Burnout to ADHD diagnosis
Everything was going okay, not easy, but okay. And then suddenly it wasn’t. You went from coping to not coping and somewhere along the line received an ADHD diagnosis, or started exploring on your own. Sound familiar?
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
It’s a familiar story, one that you often see among adult diagnosed ADHDers. Of course many people were missed as ADHD children due to the fact that there was far less knowledge about ADHD back when they were children, something that is better but still not good enough today, but there is also a category of people who were missed because when it came to school, the main place where ADHD symptoms are picked up on, these people just weren’t doing badly.
There are ways in which school is beneficial to an ADHD brain and while I can look back and see signs of my ADHD at school, when it comes down to it, I think that many features of the education system were actually helpful to my own brand of ADHD. Firstly, it was incredibly well structured and while ADHD brains hate structure and push back against it, it is something that is actually incredibly useful to us.
I mean this room is incredibly ADHD unfriendly but modern day classrooms are thankfully a little better...
We know that we have to be at a certain place at a certain time. We see the same teachers, follow a structured curriculum, all of this is helpful to ADHD brains. On top of this, there’s also a lot of variety at school. I’m someone who loves learning and I don’t think I appreciated at the time how amazing it was to learn about so many different subjects on a daily basis.
The lessons were only an hour long which pushed at the edge of my ability to concentrate but by the time I was losing concentration, the lesson was nearly over anyway (and I’d already finished my work and the teachers let me get on with writing stories and songs in my notebook instead) and then it was time to switch things up and head to the next lesson.
Many of my clients look back on that time feeling like things were different. Like they were well organised and on top of things. Often they did well at school, achieved good grades and, while it was certainly stressful at times, they overall coped very well despite their undiagnosed ADHD. Well, up until they didn’t.
I’ve started calling this concept The Wall and I’ve heard so many stories of ADHDers hitting it. I define The Wall as the point where everything changes. On one side of things, the before side, you were doing great and generally on top of things. Then you hit The Wall and suddenly everything starts crumbling down and often this sparks a series of events that lead to an ADHD diagnosis.
I mean what other imagery did you expect here? It was literally right there and I'm not creative enough to be less on the nose about it.
The Wall can come at a different point for everyone. For some people it happens as school draws to a close and the pressure of final exams causes something to snap. For others, the additional responsibilities of being solely responsible for themselves at university, or when moving out for the first time for work, pile on an extra level of stress that wasn’t there before. I know I am not the only ADHDer who is constantly ground down by life admin!
Others get well into their career and adulthood, getting married, having children, maybe even moving countries before they hit the wall. But the one thing these people have in common? They hit the wall in a big way.
When I hit my own wall, I was burnt out, stressed and exhausted from spending so long pushing myself in a role I really wasn’t enjoying because my identity was so wrapped up in being a successful career woman that I couldn’t see any other way of being. I saw myself as a Leslie Knope of Parks and Rec fame; a ridiculously hard worker who was passionate about my career and also making things better for other women.
The problem was, I wasn’t passionate about my career. Despite the awards I was winning and all the promotions and extra roles I was taking on, I was being ground down by it and getting closer and closer to the end of my tether.
It only took one trigger to send me over the edge, and unfortunately that was my grandmother passing. Being as burnt out as I was and having to deal with such a horrible thing as grief tipped me over the edge from where I was before, coping despite everything, to where I was after, very much not coping at all. Nearly a year later and I was diagnosed with ADHD.
Being on the other side of the wall is a weird place to be, for many reasons, but one of which is all of the impostor syndrome that it comes with. I was a high flier, someone who did incredibly well at school and my early career and so it led to impostor syndrome about having ADHD. When there are so many people out there whose ADHD symptoms combined in such a way that they weren’t able to cope as well as I did, it can leave you feeling like an impostor.
This is compounded by a lot of attitudes out there about ADHD. From both outside the community but also within there’s so much negativity around ADHD that often leads to the idea that being ADHD and successful are two completely opposing things when that’s not the case. In fact one of my coaching clients struggled so much with this impostor syndrome that he questioned his diagnosis and when the results came back with “no, you actually have moderate to severe ADHD” he was shocked.
Look at this dramatic imagery! He feels like an impostor compared to how he looks in the mirror. Such emotion!
On the other hand, in this post-wall place where we’ve faced down burnout and accepted that we have ADHD and that has been making our life harder, we’re keenly aware of how difficult things feel now compared to how we felt before and that leaves us with another dose of impostor syndrome; we can feel like an impostor compared to the successful person we were in the past.
What makes this an even harder pill to swallow is the fact that we can’t just go back. Hitting The Wall is a life changing experience. We’ve opened Pandora’s box and we can’t just put it away again. But despite knowing we can’t go back, we often want to.
In some ways we’re jealous of that person we were before. That person for whom success came, if not effortlessly, then much easier than everything in life feels right now. So we do everything to try and get back to that person. We do the burnout recovery. We get a therapist. We take the medication. We work hard at doing all of the things that we’re told we need to do because we’re used to working hard so this is another thing that we work hard at. But nothing gets us back to feeling like we felt before.
I’m talking about this in a way that feels bleak, and is uncharacteristically negative about ADHD by my standards because that’s how it feels at the time. Hitting The Wall is incredibly hard, one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through to be honest, but despite how incredibly hard it is, I know that there is a way forward because I’ve lived it, and so have my clients.
And actually I’ve noticed that this is when my clients tend to come to me. They’re in the post-wall rebuild. They’re well into the healing phase and are ready to start moving forward again. They know they can’t go back, but they’re not sure what moving forward looks like.
This one is a dramatic interpretation of leaving behind the pre-wall parts of you that you want to leave behind. But the words don't have to be quite this level of dramatic...
Often one of the hardest things for them is that they don’t actually know what they’re good at anymore. They know what they used to think they were good at but the path they were on before led them to hitting The Wall and burnout and they don’t want to go back there.
Another thing is that their ADHD is front and centre, and it’s something that is important to them. So much of the career advice they dutifully followed before is ADHD unfriendly and they’re fed up with trying to follow in the footsteps of people who aren’t like them, who don’t understand them and again this runs the risk of putting themselves on the road to burnout again.
They want to be successful again, but in a way that works for their brain. In a way that works for what’s important to them. So that’s what we set out to do.
Much like my own post-wall recovery, I work with clients to find out what they’re good at again, to find what they want to bring forward from pre-wall them to grow their career and what they want to leave behind. To start beating back the impostor syndrome that is throttling both their acceptance of themselves and their ADHD as well as their career. To build a life forward that works for them.
Because I’ve been there and I know what it’s like. For me the way forward involved entrepreneurship and leaning on my love of learning and perseverance through difficult and challenging situations to build a career that looked completely different, but feels much more meaningful and satisfying to me than where I was before. For others, it’s changing roles, or taking on opportunities that they always wanted but were never confident enough to pursue before.
Or maybe despite the burnout, despite hitting the wall, they did actually end up where they wanted to be, and it’s tackling the impostor syndrome so they can thrive where they are, instead of feeling like they don’t deserve what they currently have.
Okay how many of you have had weekly check boxes like this and then abandoned them when the first one gets missed!
Because hitting The Wall is not the end and having ADHD doesn’t mean that you’re stuck. It’s a period for change, and if this video resonates with you, then you’re the kind of person that can come out of the other side of this in a much better place. Because you and your brain and your ADHD are amazing, even if you don’t feel it right now, and I believe in you.
And if this video does resonate with you and you do feel like you need some help rebuilding after your own collision with The Wall, I regularly open up new availability for one-on-one personalised coaching so that we can work together on your new path forward. My website, ttncoaching.com, has all the details of the work I do and you can contact me through it if you’d like to find out a little more about it.
This topic is one that I’m sure I will come back to as there are so many people out there who are not impaired enough to receive ADHD support, but are still struggling regardless and need to know that they are not alone and that their struggles are valid. I see you. You are welcome here.
But for now, I’m going to bring this topic to a close. Please like, comment and subscribe and if you haven’t already seen it, you might be interested in going back and watching my video: “You’re a High Achiever. Could you also have ADHD?”. Thank you for your attention today and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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