This is My Brain on ADHD

People experience ADHD differently, and their experiences often shift over time. I’m well past retirement age, and my version of ADHD presents with impulsivity, working memory issues, and an inability to follow a map of ideas, calculations, or biological systems (to name a few) beyond a certain level without losing track. I rarely make it to the end.To help you visualize this, picture a complicated family tree going back many generations. I cannot follow it beyond a couple of generations if there are multiple spouses, deaths, marriages, and children. All of the subgroups, branching off of the original, make my head spin. I trace the lines back and forth until I can’t take another minute. There are 366.3 million adults worldwide with symptomatic ADHD. People over 60 years old account for 46.4 million of them. In the United States, it’s estimated that 8.7 million adults have ADHD. According to WebMD, studies suggest that less than 20% of adults with ADHD are diagnosed. I truly wish you could take a walk through my brain. (And, when you escape, let me know what the hell is going on!) I read in-depth articles, studies, and books, taking in a lot of information. My brain processes it so fast, racing it through the filters of my experience and knowledge, quickly spitting out the big picture but leaving me clueless as to how it arrived at the conclusion. It’s frustrating that I can’t break down, or even explain the input, or how I came to see the resulting big picture. Not everyone with ADHD would suffer through the agony of following complicated charts and graphs. Some have strong organizational skills and/or hyperfocus.

Here