This is a Global Player original podcast. What if all the things you thought were personal failures were actually signs of undiagnosed ADHD? And how different would life look if you'd known that earlier? I'm Katie Brathwick.
And I'm Sam Pittis. Welcome to You're Wrong About ADHD. Hello, Sam. Hi, Katie.
You all right? Yeah, I'm really, really excited about our guest today. She's written a great book, Is It My ADHD? Grace Timothy, journalist and author, and diagnosed with ADHD in her 30s after years of navigating anxiety, exhaustion, and never quite feeling on top of things.
Since then, she's spoken and written about life post-diagnosis, including all the things she wishes she'd known sooner. And that's something we've talked about so much, the idea of, when you're diagnosed, just coming to terms with what life was like and what life's going to be like in the future. Absolutely. Putting those jigsaw puzzle pieces back in the picture and making sense of it all, because suddenly you have a thing that explains what's going on there.
So, in this episode, we're going to be breaking down five of those things, from relationships to identity and shame, and reflecting on what we've learned from our own diagnosis as well. So, let's get into it. We'll speak to Grace in a moment. Hello, Grace.
Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honour. It's great to have you.
We want to talk a bit about your book and your story, really, because you were diagnosed with ADHD in your 30s. What were some of the things that were going on for you, and how did you come to that diagnosis? Well, actually, I have to be honest, there was not a lot going on at the time, because I was diagnosed during, I think, the second lockdown of the pandemic. So, actually, things were pretty good, because I was on furlough.
It was just my sole responsibility was looking out for my daughter, really. And so, with things being so simple for us, outside of obviously having a global panic, I was finding that I was coping much, much better. So, all the things I struggled with to date weren't affecting me in the same way, which is ironic, but I went for a hearing test. I've had moderate hearing loss around my life, which actually turns out to be quite closely linked to ADHD and paying attention to things.
And actually, it was the audiologist just randomly said, after I started oversharing, all the way back to childhood and my experience at school, it kind of all made sense. And this guy's, it wasn't a throwaway comment he made, but it was kind of not part of what I was there for. It turned out to be a gateway to more self-impassionate understanding, which was amazing. It does seem fairly reasonable.
I mean, I'm sure he's a great audiologist, but him to die goes through ADHD. It does seem fairly reasonable to say, actually, do you know what, I'll leave that one today. So, there must have been a suspicion, maybe something subconscious in you that it didn't seem completely out of the ordinary? Well, I think I didn't know what ADHD was.
So, when he said that, it definitely was out of the run for me. I assumed it was the kind of little boys at school who were throwing chairs at their teachers and things, and there was some sense of naughtiness in my head. But I did go through my entire life from very much sort of eight onwards, I'd say eight or nine onwards, thinking there's something that's othering me. And, you know, I am white, cis-het, you know, otherwise non-disabled.
So, it was really unclear to me and everyone else what that was, but it was something that was sending me into long periods of kind of quite intense burnout, lots of anxiety, lots and lots of kind of mental health. I call them add-ons now, because I sort of understand what was underpinning all of that, but that sort of almost minimised the experience, which was quite dire. You know, I had OCD from the age of kind of nine onwards, lots of other anxiety disorders, migraines, IBS, like all of those things that I would do all the work to kind of overcome in some way, if that's ever possible, but it would never quite work, essentially. So, I'd have pockets of really great times, and then I'd sort of go back down again.
And, obviously, on reflection, it was kind of, it was very clear that a lot of that was ADHD impacting different ways because of the demands that were stacked against me. So, as a young person moving schools, that's where it all really kicked off because the demands were so different, and it took me a while to adjust. Also, hormonal changes, so having a child, pregnancy, all of those different things. And the more and more we now know about women with ADHD specifically, you know, it all makes sense.
And then I went about, sort of, once I was writing those articles so that there was information out there. And the more research I did, the more I came to see myself on the page and also to get irate about the sort of current situation in terms of the healthcare system and the education system in terms of missing girls and young people and women with ADHD and non-binary people and for the sheer lack of kind of resource and research. So, it's become the hill that I will die on, I feel like, anyways. Yeah, and one of the things that you mention in your book is the five things that you wish you'd known when you were younger.
If you wish you'd been diagnosed with ADHD, you could explain to those different things. And Sam and I really, really resonated with that. Do you still find yourself feeling the frustration about those five things? Again, if people know that you have it.
And then I've spoken to a lot of parents who will come to me and sort of say, I don't know whether to pursue this pathway because I don't want my child to be labelled and therefore kind of discriminated against and all that kind of thing. So, I came up with these reasons as to why, for me, having that label earlier would have been really helpful. So, I think my five major things, there are so many more clearly. I would have been honest when I needed help early on in my career.
I now understand what I need for my working life to be healthy and productive. I would have been able to recognise when I was getting overstimulated and perhaps avoid some of the more impulsive reactions I had to that. So, like quitting my job, I was a good quitter, excellent quitter after a year. If I felt challenged and overstimulated, that was it, I was out.
I would have been clear with friends what they could expect from me and I think that's been a major sadness in my life and a huge sort of grief as to how many people I've sort of let down and haven't been who I want to be for. I would have forgiven myself for the admin mistakes and kind of grasped the fact that common sense is kind of a social construct and didn't necessarily apply to me and I just did things in a different way. I think the thing that I'm still grappling with the most out of all of those things is I wouldn't have written myself off as bad at sports and understood that I needed perhaps a different approach. I needed to try lots and lots of things.
I'm still grappling with that. Exercise is still eluding me, largely. I would really like to look at these five reasons one at a time. The first one, I would have been honest when I needed help in the early days of my career.
Do you look at that as a regret or do you look at that and just say, well, look, do you know what? I didn't know I had ADHD. I couldn't have asked for help and I need to let that go. How do you cope with that emotionally?
I think I'm very lucky that whatever mistakes I made or difficulties I had, I come just with a certain amount of privilege by taking how I was brought up, the fact that I'm white, the fact that I'm well-spoken, all those things actually probably allowed for a certain amount of messing up. But I also am very conscious that whatever I did do got me to where I am today and I'm in a good place work-wise. I do look at colleagues from back then and think, gosh, I didn't have the same trajectory and would I be earning more money now? Would I be very happy within that senior position that I never quite reached?
So I'd say it's a mixed pack. There is some regret there for sure because I think had I had the information I have now, I would have just approached everything differently. But at the same time, I can't regret because I'm exactly where I'd want to be in terms of being able to look after myself properly as part of a career. Do you know what I mean?
It's not just about the productivity. I've learned that in the last four, five years. It's not just about the productivity, it's how you are at the end of the day and if actually that's left you in a good place or a bad place. So I do let go.
But do you think, because you talk about the privilege of diagnosis, I totally agree with that. You know, how lucky are we that the three of us sit here and get to have this conversation because we've managed to penetrate the lists and the working and all that kind of stuff. Do you think if you had actually known about your ADHD, say, in your 20s when you were at university, it would have made a difference to your career? Because I don't know that it would have done to me necessarily.
I don't know, but do you? I think that probably, it's just a question thing. I feel like I would have had more staying power to hurry to get to a certain point that I think that was to the detriment of my progress. So I think I probably would have done things quite differently, yeah.
But I mean, it also depends on our presentations and our diagnosis and combined type with, I'd say, I err more to the hyperactivity picture than the intentive. So I think, you know, when I talk to friends who are in the same position, I've got so many friends in journalism who have ADHD and I'd say we all have different answers to that question. But yeah, I do think things could have been slightly different. I mean, I might not even become a journalist.
I was supposed to be an actor. That was my account from very, very early on. But I went to one drama school edition and didn't get it and then, you know, didn't go back. You took offense against the whole of the drama profession.
I did. I took a massive rejection sense of dysphoria and was like very clearly embedded. I thought, well, I can't possibly do it. So yeah, I think things would have been different.
I don't think it would have been better, but different. Well, that leads us on to the second point you've got here. I would have been able to recognize when I was getting overstimulated, avoided impulsive reactions like quitting my job or shouting at someone. And I look back and think, you know, I don't think my career would have been any different, but I think the way I behaved towards other people probably would have been different.
Just in terms of, I had a lot of anger issues. I had to work through, you know, I could have regulated how I behaved towards other people. I think the regulation is everything. And I think actually when we talk about it being a deficit disorder, it's definitely a dysregulation disorder.
I think whether that is the emotions, whether that's your energy levels, even because that impacts your work and relationships as well. I think that's the heart of the issue. Now I know I can manage my energy levels even better. I can manage my emotions better.
It's amazing how much just that self-awareness can kind of furnish you with what you need. And I think, yeah, the shouting people, I hope this is quite a niche problem, but where I worked in magazines, I was quite often after interns or they would be reporting to me or assisting me. And I'm now coming across quite a few of them are in much higher positions than I ever got to. So I might be positioning them sometimes to work.
You know, I might be saying, I've really lost this idea and I do live slightly in fear of like, God, it's the one that I made cry because I was so officious and come on, go ahead and get it done. I don't have time for the emotions. I don't have time for your personal life, your problems, whatever. And thankfully, you know, I don't think that happened very many times at all and I hope I was largely compassionate and kind.
But, you know, there were moments where I couldn't regulate. That's another huge area, obviously, but one that I now can second navigate, I think, quite well. That's the difficult space, isn't it, where colleagues become friends and friends might be colleagues and, you know, we're in that situation here. It can get, but it's complicated because you're not quite sure where the boundaries are or, you know, and when you bring this regulation into that space, that is especially difficult.
I mean, you mentioned your third reason was this difficulty in relationships. Do you approach relationships differently now that you know you have ADHD? I haven't quite got there yet, so I just don't approach anyone. But you have a bloody good husband by the sound of this.
Yeah, he's an absolute, you'll rock. Yeah, he absolutely is. He's an absolutely incredible person and he's also my best friend. He shows us a lot of responsibility where I'm concerned.
That has sort of filled the friendship bucket to an extent as well and so has my daughter, so my daughter and my great friends. So I'm probably also just, I don't have capacity for as many people as I used to. I used to live in a house of six girls and we were all incredibly close. It was incredibly explosive.
There were definitely like conflicts within that, but I loved them so deeply and dearly. I'm sad that none of those relationships kind of sustained. Some of them completely ended quite abruptly. Some of them just peed out because I have to psych out of mind again.
I'm very lucky that I have Rich and my daughter. But yeah, I just think, you know, there are plenty of opportunities now for me to make friends and I quite often will withdraw from those opportunities. So I put a lot of that, I don't know what is that, sort of affection and time and interest of people into my colleagues and they happen to be great people. So that's worked out really well.
But I think, yeah, in terms of sort of my daughter's last in a new school recently so it was absolutely the opportunity to meet new people and so far we've met some brilliant people and they're so lovely but I haven't thrown myself in like I used to. I used to be like, right, well let's meet for coffee and I'll tell you my whole life story. And every time you try to tell me yours I'm going to try and relate that back to mine so that you understand that I get it. You know, God, that's so anxious.
I hear you, girlfriend. Yeah, I'm going to say, I mean, I don't ever do that often. But you know what? I'm listening to you and this is not, I don't understand where you're coming from but you've talked about rejection sensitivity you've described yourself as not just there jokingly.
There is a sense when you get diagnosed of looking back and cringing and actually some of this is, you know, you look back at those situations I look back at those situations where I think, oh, that person probably hates me and actually they don't hate me or necessarily even remember me. It's one about fear but also coming to terms with perhaps a new version of yourself now that you know you've got ADHD. I think it is that. I don't know necessarily how to present that self.
So to begin with, I would tell everyone I met I've got ADHD as if it was not an excuse but again like a reason and now I kind of, I don't feel the need to say that so much. I don't worry about how I'm going to be received because I am probably a little bit more that hyperactive kind of villainous and shopper than afterwards would probably catastrophize about it but I'm definitely more conscious of my traits as they're happening. You know, we'll be at dynamic maybe with people and I'll have the floor for a minute and I'll be talking and I'll be embellishing a story perhaps or I'll be playing for last or whatever it is and I'll feel myself going like you could stop now. That's what anyone else would do or you could carry on going.
So at least I'm aware of that but it creates a fear that I never had before because suddenly I'm like well I'm really invested in the person actually I do want them to be my friend and you know recrushes my daughter if they become an idiot and all that sort of thing so it's difficult. I also think with being out there with ADHD people have a lot of assumptions about what you'll be able to do and what you won't be able to do and how capable you are and all those things and actually that sort of upsets me probably more in a way if it's a misinformation in particular. So yeah, I mean it's such a it's a bag of difficulty and challenges topped with like the fact that when you do meet people that you get on with it's the most incredible feeling. I do feel like we feel that more acutely than anyone else perhaps because the connection is huge.
Oh, the click. And that's a very, very special feeling and it generally tends to be with people who I suspect are neurodiverse. Right, let's talk about number four, admin. Okay, I'm terrible, I'm terrible admin and my wonderful rock husband is the one who tends to take responsibility for most of that.
How do you make that work for you now differently to pre-diagnosis? Well, I am less frightened. I used to be frightened because it was an unpredictable capability that I had. I'm brilliant at being organised.
I'm excellent keeping this because I had to come that way. So going straight into my first job I wasn't and I very quickly identified that I would have issues unless I wrote everything down and all that kind of thing. So I was honing these coping mechanisms all along whether that was scheduling things or just keeping lists of to-do lists managing other people's projects as well, I had to do quite a lot of the time. So I am actually good at it and when I was first going to be assessed my husband was like I don't see how this could possibly be true because reading the traits and symptoms like you are the one who keeps us all in check you know, the diary is with you the shopping list of you everything is very much with me but I think I would occasionally in my professional life make these just howling, howling mistakes where my attention to detail for some reason would just be switched off for an hour.
So for example I would book a cab to come at the same time as a flight was leaving so that you would never get to the airport there was no way to get to the airport in time. So it would be major catastrophic things like that rather than oh I missed my dead disappointment you know, three times on the trotter and that's when I would quit my job that's when something would blow up it would be huge because the shame was just terrible. So I lost a bit of the fear that I had I used to think God I must just be very unpredictable and these things would come out of nowhere where seemingly I'd used all the same process that I'd always use so now I feel like I'm just I'm a bit less scared and I understand what I need to check whereas before it was just like God at any minute this could all come tumbling down you know but I think yeah again the self-awareness just made me realise like okay so it's not that I'm stupid it's not that I don't have common sense which is so often leveled at me like why would you do that that's just it makes no sense it's that I have it somewhere in my brain that cannot retain that information cannot process it in the in the sort of neuritical way so you know let's have a backup plan with everything you said knowing common sense was a social construct and I just do things differently and I've forgiven myself for having mistakes well I think I still believe common sense is something everybody can learn and maybe I need to change that view but it's ingrained in me if I am not behaving with common sense I find it really hard to give myself a break yeah I completely feel you I think also like if I roll back the clock to when I was a teenager and just basically just wanted a boyfriend I was very aware that all the girls that were incredibly popular apart from I'm sure they all looked the same as well but they were easygoing which I was never going to be they were I don't want to say like submissive or anything like that but they definitely weren't quite as in your face as I could be and they were also incredibly popular clever and sensible and yeah they didn't make ridiculous and safe i was always called flaky and ditzy and i used to get levels of bimbo quite a lot of the time and yeah so for me i was always like i want to be that girl i want to be the one that's you know able to drive everyone else and yeah exactly i just want to yeah i want to have it together and common sense is a huge part of that common sense is also why you don't leave your glass of water right on the edge of the table and then just circulate and knock it off like that was what i was leveled a lot as a child would be like usual common sense don't do things like that whereas obviously i just wasn't paying attention in the right direction so yeah i completely get that so do we just need to let the idea go then i mean you know i mean i know what you think about this but i don't want to do we just need to let go this idea of common sense and just say you know what yeah there are always going to be people out there who don't like you you know god i remember the friend who told me the friend who told me i hugged too hard i remember for ages thinking i do i hug too hard i need to be really careful about hugging less and of course now i'm 53 i realize the problem is with her not with me and i think i think the common sense i have in middle ages to realize there are people out there who cannot be around people that is a fact and we need to make sure that those people are not in our lives and inevitably they turn up they crop up every so often and when they do and they come with all their criticism all their judgment we realize that those are not people to have around us because you know it's it's incredibly difficult to separate what they believe is the norm from actually what is you know our lived experience and we can't we can't help it i mean it's so tricky isn't it because i kind of hate to see adhd as a disability but it is a disability it is and as you say it's a disability dysregulation mostly but we have to be amongst people and in a workplace and in a community that steps into our world and meets us with understanding rather than expecting us to meet them i think i'm still struggling with that and speaking of struggling and thinking back to being at school your last point i wouldn't have written myself off as bad at sports and spent more time exploring what might work for me i'm a 40 year old man i'll probably never play football again because you know my ankles my knees and i was never really good at it and i was never really good at it and i look back and think i wish i had just not stood still in the middle of the school playing field when i was supposed to be playing sports it's so ironic isn't it considering we have so much energy but again this is a problem in school isn't it you're forced into different kinds of sport and you're made to play them for a whole time you're put on a flipping tennis court and given a racket and told to do this thing or oh my god it's made to shiver by the touchline on a flipping hockey pitch in the freezing cold this is not how sport in school should work it should be what is it that you want to do if it's literally walking around the pitch why not do that that's a form of sport so on that note grace what amazing sport have you just taken up and i've actually got a skipping rope next to me which i was given for christmas so that's where are we now it's may isn't it so any minute now that's going to be the thing i thought you were about to take five months of skipping but no not one minute of skipping yet so i have to figure that out but no i still haven't found it and i think every class that i would consider taking i still end it with like well i can't do it because i'm going to be really bad at it and so partly it's that perfectionist thing of like i'm going to be good at everything the minute i started because i don't know why i'm not worried about being embarrassed but i just i intrinsically find it impossible to do something i'm not going to get at and on the other hand also the idea i would be bad at everything i tried because of a few comments by a few key teachers i'm being sidelined i think where other children might be more resilient and able to accept that i was like well that's it i'm terrible at these things and i why would i attempt them put myself through that it's terrible but unfortunately it's you know exercise is absolutely key for survival it's really good for our mental health i keep hearing from various experts how brilliant it is for regulation so i need to do it i just yeah i haven't got anything yet and actually some things i am good at but i just i'm not just in the boring so that's that we often talk about making something something that you want to do so finding a reason why it benefits you so actually maybe you know whether it's a friendship whether it's exercise what is the benefit to me rather than think i've got to do this why do i why do i want to do this and i just think you know looking back at conversation we just had there's a lot there is a lot of regret and there is still a lot of working this through what would you say to somebody who has just been diagnosed perhaps you know revised from your book what do you do in terms of coming to terms of diagnosis and perhaps starting to let go of some of the regrets and grief of the past i think honestly the best thing i did and i would recommend other people do is really researching the condition and specifically the way that i presented it's finding other people who had similar stories to understand how that then impacts in real life and the lived experience of adhd because you know looking at an academic paper is very useful in ensuring you're not kind of plagued by misinformation but equally how does that actually play out in your day to day life so that i could then look back with some compassion i think that was the most important thing you can't skip through the grief the sadness the anger all of those kind of emotions that you go through and i've seen every single person i know be diagnosed go through those stages you can't skip through like you have to sit in those feelings and i hope that you have someone who's supportive and understands that can listen as you kind of need to get a lot off your chest but i honestly think that understanding adhd has been key to me understanding myself understanding the people around me as well having a better tolerance i guess and a better compassion for those around me honestly although it's such a sort of open-ended solution that's been the thing that's helped me the most and i don't think there are any other quick fixes that said i haven't tried medication and i would absolutely love to and i think i think we're so lucky to have that as a resource if you do have access to it but yeah i think honestly like reading things that are grounded in the science has been really important to me and avoiding the kind of social media picture of adhd has been a game changer for me and ensuring the people around me are psychoeducated to the same point as well is there a reason why you haven't tried meds i just couldn't afford it i was described when i was diagnosed i didn't qualify for shared care of the nhs i got a letter saying because she's got a job and she's sort of functioning in quote marks she doesn't qualify for the visitor crisis list essentially which is absolutely fair enough there are definitely people who need that support more than i do and so yeah it was just a case of you're not gonna you're not gonna have that i didn't want to try it and find out it was amazing no i'm shocked i'm shocked by that because i just think everyone should have access to meds if they need them it shouldn't be maybe one day yeah i hope so sam's not on meds meds don't work and i am so we kind of obviously bring those two different approaches so you know like you i imagine you have to find lots of other ways of dealing with the adhd and obviously they work they're good and the sport and all those different things and coaching all those different things can help but everyone should have access to the meds if they want them yeah well and therapy i think honestly when you're a late diagnosed person i think that the therapy is everything and i haven't accessed that either myself yet which is in a way i mean writing the book was a form of therapy and i felt like there was some value in approaching the book without having had any coaching and therapy any meds in a way because i was literally like this is this is what it feels like every day and these are the experiences i've had but obviously i'm sure that i had people contribute to the book who had had meds had coaching just to sort of you know balance it out but there's something about going through life in this kind of slightly raw and exposed state that i think means i can provide some helpful information at times but yeah that says if you put a pot in front of me as i go for it i'd be like yes maybe this will get me into netball at last gosh extraordinary grace it's been such a fascinating conversation and amazing that we should end on what i consider to be a bit of a bombshell actually about the fact that you don't take meds because i'm sure like me lots of people will have been listening to our conversation thinking that you completely have it all together and actually you know like lots of us you are still facing lots of ongoing challenges and uh i think sam and i will be picking that up in our bonus episode and talking about some of our reasons as to why we wish we'd known about ADHD anyway for now grace timothy thank you so much for joining us on the podcast thank you so much for having me it's so lovely to speak to you both thank you so much to our guest today grace timothy what a fantastic reflective conversation yeah and it's an important reminder that late diagnosis isn't just about medication or labels it's about understanding and self-acceptance absolutely we will of course include links on where you can get hands on grace's book is it my ADHD in the show notes thanks for listening to your wrong about ADHD if you've enjoyed this episode share it with someone you might need to hear it we'll see you again very soon your wrong about ADHD is made in association with apex content ventures this is a global player 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