My Blog

Myers Briggs, who knows more about putting you into the right box than the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, calls me a Campaigner, which does go some way to explaining my habit of jumping on bandwagons and shouting from the rooftops about whatever I feel strongly about; and there are so many people and so many causes to get behind, life can get quite busy.  But how I love busy! And who better to have fighting lots of corners at once than someone with ADHD?

Things began to fall into place when a fellow writer on my retreat was describing how she coped with her own neurodiversity. To illustrate some of her challenges, she showed me the hilarious YouTube video by the Holderness family, with its earworm chorus ‘ADHD’ exploding to the tune of ‘Under the Sea’, and I never looked back. I went on to discover the podcast by Saeedeh Hashemi interviewing Jordan from Rizzle Kicks who summed it up perfectly as ‘living in a soft rain of post-it notes’. He also points out that people with ADHD tend to gravitate towards others with the same condition. ‘We fire off each other’, he says. It’s true - most of my friends are addicted to activity, to plans, ideas, dreams, the next thing…

Self-diagnosed and likely to remain so given the 5 year wait on the NHS, I find myself in a state of freaky bliss, finally beginning to understand myself, rather than trying to catch up with myself all day. I can now look back at my multiple career flips - from lawyer to journalist to entrepreneur to government adviser to equalities campaigner to teacher in secondary, then primary, to stand-up comedy songwriter to language tutor to thriller writer - and suddenly it all makes sense, as do my two YouTube channels, my love-affair with Rightmove and regular upsticksing and replanting myself in pastures new; not to mention the pristine Teach Yourself Ukrainian book on the shelf, the seldom used gym membership swallowing up half my income each month and even going through the full foster parent training before falling at the last hurdle. The reason for that was that I was a single parent of three children under 18 without a reliable support person to take over in emergency – of course – my friends were all busy running their own ADHD lives…

It doesn’t exactly paint a picture of stability and sanity, but I wonder whether people living with ADHD actually suffer from a deficit of attention or are they blessed with a surfeit of it?  And isn’t the ability to do so much in such a short time more of a superpower than a ‘disorder’?  Having the energy to keep all those plates spinning, making the most of our brief time on this planet by trying everything and saying yes to every opportunity is a privilege, a gift and a joy and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Myers Briggs thanks for the signposting, I’ll take it from here.

See all articles »