I'm doing great

Hey there! It's been a while I haven't updated anyone on how things are going mentally. I'll try to make it concise, but it's naturally quite a dense topic!

TL;DR  A couple years ago I got hit by several things in life. However, over the past few months things have been fantastic. My house is fixed, my man has a healthy job and I've built support to handle my ADHD.

A couple of years ago I was really down and depressed, so I've told everyone here. There was first my husband's burnout, the flood destroying our house and my suspicions for my undiagnosed ADHD which forced me to reconsider everything about how I treated myself. At this point I could no longer recover by myself, I couldn't draw, be happy, be anything but sad and angry.

I've grown up being told I could do so much if I just tried harder. Repeated failures to do so made me think I was a bad person, that it was all a moral failure on my part. So I punished myself to become what I wanted, I had wishes but not ambition, or so I thought. When I discovered some aspects of autism and ADHD specifically, I was shocked to find my own experience described so accurately. I was torn between reason and fear. I knew it was aligning too perfectly not to be true, yet I still feared to be wrong, to be told I was grossly pathetic to even contemplate the possibility my struggle wasn't entirely self-inflicted.

The path to getting a diagnosis has been violent, in Belgium adult ADHD is still believed to be a myth, that we just grow out of it. I've been mocked openly by doctors, even specialists in neurology, psychology; all assumed I was either confused, pathetic or that I had bad self-esteem. One even attempted to reassure me by telling me I had too high of an IQ to have ADHD... Which when you know what ADHD is, just openly displays the level of ignorance I was facing. Getting the diagnosis was a relief, once written in black and white, all tests done, I had finally some ground to stand on, but the way to get there left me profoundly hurt and exhausted.

Neuro-education made me re-build how to use my brain, encouraged me to stop trying to do things the way others do. The abilities I lacked no longer brought shame and I realised I could just build tools and systems to lower the difficulty. Where I outperformed, it was no longer considered a fluke, I realised I could channel my mind to recreate those moments of high performance.

Medication has been an emotional proof of my struggle and helped me to gain a better understanding of how others struggled to understand me. So many things became easier, from dressing up, to tidy up after myself, keep track of time, unwind, enjoy a moment of calm, listening and talking clearly... So much I couldn't list it all here! I realised how people thought I felt, why they thought I was so lazy, annoying, distracted, slow, etc. "That's how they feel!" I thought. It's a bit hard to realise it at first because you just feel normally good, it really just removes all the noise in your head, but everything becomes so accessible. I remember telling others "What!? You can actually just, stop thinking about something?! WITCHCRAFT!", but then I just did and the thoughts didn't haunt me all week, that just blows my mind.

A little note on meds, I realise not everyone has access to it or that it just doesn't work for some. All I want to say is that it's sincerely worth a try if you can. There's a lot that can be done with neuro-education, but meds make life just that much more manageable.

Since then, we got the house fixed, my man got a new and much healthier job and I've been slowly catching up to all the work I had accumulated. Not everything is perfect naturally, but for once in my life I don't feel overwhelmed. I can see the path beyond the obstacles! I feel great, better than I ever felt before.

I thank everyone for your support and especially your patience. I know this update can feel overdue, but I wanted to make sure to have at least a few months of stability before reporting on it. Basically I didn't want to say it was behind me until I could put some distance with it.