ADHD

Most of what gets written about ADHD was written with someone else in mind — usually a young boy who can't sit still in class. If you're an adult who came to this diagnosis late, or a woman who spent decades being told she was anxious, scattered, or just not trying hard enough, you may have spent a long time feeling like the research and the resources weren't quite speaking to you.

I understand that experience from the inside. I'm a licensed clinical social worker with over twenty years of experience working with adults, and I was diagnosed with ADHD at sixty. By that point I had built a career, navigated decades of relationships and responsibilities, and developed enough compensatory strategies that most people — including me — had no idea what was actually going on underneath. What I had attributed to anxiety, and quietly to lesser intelligence, turned out to be something else entirely. Getting that diagnosis didn't change my history, but it changed how I understood it. That reframing was both a relief and a grief, and I know from my clients that it often is both.

The articles in this section grow out of that dual perspective — clinical and personal. They're written for adults who are living with ADHD, trying to understand it, or beginning to wonder whether it might explain something they've never quite been able to name. The RSD piece speaks particularly to women, though the experiences described are not exclusive to them. You don't need a diagnosis to find something useful here. You just need to be curious.