Crossing My Own Desert
In October 2017 the BBC broadcast a Horizon programme presented by the comedian Rory Bremner about how he discovered that he has ADHD. There wasn’t much else on the television that night, and at that time, we had yet to subscribe to Netflix. At the end of the programme, my wife turned to me. “That sounds a lot like you” she said. “I was thinking the same thing,” I said.
Which led me to find out more about ADHD. I quickly found some online ‘tests’ that suggested that I was barking up the right tree. I started considering the parts of my life that I had found difficult and considered whether ADHD could explain those difficulties. I could quickly see that in many cases they did. After more research and more thinking, I took some of the online tests to my Doctor and explained that I thought there was a strong possibility that I might have ADHD and asked him to refer me for a diagnostic assessment. Thankfully, he did, although it wasn’t until the following February that assessment day came around.
Personally, I found having an ADHD diagnosis was a relief. Finally, the jigsaw pieces fit and I could more clearly see into some of the aspects of my life that had previously been opaque. I wanted to understand more. I thought that since we’re all invisible there must be a support group meeting in the back room of a local pub somewhere. I thought that being part of that might help me to understand myself better. At the time there wasn’t a local support group so I went hunting for other ADHD adults like myself instead. It’s not easy hunting for people who are invisible! After a while, I met R and after many cups of tea, we decided to start a support group of our own. The group has been a success and it was great to meet other adults with similar questions of their own. I made time to talk to newcomers about the issues that were important to them and as I learned more about ADHD I found that I had begun to provide peer-to-peer support. Often there was a specific issue that was really causing a problem. Sometimes I knew who would be best to talk to or I knew of a web resource or a book where they could find out more and I was interested to know what they subsequently found out.
During this time my own journey led me to re-read my old school reports. I hadn’t looked at them in 35 years and then they had come one at a time and always followed by ‘the chat’. Now I read them like a book. Good God! It was all in there, all the time! The lack of focus, the unfulfilled potential, the inability to organise stuff, the behavioural issues, the frustrations of school masters. All of the common threads of school reports for undiagnosed ADHD’ers.
There had always been a paradox about my school days. In my final years, I had managed to redeem myself somewhat but I had always attributed my lack of success and the problems to the notion that the school hadn’t been the right ‘environment’ for me. However, I also recognised that the school had a massive impact in shaping the person that I became. I had never looked closely at this paradox. Perhaps I was frightened of what I might discover?
After rereading my school reports I decided that it was time to understand these things. If the school had had such a big part to play in who I am now, perhaps it was time to understand the paradox in order to discover more about myself. I arranged a visit and in the days that followed a lot of bits and pieces began to fall into place.
I also went to see an ADHD Counsellor around the same time. Not really for any specific reason but simply out of a need to ‘check in’. ‘Is this normal?’ ‘Do I need to worry about that?’ ‘I’m thinking about this. What do you think?’ After all, the post-diagnostic journey can be something of a personal pilgrimage. One of the things that I did want to discuss was my future career direction. Like many adults with ADHD, my CV looks like a chaotic cut-and-paste job with no logical pattern and a number of sudden changes of direction. Once again I was at something of a fork in the road. Another career incarnation was coming to an end and I was having a hard job working out what was going to come next. Something sensible? A path towards finally finding professional fulfilment or another temporary fix to add to the already long list in my CV.
It was the Counsellor that first suggested that I should become an ADHD coach. It was not something that I had come remotely close to considering. When I asked why, she came up with some pretty compelling reasons why I should give it some serious thought. Not being one to jump in with both feet I went away and procrastinated instead. But I did do some research into ADHD Coach Training and saved the research on the PC.
Procrastination, as we know, (and, maybe like fine wine), just takes its own sweet time but a few months later decision time had arrived. It was time to face it, I would once again have to try and make the CV presentable, write some application letters for jobs I probably didn’t really want and probably wouldn’t get anyway. If I did somehow manage to get myself hired I knew that whatever enthusiasm I could conjure up would almost certainly be short-lived. So I kept putting it off. The reality was that just contemplating the meaninglessness of that path again caused almost spontaneous despondency.
I reviewed the ADHD Coach Training Research I had done sometime earlier, hit the ‘register now’ button, changed Sterling for US Dollars and enrolled with the ADHD Coach Training Academy Instead.