By Cian Prendiville

Am I crazy, or is everyone else pretending too?

This recurring thought has been with me all my life. It always seemed that social norms, unwritten rules, and accepting power dynamics came naturally to everyone else, while I struggled to understand and follow them.

Turns out, it’s a bit of both, as earlier this year, I finally got an ADHD diagnosis. To be honest, the whole thing is still a bit surreal. Reading through the ‘symptoms’, I’ve never felt so seen, but also so lost.

These things you call ADHD, I call Cian.

Was my “disruptive behaviour” towards authority figures as a teenager, organising protests in my school, challenging my principal’s arbitrary and authoritarian rule simply ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’?

‘Rejection Sensitivity’ is a symptom now? That’s “when a person feels intense emotional pain related to rejection”. Are all ye neuro-typicals just walking around whistling after being excluded?

I still can’t get over ‘Justice Sensitivity’: “the tendency to notice and identify wrong-doing and injustice and have intense cognitive, emotional, and behavioural reactions to that injustice”. Wait, is everyone else just not noticing the injustices?

Of course, everyone has some element of all of these. The question is: how strongly, frequently and severely do they affect you? The same goes for the more ‘known’ ADHD symptoms. Everyone loses things, gets bored, and interrupts conversations. Just cause you’re scrolling TikTok does not mean you’ve ADHD.

But the process of thinking of myself as either ‘having’ ADHD or ‘being’ neurodivergent is tough. Tougher still because you are left on your own to figure it out.

The diagnostic process for me boiled down to one long interview, with deeply personal questions, followed by deeply traumatic topics in a rapid-fire succession that left my head spinning. All the time you’re thinking to yourself: was that answer ADHD enough? Am I overstating things here, to get the diagnosis? Or am I still, even in this situation, ‘masking’?

Then it ends. “OK, I think you have ADHD, I will write the full report later. Do you want to start medication tomorrow?”

Fuck. I just got told I’ve got some ‘disorder’. Things I thought were just my personality, my traumas, my weaknesses are actually… what? A disability? A defect? A superpower? A part of the spectrum of humanity?

Then the Zoom call is over, the prescription is sent and I’m just sitting in my office at home.

I don’t know what to make of it all. So, I read some articles. I watch some videos. I go to a support group. I turn to longer books, attempting to analyse this from a Marxist perspective. And now, I write.

This is just the beginning, I know that. If I was narrating my life like a 90s movie, now would be the “start of a new chapter of my life”. Cue the montage of my future: reading on the couch, discussing with others, typing furiously, speaking at a meeting on the subject, and eventually organising campaigns for greater rights for neurodiverse people.

Hopefully, I can do some of that in the pages of Rupture, on Rupture Radio, and together with some of you reading this now.

I know my experience is probably a drop in the ocean of what others go through.

Apparently, I am ‘high functioning’. I was good in school. Yes, I had terrible handwriting, I didn’t pay attention and challenged the teachers, but when exams came around I aced them. So, I was deemed ‘gifted’ not ‘troubled’. My Limerick accent, picked up when living and going to school in Moyross was gone by secondary school, replaced by some odd neutral notes from nowhere, so when I didn’t do homework, or arrived late to school, rather than being a ‘problem pupil’, I was told I ‘could be great, if you’d just apply yourself’.

I imagine what life could be like for others who are not so lucky. How many have been failed by the education system, the legal system and the economic system as they are not ‘neurotypical’? They estimate 1 in 20 have a brain type we now call ‘ADHD’, but for those in prison, the figure is 1 in 4.

The diagnosis experience also makes me feel for those forced to go through much worse. People spend years on a waiting list. Some get doctors who are far less sympathetic, or even far more hostile. Or, what about those forced to seek a diagnosis for ‘Gender Dysphoria’, facing what I imagine is an even more intense and personal grilling, just so you can get the trans healthcare you should be entitled to as a right?

Ironically, I wonder if the fact that I am even thinking about this so much, questioning the system and the structures of the status quo of Ireland’s healthcare system, is itself a symptom. I’m sure the fact that I am writing this article 3 weeks after the deadline is one.

But here we are. This is me, this is ADHD, this is life.

ADHD and me