The Very Real, Totally Hidden, Costs of Being an Adult With ADHD
Or: Whoops—I got a call from collections again!
I was 36 years old when my therapist, who had been hinting at as much for months, gently told me she suspected I had ADHD.
At first, I scoffed at the suggestion. Nobody had ever, ever said that to me before. ADHD, as I understood it, was what the kid who couldn’t sit still in my middle school English class had. That wasn’t me at all. I’d been an honors student! I had a graduate degree! I taught yoga, for crying out loud—isn’t that, like, the opposite of having ADHD?
As it turns out: no. My therapist encouraged me to be curious and introspective, and to do some research on the subject. Not in an “I’ll do my own research and scroll through page after page of search results until I find a post that validates my opinion” way, but rather in a way that involved spending lots of hours reading articles and listening to podcasts that featured experts on the subject. And, well, what I turned up explained a lot.
I had bought into the belief that if you had ADHD, you couldn’t succeed in school, but I learned that plenty of kids with ADHD did just fine—or better than fine—when it came to their academic performance. In fact, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap between behaviors associated…
