I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Nobody knew about ADHD.
I hated school because it didn’t interest me. Nobody engaged me, they just labelled me. Lazy; impatient; does not pay attention; daydreamer.
I was called all those and things a hell of a lot worse by my schoolteachers. At the age of 11 I was told that I had the reading and maths skills of an 18-year-old. That’s a sure-fire way of telling an ADHD kid that they don’t need to pay attention in lessons. I was the first kid in my school to get a grade ‘A’s on the report card with the marker * – “did not apply themselves – very low effort in the year” – across multiple subjects.
I did everything last minute. Homework on the bus. Multi-term projects in an all-night session the night before submission. Too much stimulation threw me in to a rage. I never did any revision for an exam, always just scraping by. These patterns never changed. I went to university to study chemistry; I hated the structure of a taught course. I completed the assignments for a year of ‘Computing for Chemistry’ in two afternoons. I ended up modelling interractions of atoms in natural units using Inmos Transputers for a physical chemistry Professor.
I didn’t go to many lectures. I ran a Multi User Dungeon on the Computer Science departments’ Sillicon Graphics workstations, got a couple of hundred users on that every night. I went to even less lectures. After two years, I got a job one summer writing C++ code for Windows 3.1. Being a dev interested me. Solving problems, making things work, understanding complex systems (I love a complex system). I coped and masked. My course was set.
Roll forwards almost 30 years and I’m living in Manhattan with my fianceé, who’d already received her late-in-life diagnosis. It became obvious to me that I was ADHD and in super-top-notch-level denial about it. “I can’t have ADHD, I’m doing this job, nobody with ADHD could do this!” She eventually got me to a psychiatrist; it was a super short conversation as I explained my symptoms to him. “Yeah, you have ADHD.”
Bang. Old me was gone.