What I Wish You Knew: A letter to my younger myself about our ADHD

18 min readOct 12, 2021

In 2021 I went through the process of getting tested and treated for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). The experience brought me a lot of clarity and self-understanding, but it also resurfaced a lot of emotions that I’ve struggled with throughout my childhood and adolescent experiences. Some say you have an emotional response similar to the cycle of grief after learning you have ADHD, so I thought I’d use each stage to illustrate my experiences and emotions in this essay.

I also included some resources at the end of this post, but for anyone looking for more immediate resources to learn more about ADHD or to receive support, visit chadd.org.

Dear Kés,

Today, October 11, is International Day of the Girl, and October is ADHD Awareness Month. You probably don’t care about either of those things, but it made me think of you for a few reasons:

I’ve always thought that you were a super smart girl, a dreamer with a ceaseless imagination and an endless list of interests and talents. I’ve also always known (and so have you) that your intelligence and ever-growing list of interests, sometimes and for some reason, have not always been the most convenient to other people, especially to you.

Well, we finally now have that reason. Shortly after we turn 23, we start taking a medication called Adderall. It’s supposed to stimulate your nervous system — for some people, that helps with things like all-nighters in college. For those with ADHD, it helps them to focus and concentrate better on important things like school and work.

It turns out that we actually fall in the second group of people — the folks with ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In your time they probably still call it ADD, which isn’t really the most politically correct, but it does describe a subtype of ADHD which includes people who have trouble concentrating more often than not.

Most of what you’ve heard about ADHD probably describes people who struggle to concentrate because they’re “super antsy, eat too much sugar or watch too much TV,” but it can also describe people who struggle to concentrate because they, like us, are super-frequent daydreamers — and are often forgetful, struggle with time-management or get bored easily. The point is that it includes lots of things that you already have or will struggle with frequently in your life.

So, the mysterious, unknown thing that we always knew was “wrong” with us? There actually is/was a thing, and it’s called ADHD. I’ve been learning more about it since realizing “the thing” was actually ADHD, and it’s made a lot of things that we’ve experienced in our life make a lot of sense. Here’s some of what I wish you knew:

Yes, you have ADHD. No, there isn’t anything actually “wrong” with you. You won’t outgrow it, and you can’t outwork it.

We end up making a Tumblr in middle school, and I was going through some old posts when I found this post, that we wrote around 13. Here’s some of what we said:

“I’m sitting here trying as hard as possible to do this paper when I was given a week to do it, and most likely won’t complete it and it’s due on Tuesday. I know it’s my fault and I should fail and know I will. I still have to write a 2–4 minute speech. rehearse it, and make a visual aid. Right now I have absolutely none of my speech done and I feel like when I tell my teacher that, he won’t be surprised. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself how this is going to make me look if I continue to have this work ethic in high school since I will be in the magnet program. Speaking of which, I really don’t deserve to be in the magnet program. I don’t work nearly as hard as my classmates, who are all probably working their asses off trying to perfect their speeches right now. My [Language Arts] teacher even told me that I should reconsider doing magnet and I completely agreed with him. I didn’t want to sign up for magnet and really wish my parents didn’t make me. And my mom told me that I obviously should be in magnet because I was accepted, but that only means that I can pass a standardized test and write an okay essay. My problem with school is that I just don’t take it seriously enough and I have horrible time management skills.
Although I’m excited to be leaving middle school, I’m really scared to go to high school, because I’m afraid I’m going to fail. I have the idea that I’m not going to be as smart as the other kids and I’m going to fall behind and not be able to catch up. It’s scary thinking about balancing magnet, marching band, and tennis. I don’t want to have to give anything up but I probably will. I’m hoping I can get it together and balance everything and not have [to] give anything up because these are all things I’ve wanted to do for a really long time. And there’s another thing, the one thing that pisses me off the most in this whole situation is myself. I have every power to do my homework, not procrastinate, and make better grades, but I just don’t and I have no idea why. I sit there and get distracted KNOWING that I had this important assignment to do and think “oh well I can do it later” then have the nerve to want to complain about it. That’s the one thing I don’t like about this situation and it’s the main thing I don’t like about myself as a person. I have a majority of the power to get to where I want to be in life, yet I sit around thinking that God’s gonna do all the work. That’s not true at all, from my perspective, God has the plan, I just have to put it into action.”

Yeah. I know. Yikes.

What I can say is that this way of thinking was just you internalizing a lot of harsh criticism from your teachers, parents, and other adults who, like you, didn’t have the awareness to understand you or support you in the way that you needed. I really, really wish you knew that so you wouldn’t have internalized how they viewed you as fact, and especially so you wouldn’t have internalized that and been so hard on yourself. I really do.

A lot of the adults with the power to make and influence decisions about your life for you (still) may not have the information to genuinely understand and support you.

Our earliest memory is that time your preschool told Mom something was “wrong with us.” They said that because we’d fidget or get upset when we didn’t have everything we needed to do our work, or wouldn’t sit still once we completed our work. Sound similar to anything I said earlier?

Hearing this story again after learning about our ADHD made me just a little angry because the opportunity to diagnose us was right there. But, for the most part, the focus was on the disruption I may have caused to my teachers or others and framed it as a behavior issue or something that must be “wrong” with us that needed to be fixed because it was inconvenient to them. Not as a condition that we needed support and shared understanding to help us navigate.

“Black parents are often told by teachers and other parents — even within their own community — that their children are bad and that they need to do a better job of parenting.” (source)

I don’t know if this was 100 percent Mom and Dad’s case — but, in general, the stigma on Black parents and how they raise Black children has been and continues to be cause for concern, especially when it comes to how those stigmas affect Black parents’ ability to work with teachers to identify and meet children’s needs. It’s hard to do that successfully and in a way that centers the child's needs without fear that it will later be used as a weapon against parents — either through casual judgment or outright criminalization.

Additionally, you know this, but society definitely doesn’t allow Black children to just be children, especially those with cognitive or other medical conditions that often lead to crises or behavior presentations that are seen as “disruptive.” It leads to Black children and their Black parents in fear of the punitive responses to how we present in the world mentally, emotionally, and physically.

The problem with all of this (besides the obvious) is the constant prioritization of the white gaze and white, neurotypical standards of how we should exist and move through the world. It has deeply tangible impacts on our lives that result in familial and collective cultures of ignoring each others’ or our own human needs. It can be and is so rooted, that it’s hard to imagine how we can begin to unlearn how white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism — and subsequently ableism — influence how we all behave and relate to each other.

All of this, of course, has the biggest impacts on all of the children, women, gender-expansive people, and people living with a low socioeconomic status, who may also struggle with a cognitive or physical difference and/or disability.

Speaking of women and girls, the narrative about ADHD is one that primarily focuses on young, cishet white boys. This creates a stigma that leaves girls and women extremely underdiagnosed and internalizing shame and other disempowering beliefs and habits that lead a lot of us to people-pleasing and perpetual self-erasure.

*Source:* *20 Signs and Symptoms of ADHD in Girls*

However, in spite of all of that, our ADHD has allowed me to see and understand you in a whole new light.

I never really had an issue accepting the idea or reality of ADHD. It genuinely has opened up a new door of self-understanding, affirmation, and clarity that I’ve never experienced before.

What I will say is that my journey with ADHD and treatment has led me to think about and work to unlearn the internalized stigma I had about treatment and support — particularly about medication.

For example, I used to say that we’d never take medicine for a mental condition if we could help it. This was mainly because I once believed the myth that most medicines for things like ADHD, depression, anxiety, and other mental conditions and illnesses somehow “numb” your emotions, which kind of scared me.

I can now confidently say that because of Adderrall and its ability to regulate the imbalance of dopamine in my brain, I feel a lot calmer, clearer, and able to stay emotionally balanced. It gives me a foundation to implement a lot of the smaller tips and tricks people with ADHD often suggested to use that don’t always get to the root of this condition.

However, even with that support in regulating the chemical aspect of ADHD, I do still struggle with unlearning the fact that, even though we now have all of these great resources at our fingertips, we’ll continue to have and struggle with ADHD for the rest of our life.

I’ve had to learn the idea that medicine as a treatment for ADHD is a one-and-done solution. Now, comes the journey of unlearning all of the internalized judgment toward myself that kept me from leaning on my support system and self-advocating more frequently and confidently. This is mainly because the topic of my ADHD, I’m realizing, is very deeply entrenched in every aspect of my life, particularly when it comes to my social life and my achievements.

To this day I feel very vulnerable and exposed when I have to confront the way I’ve mentally and emotionally isolated and “robotized” myself in an effort to avoid making mistakes or having to accept (at times seemingly unnecessarily harsh) lectures and feedback for behaviors I didn’t know the true cause of. I get deeply re-triggered now that I’m having to share my ADHD with people, and there are times when people still don’t understand or respond in the way that I most desperately need.

Because — would I be accepting deficiency if I chose to stick with Adderall in the long run? What if it actually turned out that all of this was a mistake and that I really don’t have ADHD? That I’m just inherently not good enough and haven’t been this whole time?

I don’t know, but I think you’d be happy to finally not only have an answer, but a solution to build off of, so I guess I’m happy with that, too.

I wish I could go back to help you tell everyone else why you are the way you are, but I can’t and I’m sorry.

I struggled a lot with the internalized stereotype about Black people being “lazy.” Additionally, in terms of ADHD and its impact on emotional regulation, I now understand how that also sometimes overlapped with a desperate avoidance of being seen as the “Black girl with an attitude problem” who could eventually grow up to be an “Angry Black Woman.”

I now often struggle with overworking myself — which others would more than likely attribute to my being an “overachiever,” rather than someone who has internalized overcompensation so much, that she’s now extremely out of tune with her mind, body, and spirit telling her to slow down.

At your age, that self-denial began as always trying to be the good, self-reliant kid who — even if I wasn’t making the best grades — was able to get by on her own. Anything to avoid being seen as needy or a burden.

In Black children, the way ADHD can present is more often than not seen as a behavior problem that leads onlookers to, at its best, characterize Black children as “bad,” disruptive, or disobedient — whether implicitly or explicitly. At its worst, it can create touchpoints with in-and-out-of-school suspension and other punitive measures that constitute the school-to-prison pipeline. Or what one person quoted in this article called the “misdiagnosis-to-prison pipeline”:

“Missing the diagnosis is really just the start of the pipeline, she said. When teachers see ADHD behaviors — particularly those involving impulse control — without attributing them to a neurological cause, they often interpret them as defiance. Kids who are viewed as defiant or violent are labeled, said Cort — even if they’re not accurately labeled with ADHD.
‘He’s going to be labeled as a ‘bad kid’ who is going to get suspended, and probably going to get expelled,’ she said. ‘And being suspended once or twice is highly associated with becoming involved in the juvenile justice system.’ Studies have estimated that up to 40 percent of inmates in the U.S. have ADHD — a rate that dwarfs that of the general population.
Not every person who has ADHD but hasn’t been diagnosed winds up in prison. But untreated ADHD has far-reaching effects — on self-esteem, social functioning, career progress, and overall happiness.”

Generally, research studies about Black people with ADHD, to me, aren’t always clear. The ones I have seen either conclude that there are too many diagnoses or too few. In the conclusion of “higher risk of ADHD diagnosis,” “diagnosis” operative word.

The process of ADHD diagnosis puts the power in the hands of those reporting symptoms. This happens to be everyone around the person with ADHD — rather than the person themselves — who is inconvenienced by the person’s condition enough to notice. Oh, by the way, after five months of remembering to and trying to seek testing, Kaiser never gets back to you with the actual results — even in the three months since you took the test. You only end up getting your prescription because of a Black woman doctor who listened and offered suggestions for holistic treatments like sleep and good nutrition, in addition to the prescription of a low dose of Adderall.

These experiences are especially true for children who, as I experienced, don’t have the language to accurately describe what they are struggling with or the trust in their support system or in medical providers to take their concerns seriously as something that needs to be adequately addressed, evaluated, and possibly diagnosed, and treated, rather than a problem that they should be disciplined for or told to work harder to mitigate.

This conclusion also doesn’t necessarily mean that Black people are necessarily more at risk for having ADHD. I believe this framing is another instance where medical conditions and their disproportionate risks are attributed to Blackness inherently.

In the case of ADHD, overdiagnosis can be individuals immediately treating a lack of emotional and behavioral regulation skills as a mental condition. Underdiagnosis can be because of actual mental conditions being dismissed as behavioral issues or “disobedience.”

For those who don’t know the actual causes of ADHD, there are three primary ones (source):

Genetic — Similar to our case, and a majority of ADHD cases, people can inherit it from one or both parents. There are plenty of stories of folks who went to get their kid diagnosed, only to discover they have ADHD as well.
Biological — Slower development in the frontal lobe is a reason for issues with things like executive dysfunction, working memory, organization, attention regulation, etc.
Chemical — The main reason for ADHD’s signature symptom — attention dysregulation — is often a lack of dopamine in the brain. People with ADHD are not “antsy” or “squirrelly,” which is what it looks like when we aren’t stimulated enough. On the other end, inattentiveness (what was formerly known as ADD) can lead to frequent daydreaming, getting bored easily, or being forgetful. I think the Inattentive Type is where I mostly present, but I’ve learned recently that when hyperactive symptoms present in a person that has learned to inhibit those behaviors (a form of “masking”), it can present as internal hyperactivity — so racing thoughts, constant fidgeting, etc. — which is especially true for adults with ADHD.

There is also a lack of broad awareness and education about ADHD in Black communities and families, as well as inequitable access to health care providers that are culturally competent/specialize in how ADHD presents in Black folks, and insurance or ability to pay to cover the cost of pre-screenings and evaluations, testing, and treatment.

Of course, there are environmental, social, nutritional, behavioral, and other circumstantial factors that are sometimes attributed to ADHD. These sometimes cause the presentation of symptoms similar to ADHD. For example, many people with ADHD struggle with executive dysfunction, but not everyone that struggles with executive dysfunction — which just describes the ability to manage time, have impulse and emotional control, start tasks with ease, etc. — has ADHD.

Moving on, reports like these also erase Black girls’ experiences with ADHD, and fail to talk about the intersecting levels of discrimination and erasure that occur as you add on Blackness and girlhood to ADHD’s typical narrative of “rowdy young white boys.”

The narrative about ADHD and how it presents in Black women pokes uncannily at the Superwoman Complex, which leaves many of us struggling to accept or ask for support and feeling like we have to work 10 times harder to overcome our symptoms. And it doesn’t help when it’s coupled with symptoms like hyperactivity and fixation when it comes to things we are interested in or when we have looming deadlines and time crunches.

I have definitely internalized a lot of this narrative — long before I ever had the understanding and language to name my ADHD. It has only added another weight onto my overall experience as a young Black woman in America.

These stigmas are what young Black girls look up to and learn to model their behaviors after. That is the culture that leads us to be hypervigilant in our measurements of what might be “too much” or “unacceptable” to lean on support systems for.

I won’t say “ask for help” — because I feel like the phrase is overused and inaccurate to the nuance of what we experience in our daily lives:

One, I feel like it’s difficult to ask for help in a society and culture that is so incredibly based on individualism, and that teaches all people, regardless of age, race, or gender, that doing and achieving everything on your own is what we should be aiming for. Anything less gets an “A” for effort but is more genuinely looked at with implicit judgment that often isn’t rewarded systemically.

Two, being able to ask for help pre-requires that you see yourself as a full human being with complex needs. The ability of other people to be responsive and support you in the way that many of us need, pre-requires that they, in turn, see you as a full human being with complex needs. Our culture and society simply don’t lend well to seeing each other fully in our humanity. And it shows.

Especially for women and girls, we’re taught that having needs — of any kind, let alone varying differences and disabilities — creates a burden and inconvenience for everyone around us, sometimes even ourselves. People who get periods aren’t able to even get free and accessible menstrual products for a biological process that has happened since the beginning of time. How do you think that translates to other needs for accessibility and accommodation?

Moving forward, I’ll do my best to move forward and be the adult you needed to advocate for, support, and protect you.

The characterization of those with ADHD as hopeless lost causes who just don’t work hard enough to stay organized is the bane of my existence, I can’t say I love the “ADHD is my superpower” trope and other attempts to reclaim the condition. It makes it seem like a quirky personality trait, and if I’m being honest, it’s lame to me. ADHD and the struggles I have faced because of it — without being aware that it was the cause — have caused me a lot of pain and have left a lot of internal scars. Most especially when it comes to my relationship with myself.

While having the language and understanding about how my brain works has been transformational, I will never claim this experience of having ADHD as a positive. It allows individuals and our society to continue evading responsibility for how it perpetuates stigmas about ADHD and other cognitive and physical differences and disabilities, which undoubtedly compounds with severity. It feels good to be able to reclaim and reframe the internalized narratives that ADHD struggles thrive on, but the ableism that is so deeply entrenched in our world moves on unscathed because we don’t name that more directly and call it out when we see it.

I still get really, really angry when I think of how my younger self was failed by the adults in my life who were in the position to see my ADHD and offer me support, or at the very least compassion with the things I struggled with. I remember and appreciate those who did offer me that. But those that didn’t, and people who think and act like them, are able to get away with it because people with ADHD are seen as sensitive when we call it out. We’re told that we should just accept a world that lacks understanding and acknowledgment of our individual humanity and each of our unique presentations and needs.

Like Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you’re silent about your pain, they will kill you and say that you enjoyed it.” The tips and tricks, fidget toys and social media illustrations are great, but when y’all figure that part out, let me know.

Anyways, Kés. This has been and will continue to be a struggle and long journey. However, I want to say that I see you. I understand you. And I will do my best moving forward to be better to and for you — to be better to and for myself.

Thank you for being you, because if it weren’t for you being exactly who you are, I would not be the person I am. So thank you.

– Kés

Resources that have helped me along my journey, that I want to share with y’all:

A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD: Embrace Neurodiversity, Live Boldly, and Break Through Barriers (Audiobook version) by Sari Solden, MS, and Michelle Frank, PsyD – This has been the biggest tool to help me begin to rewrite my internal narrative when it comes to my struggles with ADHD. I listened to the audiobook — funny enough, a big part of my ADHD has been embracing audiobooks, rather than viewing myself as a failure if I didn’t make time to read the physical book. I’m playing around with a balance of this, to ensure I don’t miss parts of the story or information in an audiobook, but they do take a huge pressure off of you to sit there and focus on reading, rather than passively listen and pick up nuggets here and there. So maybe I’ll continue doing this with self-help books rather than novels, memoirs, etc.
My Black ADHD Heroes. These famous Black women helped me come to terms with my own ADHD diagnosis by Zia Moon for ZORA
Black Girl Lost Keys
Understood
How The Racial Health Gap Fails Black Women With ADHD

References used in this piece: