What do you imagine when you think of someone with ADHD? Do you picture a grown adult or a child? A boy or a girl? More often than not, when someone imagines a person with ADHD, it’s a young boy, probably in elementary or middle school. Most people don’t picture a little girl. And almost no one pictures a grown woman. Maybe because it’s common for kids with ADHD to grow out of it. Or maybe because girls are so often misdiagnosed, if at all. What if I told you that I am a 22-year-old female who has ADHD? And what if I told you I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 20?
The story of my ADHD diagnosis didn’t start with the doctor who finally wrote me a prescription for Strattera. It didn’t start with my constant trouble reading in school. It didn’t start with my inability to keep quiet when I was a kid. It didn’t even start with my birth. My ADHD story starts 6 years before that, when my older brother, Connor, was born.
According to my mom, Connor started running at 10 months old. My mom had never really been around kids before, so in her mind, this was normal. She’ll tell you that he cried and screamed every chance he got. Everyone told her, “He’s young. This is just what little boys do.” When he went to kindergarten, the teachers would say no amount of exercise could wear him down. He was an energetic kid. It wasn’t until 5th grade, when he started making hundreds of origami frogs in class, that his teacher called my mom and said that it might be a good idea to get him tested for ADHD.
The test day came for my brother, and he failed… miserably. Apparently, he gave up a third of the way through the test and just started hitting random buttons. They sent him home with a prescription for Adderall that day.
Around this time, I was born. And, according to my mom, I was an angel. I never cried. I slept through the night. Compared to my hyperactive, always crying, baby version of my brother, I was the perfect baby. When I was 10 months old and not running around the house like Connor, she thought there was something wrong with me. Turns out, I was just a “normal kid.”
Standing next to my brother, I did seem normal. I wasn’t jumping off the walls or running laps in the yard. I was playing with Barbies and Poly pockets on my bedroom floor, just like every other little girl. I wasn’t very good in English class, but compared to Connor, I was great. I talked a lot, but everyone just called me “chatty.” Aren’t all little girls chatty? My mom used to say no one could ever get me to shut up because I had a tied tongue when I was born, and I was “making up for lost time.”
My brother spent his four years of high school in the tech wing, learning how to weld. He always got good grades but was a fairly forgettable student, probably because he never spoke. The only extracurricular activity I remember him being involved in was Boy Scouts: cub to eagle.
I spent my four years of high school in band practices and choir recitals and musical performances and Girl Scout outings and bowling tournaments. I got good grades, just like Connor, but my teachers remembered me; either because I was loud but not disruptive, or I was a teacher’s pet. There’s really no way of knowing.
Connor was shy and worked with his hands. I was the definition of outgoing and really liked music.
When I graduated with a 4.0 and went to college, I thought it was going to be easy. Until I realized that I actually needed to study in college, but high school never taught me how to because I never needed to. Needless to say, my first year of college was humbling.
My freshman year, I was diagnosed with anxiety. I started seeing both a psychiatrist and a therapist. My psychiatrist: a man. My therapist: a woman.
I had been meeting with my therapist for about 6 months before she started mentioning ADHD. The first time she mentioned anything, she asked, “Do you have ADHD?”
I replied with, “Hell, no. I’m not my brother.” She was a grown woman with ADHD, herself. She must’ve seen something in me no one else saw, because she asked me for weeks to bring it up to my psychiatrist.
During those weeks, I kept telling her I didn’t have ADHD. I knew what ADHD looked like, and it wasn’t me. I didn’t act like my brother. But I kept thinking about it, in the back of my mind. I kept remembering things that used to happen to me in school when I was younger. My teachers stopped calling on me because I raised my hand every chance I got – not because I knew all the answers but because I just wanted to talk. I would have friends growing up who would constantly shush me because I was always too loud. But, at the same time, the only way I would read would be with an index card in my hand, stopping me from reading ahead. The lines on the page would jumble together as if they were written on top of each other. I could make the lines straight by reading aloud, but when I read aloud, I had something like a stutter.
Eventually, I broke down and told my psychiatrist that I thought I might have ADHD. He said, “That’s your anxiety. Let’s just up the dosage.” Unfortunately, this kind of response is more common than people would think for females asking about ADHD. In females, it can look like anxiety, but that doesn’t mean that it always is. His oversight and refusal to look further into it are far too common. Females of any age tend to get overlooked by male doctors when it comes to diagnosing ADHD, leading to the extreme number of misdiagnosed women and young girls. Frustrating, don’t you think?
About a month later, he resigned to take another job. When I went in to have my next appointment, they put me with a new doctor. It was completely randomized. This time, I was given a female doctor to see.
The first time I met with her, I mentioned that I thought I had ADHD. She went and got me a questionnaire to fill out. When I was done and handed it back to her, without looking at my answers, she said, “Do you want me to send the prescription to the Walgreen here or back home?”
“Prescription for what?” I said.
“For Strattera. It will help with your ADHD.”
“Don’t I have to take some kind of test? Don’t you need to look at the form I just filled out?”
She said there were tests that I could take, but they didn’t work very well on adults who have learned to suppress their ADHD. When I looked down at the questionnaire with a question on my face, essentially pointing at it, she said she didn’t need to look at the paper because my leg hadn’t stopped moving since I sat down, my pencil bounced on the table any time I paused to read something, I asked her 15 questions about a 10 question questionnaire, and I told her 4 random stories that weren’t relevant to anything.
“You have ADHD,” she said to me.
I eventually took a test for ADHD, but she was right. I spent the first 20 years of my life forcing myself to focus, even though I wanted to do anything else. Even though the test made me angry and impatient and feel like my skin was peeling off, I could still sit there and press the buttons when they told me to press them.
I have ADHD, and so does my brother. But he was diagnosed in 5th grade. I was diagnosed in college. Boys are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls. This is because you can physically see hyperactivity in boys. They jump around and can’t sit still to save their lives. ADHD in girls apparently looks a lot like anxiety. ADHD in girls looks like she’s just not listening.
I wasn’t running at 10 months old. I wasn’t making origami frogs in class. I didn’t look or act like my brother, so I didn’t have ADHD. But I did. Mine just looked different, maybe because I learned how to hide it young. I talked a lot, but not at the same volume as my brother. My leg bounced, but it didn’t shake the house like Connor.
I have ADHD. And that’s not something to hide. It’s not something I feel ashamed of, because it makes me who I am. I know all this now. And looking back at my childhood, now as an adult, I can see that it was always there. Mine was just a little quieter. Mine was a little more sneaky. Mine wasn’t seen, aside from my pencil tapping on the table.
Karsyn Braaschs is the author of this piece.
Arrow Rock Literary Journal 
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