Graphs that helped me understand my ADHD

I had lied to myself for many years. I believed myself to be a lazy and terrible person, because I just couldn't do what I needed to. The laundry would pile up, and I would sit on my bed, staring at the overflowing basket. Trying to scavenged whatever motivation I could to force my body to move. I could envision the act of throwing the pile in the washer, but I sank deeper into my seat as I realized how only half the basket would fit in. Hoping, praying I wouldn't have to rewash another load after forgetting about it again. My mind would freeze at how massive the task looked, even though I had every physical capacity to do the task, something invisible blockaded me from properly functioning.

And then I would find posts like this one by Dani Donovan at adhddd.com and they would move me to tears, to know that I didn't choose this fate but it was part of my diagnosis. Part of how my brain worked. To know that someone else shared this anxiety was a huge step in my own self love. To know that the ADHD I was diagnosed with in childhood did not just go away, I did not "grow out of it," but I grew into and ADHD adult.

Thinking about it now, that executive dysfunction sounds so much like depression, but it was more a function of stress than anything. My brain would freeze anytime I had too much to do. Too much could be three tasks, but my brain could not organize those three tasks into a reasonable order most days. And on the days where I could organize my tasks. First Laundry, throw the clothes in the wash, then second comes microwaving those leftovers so they don't go bad. Third, do homework, fourth make sure the clothes make it into the dryer. But on the way to the kitchen, I would be caught up by the bag of groceries I forgot to unload the night before that just sat on the counter. And suddenly I wasn't microwaving leftovers at all, but cooking pasta. And then while it boiled I would clean my living room. Forgetting about my laundry, forgetting about my homework.

This cycle of always having energy, but the inability to direct it in the direction it needed to go haunted me, but the energy being there convinced me it must be my fault. But that lack of control was coined by psychologists as "poor impulse control" and most of the medical literature cites examples about speaking out in class. About how a child cannot seem to handle their body, jumping around, moving from their seats in class. When in reality, adult ADHD does not look like the child's ADHD because it is usually observed by the individual, not the parent. We grow into our autonomy and the criteria for diagnosing ADHD is lost because so much of the diagnosis is based in 

I love this photo of the ADHD Iceberg from @finuccinialfredo. How the diagnosis is seen by society. Usually in the form of a little hyperactive kid. Disruptive and fidgety. When in reality the way an individual is affected by their own diagnosis is so much more internal than that. So much of how society sees us is not based on our experiences, but how society experiences us.

Under the iceberg, we experience so much of life at the mercy of our brains. And as visual learners, I really want more of us to see these graphs that showcase our experiences. Because it is hard to really reconcile what it's like to exist with ADHD in a way that isn't based on an external stereotype. But we can't learn to move through the world without understand how to live with the way ADHD affects our internal self.