Diagnosed at 47. Once I studied what it really is and how it operates my entire life was explained. I am the poster child.
I have had to grieve a lot… My life would have been very different if I had been diagnosed as a child or even a young woman. It’s been nice to shed some of the shame I’ve carried all my life, though.
I was also lucky because I had a very dramatic experience that confirmed the diagnosis beyond all doubt, even though it happened five years before I got my official diagnosis: I quit smoking after 26 years of 2+ packs a day. I was also a voracious reader during those same years, reading two or three novels a month and countless periodicals. The day I quit smoking also the last day I was able to read a novel. That was 19 years ago. (Actually I have read exactly one novel in the last 19 years, it was The Road, which I could not put down… But everything else? Forget it.)
When I told my then therapist in a panic that I couldn’t read anymore, she said it sounded like I had ADD and I had been self-medicating with nicotine. I scoffed, because I didn’t actually understand what ADD really looks like. But looking back now, the first day I ever smoked, I smoked a whole pack and never looked back. My brain latched onto that nicotine instantly.
Five years of not smoking and having symptoms that I had always lived with become enormous in my life landed me in a psychiatrist’s office where I got my diagnosis. That was 13 years ago and I have studied ADD extensively since then, as well as how self-control operates generally, executive function of the brain etc. etc. I also take what my psychiatrist calls “heroic” doses of Adderall and barely notice.
For your own sake I hope you don’t have it. It is extraordinarily difficult to make people understand and believe what’s really going on, and very frustrating. My favorite researcher calls it a self-regulation disorder, and that is truly what it is… There’s nothing quite so terrifying as really not being able to control yourself. And decades of behaviors have run grooves in the brain that are very, very difficult to change.
Anyway good luck. You can message me privately if you like.
And here’s my favorite researcher:
http://www.russellbarkley.org/factsheets.html