Finding My Voice With ADHD

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.

Beware the hooks! AuDHD and ADHD’s influence on thought

Spongebob: Ep. Hooky

How many other people with AuDHD or ADHD have felt themselves unable to let go of a stream of thought? It happens to me frequently. I feel like a dog with a chew toy, I just cannot let go, even after a good mangling.

I never even realized this is what I was doing until I’d been “consistently” on my meds. At this point, I have to conclude my academic curiosities and my enjoyment of a good critique or debate are a result of these hooks that just won’t let go of a topic. The irony of these hooks is that they don’t seem to align with an attention deficit at all, quite the opposite. I might argue that “attention deficit” is really what it looks like to somebody who has noticed but not accepted they are boring me to tears.

The upside to these naturally occurring hooks is that I can get quite deep into some interesting topics and experience the satisfaction gained from new perspectives and a deeper conceptual understanding. However, the downside is no joke. These hooks can get into streams of thought that are not productive, fed and exacerbated by anxiety and depression. Those with AuDHD and ADHD have often been noted to have a creative bent due to lateral thinking and an intimidating imagination, but if that machinery is hijacked by anxiety, my mind is then in that place for the foreseeable future.

Before I was diagnosed, I always used to say things like, “I have a lot on my mind,” or, “I wish I had an off button” when talking about the difficulty of quieting my thoughts towards the end of a day. I don’t know how many times I have tried to guide a thought process to a natural full stop with the hopes of freeing my mind from this burden, but it never seems to work. Given that often what I am doing is trying to make predictions and come up with contingency plans for different eventualities, I can sometimes accept that I simply cannot know and therefore should put the thought process on hold until I know more. I can also accept that my mind likes to spear ideas with hooks, reminding me that this is in my nature, which can perhaps help keep the emotional response in check (if my alexithymia hasn’t blinded me completely). So far, though, the best solution seems to be distraction – spear something else.   

I have also noticed my hooks can be sensitive to communications from others, which result in something being said (written), and I’m unable to gauge meaning or intention (the Au in AuDHD). My response, and I don’t have much say in this, is to sink my hooks into the message and figure out both what it meant and what it means in the context of understanding my future. I usually have to remind myself that I am going to over-think it, there might not be much meaning or intent, and even if there is, it’s just one opinion. Although, to save myself from any mental acrobatics that might ruin my evening, I tend to avoid communications towards the end of the day and tackle them in the morning – I know avoidance isn’t a great solution, but I’m still waiting for the day when everyone gets their communication out the way in the morning, so they can then shut up for the rest of the day.

The Milestone in Mental Health

My stake in the mental healthcare discussion is similar to everyone else’s. After half a lifetime of experiences that never quite made sense, things started to click and I was late-diagnosed with ADHD, although I think I’m more AuDHD. Mental healthcare is now a staple of popular media, millions of Internet users discuss it every day, and there has been a rise in activism to push for changes in the shared aspects of our world to accommodate for everyone. This might be a fire that needs to rage if we are to achieve the stubbornest of all civic goals, systemic change, but are we missing something more fundamental?

In this age of constant fighting, where everyone at a moment’s notice has to be prepared to cling-on to their rights, one can’t help thinking we’ve reached a moment in time for a much needed paradigm shift in terms of how we see each other. The wealth gap is eye-wateringly askew, willful planetary destruction coupled with climate change threatens our survival, and governments have inverted, to now be run by naïve ideologues obsessed with stripping all meaningful public services. It’s not surprising this is also the age that the contrived service of “AI” has been foistered on everyone as its core principle is to remove the person from exercising skillsets, although talking points mask this by marketing it as the removal of chores/inconveniences/thought; purveyors of lobotomies once promised the same thing. Chores and inconveniences are still needed to build us as humans – to remove them will make us less human and incapable of the oversight we are supposed to provide over the AI slop produced in our place.

From the outside, it looks like we are living in a fundamentally antihuman era.

With this background, it is not surprising that mental health is on everyone’s lips. One of our strongest pillars for maintaining control of our mental health is to believe that we have a future and it will be better than what we endure in the present. Maintaining this belief starts to become untenable if our standard of living drops and the world seems to be slipping into chaos.

In addition to these environmental factors, everyone remains at the mercy of their biology, something compounded in the US by struggles with health insurance companies. Our brain health can still be undermined by strokes, aneurysms and embolisms, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, etc. These maladies can impact memory, mood, and personality, if not directly then consequently. A decline in brain health impacts how a person can interact with the world around them and how they have traditionally thought about everything they do and everything they are.

Mental health is a concept premised on the idea that should something be wrong with our minds, we should seek to correct them back to a healthy state of normal. A problem with this idea is that the passage of time, combined with the impact of aging, means returning to a prior state is impossible and the concept of normal quickly becomes a mirage. Normal is a state of mind, once held, that provides a sense of peace and security. When it comes to how we see our health, normal is the security blanket we all crave, and we are sometimes prepared to pay for with defiance. Normal also stops us from recognizing and appreciating difference.

When it comes to brain health, unfortunately there isn’t a lot of utility in talking about what should be. What should be is the question behind systems of morality, law, and justice, so as a line of questioning it is natural for people to think this way. If a brain develops a tumor, the resultant tumor was due to the complexities of human biology, and the oncologist is tasked with removing the tumor and preventing recurrence. They can rightly assume this is a state of brain health that should result in the best outcome for the patient, but should bes are human judgments and attempts at wish fulfillment over complexities that can only be minimally influenced.

Neuroscience has also shown us that common mental health disorders are indicative of unique pathologies, literally meaning that the brains of autists and those with classical personality disorders pursued their own unique development that differs from those without these conditions. Changes are often found in gray and white matter volumes, white matter conductivity (resting and during activity), and gyrification (the amount of folding in the neocortex). But again, these complex and enduring pathologies are not changing course from some ideal, they just are. Human.

To be human and living in the world means we are all united by the same risks to our mental health, even if our desire to see ourselves as normal and healthy prevent us from empathizing with those vocal about their struggle. Disorder and disease are not outside forces looking to infiltrate our bodies, they reflect how our bodies have developed within the complex rubric of gene-environment interaction and how our bodies are responding to life around them; they are all part of what it is to be human, even though our knowledge and technologies have allowed us some influence in these areas to better understand how we can live.

This means that the quest for a compassionate society might not be best served by a multitude of advocacy groups, all competing with their own interests, and quick to be ignored by those who cannot currently identify or use it to turn a profit. An understanding and acceptance of our human nature, as it rightfully applies to all, might be the milestone we need to move forward.

Seeking a mental health diagnosis in your 40s

To be diagnosed later in life with something that has been with you since childhood is a strange feeling.

I was always the kid with asthma, meaning I had bright and shiny inhalers in my pocket. Other kids would recognize that that was my difference, but I got used to it, and assumed as a young child that was the only medical condition that would ever define me. The novelty of having inhalers soon wore off, however, and I was left annoyed that all having asthma really meant was putting restrictions on me that other kids didn’t have to endure. Many years later, because I’m a special kind of idiot, I was determined to smoke to reclaim some autonomy and put my finger up at the world for always telling me what to do.

The teens also saw the arrival of a new nemesis.

Cystic acne. I never knew the name for this at the time, only the mortifying feeling of waking up with massive painful swellings on my face or chest and knowing that it would draw attention to me in public spaces and I was going to be stuck with these swellings for at least a few weeks (which is about a year in teenager time).

Fortunately, as I stepped boldly but naively into adulthood, the severity of my asthma decreased, and the acne, slowly but surely decided not to come back. But there was something else there that refused to budge.

Depression, anxiety, and meltdowns from being sensorily overwhelmed had been there since my early teens and seemed to be getting worse. I naturally assumed they were a part of adolescence and it never occurred to me that the difficulties I was having in school were due to (at least one) mental health challenge. The extreme fatigue, the problems I had focusing, the need for solitude and sensory deprivation, and how rooms full of other students and teachers always felt too much. I came to believe that I just sucked at life and it didn’t matter how hard I tried, things just never seemed to get better.

My first year in college was one of the lowest of my life.

I would find myself awake at 3am in such agony at my own existence. Nothing I seemed to do mattered and it seemed to be well beyond my own ability to fix myself. It might have been a sign of the times, but it never even occurred to me that I might have mental health issues. I hated what I was studying, I hated that I could not seem to connect with anyone, I hated myself for feeling the suffocating depression that I was convinced clung to me like a wet blanket precisely because I was too useless to rescue myself.

Eventually, my experiences at college did come to my aid.

I took it upon myself to change subjects and I fell in love with the act of learning. There is always something to learn and learning itself is an act of transition, giving you more and more access to conceptual worlds that previously would have remained boring and unengaging. I decided to learn to write and moved into a more essay-oriented field, and I now got to read about so many amazing people that influenced the world in unique and captivating ways. Finally, learning and seeking new experiences picked me up and gave me a fighting chance.

Fast forward through a history of many jobs, neglected responsibilities, a lengthened stay in academia, and an accumulating arsenal of coping mechanisms and I arrived in my forties, committed to a diagnostic evaluation for ADHD.

Anyone who has been through this will appreciate the irony of this assessment. You are asked about your ability to sit still, focus, and complete lengthy but boring administrative tasks, while it is incumbent upon you to sit still, focus, and complete a lengthy but boring administrative task. Indeed, the required activity and not the actual assessment itself feels like the actual test.

Still, the task was completed, I was interviewed by a charming psychologist, and a week later a report confirmed what I had perhaps known all along. Yet there is a peace in no longer needing to doubt myself. The “off button” I crave for overactive thoughts could at least now be applied to understanding this facet of my mental health. The explanatory power of a mental health diagnosis is also profound. I have numerous memories of difficult or painful times, which I had not been able to understand. There are times I could not understand why I felt so bad or why certain people had become inexplicably annoyed or angry with me.

Before I was diagnosed, it was common for me to use certain metaphors to describe my experience. For example, when I felt overwhelmed, it felt like my mind had been unrolled and stuck on a spike. Or after a busy meeting with quite a few attendants, it felt like my mind was a smoldering ash heap. The acts of reading and writing have always been soothing for me, because working through sentences makes me feel like my mind is being stitched back together. This next metaphor is a bit labored, but nonetheless true – joining a meeting, asserting myself into the conversation and recruiting my voice to contribute feels like running from the back of an aircraft hangar while I’m tethered to a piece of bungee cord trying to get out through the main door to join the storm outside.

If you have not been diagnosed, and describing your life using these kinds of metaphors has been common, it may very well be something to pursue.

Under the light of my diagnosis, these memories have now started to lose their sting and even though moving forward is not always easy, I at least can do it with greater understanding.

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