. While I am not a fan of terms like deficit, dysfunction, and healthy control population, I do like to use my background in brain science to see if some of the things I have identified from my life have been discovered in comparative studies. Recently, there was a study (2025) that found those with ADHD do have unique voice patterns, and has been tentatively linked to executive dysfunction resulting in a unique modulation of the vastly complex voice system. So, some of us do struggle with our voices and no doubt, through grit and determination, find ways to make it work for us.
Perhaps ironically, the writer in me is excited by those with ADHD having their own unique relationship to their voice. When a person struggles with something about themselves, they are likely to spend a lot of time thinking about it. Here, you have a lot of people thinking about voice, how to communicate, and how to speak. People with ADHD have put a lot of time and thought into self-expression and so are likely to have done something unique with a core part of who they are. Firstly, this makes people with ADHD incredibly sexy, but these unique expressions invariably contribute to culture in novel and exciting ways.
In fact, more and more, I have become frustrated by the idea that those of us heavily documented in the DSM with deficits and disorders contribute richly, indeed disproportionately, to culture, art, and scholarship. So, what does it say about us as a species that the novel ideas and novel expression that we cherish for intellectual advancement and the nurturing of our souls comes from the disordered?
If I had the energy, I might say something.