Living with ADHD as a “model minority”

I was 42 years old when I discovered I have ADHD and I have spent my entire life feeling like I’m always 5 steps behind, a late bloomer, someone who gets across the finish line by the skin of my teeth and yet most of you who don’t know me intimately probably would never really know most of this. Truly I have mastered the art of masking. On the outside looking in there are many markers of success to my life. Two degrees, a well paying job and a career I find deep fulfilment in, a plethora of board and community volunteer work, my own home, a admirable credit score and keeping this podcast alive for nearly 4 years, but what you don’t see is the long and arduous road to get here that has included deeply impulsive decisions, internalised imposter syndrome, being too close to the edge of being a college failure, at one point racking up credit card debt to the point of oblivion, road rage that at times felt uncontrollable and a general, disorganised chaos in my brain that feels like 100 tabs open at once that often leads to stress inducing procrastination, overeating to avoid, a million inspired ideas that never get moved ahead, forgetfulness, unanswered e-mails, text messages and DM’s, disinterest in projects and people that don’t or no longer inspire me and true day to day chaos that more often than not ends up actualizing into a sink full of dishes and a warm and comforting spot of clothes on the floor of my bedroom for my dog to sleep in while I’m at work. 

And I heard someone recently talk about the control that they have over their introspective sharing online and that resonated deep in my core as I’m much the same. I can pour my heart out on a platform that is accessible by virtual strangers, but the topic and focus is typically on that which I’ve processed, what I’ve come to terms with and that which I’ve “immersion therapied” myself into accepting. Where there isn’t shame attached to my sharing and hence its controlled vulnerability. This is not one of those cases, but I’m a writer in my heart and the act of writing is what often helps me process and heal the not so pretty, sometimes shameful parts of me, so here we are.

And I have this sometimes strange relationship with this podcast. I use it as a form of therapy some days because I’m a reflective and introspective person and a platform like this helps me process, but also an opportunity to use my life, career mistakes and life's work to support others in not making the same mistakes I have or to advance equity from a place of possibility and often it ends up being a combination of reflective processing with hopefully a little bit of value to those listening that goes beyond an online stream of consciousness. This particular episode will most certainly be a combination of all the above, but it’s a tough one to write, produce and publish. It took me a long time, far longer than normal to find any real flow in writing this, which means I’m probably blocking something from fully coming to the surface and much of that is because I feel incredibly raw and uncertain of how those listening will process their impressions of me as a person after hearing this. So know that you’re here with me in a space that may feel unfinished, but that hopefully will shed some light for you or make you feel less alone. 

I once heard someone describe their late life ADHD diagnosis as forcing them into a process of mourning the life they didn’t even realise was possible for themselves.  This also resonates in ways I can’t even quite fully process. I’ve spent a lifetime feeling different, like a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit, feeling like a walking dichotomy - lazy yet hyperproductive under pressure, living with organised chaos, innate emotional intelligence coupled with detachment that can come sometimes too easily. I also tend to say the quiet parts outloud, but only in spaces and places where I’m given the ability to be myself, or where the truth just can’t stay inside me. An oversharer who is also an introvert and vulnerable with intention. Bursts of road rage coupled with a passivity in other situations that has me supremely detached from aggression in 99% of my life otherwise. For some people, such a diagnosis provides clarity. For me, it left me feeling disconnected because of the possibilities of a life that I didn’t get to have. I think about the 10 year old Shahzia that struggled to finish reading a book or find success in many of the conventional markers in academia for the first 26 years of my life. The young woman who pursued advanced education to prove something to myself and to show the world I was capable of doing things the right and conventional way. The young girl who felt so out of place and took so many extra years to meet the mark. The young woman who made such foolish decisions out of deep impulse and a lack of capacity to think through the consequences and the young girl who would have had no outlet to get support. Not only was ADHD a shameful young boys problem back when I was growing up, I was also growing up in an immigrant household with parents who were genuinely in survival mode, disconnected from their larger family structures where normal Western developmental experiences within childhood were often met with discomfort and shame and they likely wouldn’t have the capacity to know what to do with a child who had ADHD. 

And, I am a child of the 80’s and 90’s and the term ADHD carried a lot of shame and negative stigma back then. Even now with me being immersed in the world of equity, diversity and inclusion in my work and life, the term neurodiverse feels strange and uncomfortable for me to use to describe myself. Almost like the term has gotten some sort of rebrand in the past year with the massive uptick in women being diagnosed with ADHD and like we’re all scrambling to find a list of folks who are successful humans and happen to have ADHD to comfort ourselves and grab onto the differences as positive to make ourselves feel better about how we don’t fit the mold. Because difference is still stigmatised and we’re navigating a neurotypical world that simply doesn’t want our excuses. No matter how many successful entrepreneurs we see proudly using their ADHD as a strength and a superpower, to learn about such a diagnosis for myself so late in life leaves a lot of questions unanswered and a deep desire to refute the label while simultaneously looking back over a lifetime to understand how it impacted my life, my potential and my relationships. 

Part of me thinks the generalised symptoms of ADHD and how they present in women can be applicable to so many people, especially post-pandemic where our worlds have been turned upside down in a way that created a new normal and perhaps I like many others are still adjusting. Although my diagnosis journey brought clarity to the younger me that didn’t live in a world disoriented by a global pandemic, it’s still hard not to downplay my truth because so many people are coming to having their own ah ha moments. According to the Guardian, “ADHD, or attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, is having a moment. On TikTok, videos tagged #ADHD have been viewed more than 11bn times. Most of the creators are twenty- and thirty-somethings who identify as having the executive function disorder, whose symptoms commonly include difficulties in concentrating and regulating emotions. Where the striking overlap between ADHD symptoms and garden variety “pandemic brain” only compounds common misunderstandings of the former. Simply, ADHD symptoms can look and sound a whole lot like the struggles that define many people’s everyday workflows, which are so often fragmented by push notifications and digital dopamine hits. Who doesn’t have trouble multitasking or following through with tasks? And who isn’t fighting the urge to impulse-scroll social media during the particularly dull moments of any given afternoon? In the past two years, these difficulties have only become more pronounced. But whether or not ADHD is actively overdiagnosed is a separate question, and one without simple answers. Two things are certain. For one, research suggests that ADHD isn’t a clearcut disorder that a person either totally does or does not have, but a combination of challenges that present on a spectrum of impairment.” That spectrum of impairment is what I’m grappling with. 

See there’s this additional sticky layer of my own identity that often can’t take a one size fits all approach to commonly dolled out, well meaning advice, the one part of this diagnosis that I struggle the most with. It’s that as a racialized woman, a child of immigrants, my ability to navigate through the consequences of such a diagnosis are far more nuanced and complicated than someone of the majority. One perspective relates to my upbringing. As a first generation Canadian, child of Pakistani immigrants who additionally comes from a religious community where achievement and success are par for the course. I’ve been taught through the many challenges that life has presented, that I shouldn’t have any excuses for life. I’m a highly self critical human with the genuine inability to give myself grace and grace is exactly what is required when you hear such a life changing perspective on yourself. And you can imagine this perfect storm internally and amongst a community and family that doesn’t really enjoy talking through such things means there is a lot of internal processing and oftentimes dramatically feeling like I was dropped into the middle of the ocean with no liferaft.. And the consequences and risks are bigger than just my own individual angst about it. Think about it this way - as a racialized woman, I am more at risk in the workplace for discrimination, needing to assimilate to remove any semblance of difference that can be weaponized against me, than white women or white men. However, I’m at a privileged place as a quote on quote model minority, someone whose proximity to whiteness aids me in advancing in the workplace, far more than Black or Indigenous women. Yet, the irony of being the model minority keeps me trapped in the cycle of expectation that pushes against all odds to find not only success, but impact and accolades that supersede most. The idea of disclosing any sort of a diagnosis that requires accommodation that is rooted in my own self advocacy is tricky and yes, most certainly risky. We all operate in workplaces that are designed to uphold white supremacy and traits that genuinely go against the grain of what I naturally excel at as an ADHDer. Cultural tenants such as perfectionism, a sense of urgency, quantity over quality leave me questioning whether so many of us really have ADHD or just a resistance to conforming to white supremecist workplace cultures that ultimately does not value individual lives as much as they values whiteness, but that’s a tangent perhaps for another day. 

But truly the fear that pulses through my body when thinking of the box of the label and how that manifests in people’s brains into something they can’t forget about you. How quickly you can be dismissed, overlooked or seen as not capable. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that more than one workplace in my past included leaders that would have weaponized such a diagnosis against me. One boss who is seared in my brain had mastered the art of passive aggressive commentary. They reminded me of someone who took their leadership advice from old school 1980’s books inspired by a command and control leadership style and any person’s even slightest demonstration of personality made them deeply awkward and everyone around them visibly uncomfortable, forcing those that worked for them to walk on eggshells. The feeling of safety in authenticity was non-existent and any disclosure or request for accommodation would most certainly have been used against me in yearly performance reviews, which despite promotions in every organization I’ve worked for since starting my career in HR, have always kept me humbled with a meets expectations marking.

And I wish I could relay a bunch of advice to help you navigate your own journey, but the truth is I’m still very much in it figuring out what works and doesn’t work for me. I also recognize that like anything with neurodiversity, there is a spectrum and what is true for me in how my ADHD shows up and impacts my life may not be true for you. I want to, so badly, tie everything up with a pretty bow and call it a day, but that’s not how these things work. 

But I will say that the process of even being open about this was not an easy and not an uneventful decision to come to. It feels like a shameful admission of something that I don’t know how to quite yet own. Part of it has come from working through a mourning process that has not had a path or way forward with all the complicated nuance that such a life changing truth does to a person. But in part, this truth telling makes me feel like I have some control over the narrative, a way to provide people context into the layers of a person who is dealing with this that hopefully help people go beyond the stereotypical judgements and assumptions. It’s been freeing in some ways to write about it and now talk about it because in part, I’ve also started to uncover the beauty of a brain that simply hasn’t always been given the opportunity to come fully alive. I saw a tweet a while back that I took a screenshot of and saved to my favourites in my phone as a gentle reminder of the depth of grace I have had to give myself as I work through what ADHD means for me and it stated that “The thing about ADHD is that it’s actually great. I love the way my brain works. I’m funny and flexible and creative and adventurous. My frustrations mostly stem from trying to force my ADHD brain to function in a non-ADHD world.” - Brittney Bush Bollay @BrittneyBush

And the realization that as a neurodivergent person the world simply isn’t designed for people like me, that also adds a complicated layer because so much of the changes that are required to work through this require me to get better at assimilating to meet the needs of a neurotypical world or advocating for myself in ways that I haven’t ever really been able to do. I’ve mastered the art of fitting in, doing what is expected and pushing through, asking for help or reframing how I see my flaws and mistakes doesn’t come naturally or easily. I’d say that the one thing I’ve learned is to sit in it for as long as is needed, taking in information as it connects to your own story and your own self. Not everything will resonate and not everything should. If you have an intersections to your identity that make you less safe existing in the world, listening to advice on how to manage or live with your ADHD should be taken with a grain of salt and dependent on the person doling out the advice, no matter how well intentioned it may be. 

I also leave you and myself with this - it’s a note on grace. A reminder of sorts to give yourself grace as you get to know yourself all over again. The person I’ve become in the last 42 years has been a response of sorts to a world that doesn’t really know what to do with people like me. The person I’m going to become has to be met with grace, kindness and the capacity to get to know myself all over again from a lens of genuine curiosity, learning all the ways in which this beautiful and dynamic brain of mine operates is going to be quite a ride.