The Life of an Undiagnosed ADHD Girl

This blog post is one I’ve had for a while, nearly two years. I enjoy my passion from it. It’s not my most renowned, or best written, or honestly my best vocabulary- but it’s important for me that this piece of writing exists on my platform.

Throughout this post I want to discuss what it felt like to be a kid and an adult with undiagnosed ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 21, and when I was my whole life began to make sense. Today I would like to talk through my thoughts and feelings of this diagnosis and go back to how I felt as a kid. ADHD is shown very differently in women than men, and most of the casework studies are based on men. I’m here to share my experience as a woman with ADHD, so the possibility of making young girls’s lives easier with an early diagnosis. If more casework of ADHD was based on girls and women, I believe that I would’ve been diagnosed as a kid and my life would’ve been so much easier.

As far back as I can remember, I was put into the programs that were meant for the more “advanced students.” In elementary school I was in the GATE program which was for the “gifted and talented students,” but I didn’t get in through the test that gets kids into the program; my friends and twin sister got into the program through a test we took in third grade, but I did not pass it. I got into the program the year after based on my good grades. In elementary school, my desk was always a disaster. I always wanted to keep it clean but I never could and it was always so embarrassing to me. I remember feeling like I didn’t belong with all the GATE kids because all of them were extremely organized even at the age of 10. We would have desk clean-out days and I never wanted anyone to help with mine because of the tornado it was in there.

A lot of the times you see boys get diagnosed with ADHD in elementary due hyperactivity, inattention, etc. Because these traits are external, teachers and parents know what to look for. On the opposing end, girls show ADHD much differently as children. Girls usually show ADHD with internal traits such as inattentiveness and low self-esteem. 

Because of the GATE program, I was placed into honors courses in middle school and that’s when my messiness completely went a-wall. My backpack once again was a crazy mess: papers crumpled up, old trash, homework I never did, etc. Middle school was really when my parents began to notice how unorganized I was. They would always buy me the school planner that was offered, but I would only write in it for maybe the first week. My twin sister, Lexy, loved planners and constantly kept hers completely filled out, mostly color coordinated as well. I was always so jealous of her and how she was able to do that; she would always offer to help me, but my jealousy got in the way a lot when we were kids. Middle school was a messy blur: papers everywhere, getting C’s in classes I should’ve gotten A’s in, feeling extremely overwhelmed with having 7 classes a day, etc. 

Not only was school a mess for me, my room was exactly the same. As far as I could remember, it was the biggest point of contention for me and my mom. She is extremely organized and has a place for everything, while I was (still kind of am) the complete opposite. When my mom would look at my room she would see an absolute mess of clothes on the floor, trash near my window sill, my bed unmade, etc. But to me, my clothes piles were perfectly sorted- clean floor pile, dirty floor pile, could wear again floor pile. The trash was on my window sill because the idea of throwing my trash away below me, compared to putting my trash on my window sill that was about 8 inches closer, made the most sense to me. Also- why make my bed when I just have to get back in it? The small mundane tasks seemed extremely taxing, and not worth it to me. When I was able to clean my room, my sister would have to be in the room, I didn’t want her to do anything, I just wanted her to be in there for me (which I now know is a useful strategy for ADHD called body doubling). It’s not like she would boss me around or tell me what to clean, sometimes she would just sit there doing her homework, but I found that having a person there in my room, made me feel like I had to get it done. 

When I got to high school, everything became progressively worse in all aspects of my life: grades, my cleanliness, my relationships with people, and much much more. My high school was on the quarter system/block schedule, meaning that we had four different report cards per year. We would have four classes from August to December, where we received two report cards, and from January to May, we would get a new set of four classes, alongside two more report cards. Everything is extremely fast-paced with the quarter system, for us, we were learning a year’s long material per class, but with half the time. This was a nightmare for an undiagnosed ADHD kid like myself. I loved the idea of getting to switch classes halfway through the year, because I would get bored very easily, but I could also never keep up. Every new set of classes I started to use a new planner, but yet once again, it joined the graveyard of past planners that only had one week of assignments in it. I then used the same strategy every time: hopefully I’ll remember my homework (which most of the times I never did) or write the stuff I needed to do on my hand. I was an unorganized mess, and it showed in my grades. If I missed one assignment in a class, I would tell myself it was okay because I would just make sure I do the next one, but that strategy also never worked. You see when you have ADHD, most things in life feel all-consuming. So if I missed an assignment, and then two, and then three, I would just give up. I couldn’t fathom being able to catch up in a class that I was behind in. When it came to my friendships, it was very touch and go. I was extremely outgoing and loved talking to people, but I was also extremely emotional and easily embarrassed; I always hated those things about me, but little did I know, they were big signs of my ADHD. I have vivid memories of my teachers in high school giving us lectures on topics or giving the class directions, but I could never obtain any information. Every time any teacher finished talking, I would sheepishly turn to someone next to me and ask them to repeat what the teacher had just said. I always felt extremely dumb and embarrassed that people probably thought I wasn’t listening.

For me, high school was about surviving and getting acceptable grades. My parents would always tell me how capable I was, and it would make me upset because I knew they were right. I just never knew why I couldn’t “reach my potential.” I ended high school with about a 3.1 unweighted GPA. It wasn’t heavily celebrated in my family, because there was only one expectation after high school: go directly to a four year university. 

My parents (mostly my dad) had a 4 year university only option. Our sophomore year, my dad paid for me and Lexy to go to a college planning center. It was all about getting into four years, proofreading college essays, making sure applications were sent in on time, etc. I enjoyed going to the college planning center- it was fun to imagine college and where I could go, but something in my mind kept telling me I wasn’t ready. 

My mom began to offer the idea of me attending a community college towards the end of my senior year, but my dad was against the idea. I ended up choosing to attend the University of Oregon. Oregon was a quarter system school, so I felt prepared to handle the quickness, an extremely naive concept that I would learn very quickly. What I didn’t think about was the option to go to class. At least in high school, there was the held accountable aspect of going to class. If you skipped school, it was known because each class took attendance. The office would call home if you had an unexcused absence. In college, class becomes “optional.” I never wanted to get out of bed, it felt like way too much. Going to lecture halls that were too big, walking all the way to class, having to listen to a professor for two hours on one topic- I couldn’t even pretend I wanted to do any of that. I would excitedly attend all my classes the first week of school, but once again, just like high school, I wouldn’t do an assignment, and it all went downhill. I was extremely embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop giving up. I would call Lexy crying because I couldn’t read an essay prompt that was only a paragraph long. Lexy would do all she could to help me, even researching a book that I had to write about, that she had never even heard of. But even the help of my sister wasn't nearly enough to combat my undiagnosed ADHD. Without going into too much detail, because it’s still a hard topic for me to talk about, I had to leave Oregon for a few reasons, but one of them being my grades. I felt worthless, embarrassed, and that I never would graduate college. I accepted that I just needed to work and forget about school. I fell into a very deep depression. So much so, that for the first time in my life, I accepted that I needed help. I have seen a psychiatrist before, but it was for an anxiety/depression issue, so I wanted to see if I needed to have medication again. I shared this with my mom, and she was extremely proud of me. I had never asked for help on my own, and when I finally did, I would soon find out that it would change my life.

I’ll go into how it felt to be diagnosed so late in life in my next post, and how it’s still impacting me almost three years after my diagnosis. I will say, simply put, my life has drastically changed for the better since getting diagnosed with ADHD.