Written and edited in the spring of 2023
Note from the Author:
Undiagnosed is a short story in my collection Pieces of Me, which was written as a final project for my creative writing grad class at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi. Pieces of Me is a multi-genre collection of stories, poems, thoughts, observations, and more. Some of the pieces are nonfiction, some fiction, and some are something in between. The next couple of posts on this blog will be from this collection as a way to have more to post while I finish up some of my current WIPs, but because some of the pieces from the collection are in the process of being published in various places I will only be posting the pieces that I will not be submitting for traditional publication.
People have expiration dates. And not in that they die. Their expiration dates are when they leave you. Decide they don’t want to deal with you anymore. That “you” they thought they liked was just a mirror. And when you’re comfortable with them your mask comes off.
Maybe you’re too loud. Too emotional. Too numb. Too tired. Too happy. Too sad. Too patient. Too angry. Too much.
Your multitudes scare them. Your conflictions confuse them. Your highs are too high, and your lows are too low. They can’t keep up.
And you spend your whole life wishing you had the words to explain yourself. That you don’t know why you’re late to everything. You don’t know why making your own doctors appointments or sending an email can push you over the edge into a panic attack. You don’t understand your own eating habits, how you can go weeks without having anything more than caffeine and water, or suddenly wake up surrounded by candy wrappers and empty fast food containers. You can’t tell them that you weren’t thinking when you spent five hundred dollars on shoes in the span of one shopping trip, or went speeding too fast on the highway and got pulled over for going forty over the speed limit. You can’t tell them you forgot about your credit card debt, or when your bills are due. You can’t tell them that you forget they exist when they aren’t right in front of you. You don’t even know why you do these things.
You aren’t trying to be bad at life. And you’re actually trying to be good. You’re desperately trying to do better. To set your alarms, develop habits, power through when your mind, body and soul are screaming at you that you can’t. That you want to brush your teeth after every meal, you want to go work out after a day of sitting at the office, you want to chug gallons upon gallons of water, you want to stick to your skincare routine, make your bed every morning, do the dishes immediately after finishing your meal. But you can’t. You don’t know why you can’t.
All you know is that caffeine and alcohol, exercise and starvation, obsession and apathy fill the voids within you. You drink too much coffee, not because it energizes you but because it helps to focus when you have to get things done. Everytime you drink you get drunk, not because you like the taste of alcohol but because you crave the way it silences your anxious thoughts and slows you down. You exercise too much, not because it is “healthy” but because the rage you feel consumes you and the only socially acceptable outlet you have is to exhaust yourself at the gym until the only thing you feel is a numbing pain in your limbs. You starve yourself, not because you wish to be thin but because you can’t recognize what your body needs until the hunger pangs reach a critical point. Your obsession with books and movies and niche topics are the result of an explosion of thoughts and ideas that you can’t purposefully spark or quell. Your apathy for other things possesses you until your numbness teeters dangerously close to the edge of depression.
And when they see you, forgetting, drinking, speeding, spending, crying, laughing, carrying on, they decide it's too much. And when they see you’ve grown attached to them. Crave their attention, desperately wanting to be their friend, lover, confidant, colleague, companion, they leave.
The expiration date is almost always one year. Sometimes to the day. And when they leave it almost always ends with a burned bridge. And when they leave you are reminded of all the others who left before. And when they left the reasons why come flooding into your mind like a song stuck on repeat.
One guy you were talking to got bored because you were too depressed. One friend left because you got mad that she chose a boy who would never even look her way over your friendship. One only pretended to be your friend so she could date your best friend and then cut you out of the picture. One boyfriend heard from a friend of a friend that your grandparents were rich and thought if he stuck it out long enough he could’ve gotten on the will too but left because you were too hard to deal with. Others left because when you began sharing with them your life story they thought you were too broken to fix.
Some were scared off by that anger. The blinding rage that took over when you saw the injustices of the world. When your voice became a tempest, crashing down around them. And your blood boiled like a volcano spewing molten hot lava at any and all those who treated you or the ones you love poorly. They were scared that anger would one day turn towards them, but you promised it never would. But deep down you know, you know that no matter how hard you try you can’t control that anger.
You tried therapy. To fix the parts of you that made people leave. And it worked. Until it didn't. And you always hear the therapists wonder what it is that’s broken in your brain. They recommend psychiatrists in case it's something like bipolar, or neurologists when you say you don’t know if you've ever had a traumatic brain injury in childhood. And you know from experience that physical doctors are your enemy, you’ve learned it from a young age when your baby sister needed brain surgery but instead they tried to diagnose your desperate pleading mother with hysteria or munchausen by proxy. And when your mom finally found a doctor that would listen and run the tests and your sister finally got relief and the help she needed the damage was already done and your family had to go to more doctors to fix issues that could have been prevented if the damned medical industrial complex wasn’t so fucking sexist and dissmissive of people in need of help. And you know that psychiatrists are bullshit because every diagnosis is based on studies and experiments that left out the “others” of society. Every diagnosis formed by limited information of a much wider population than just white and male. Hundreds of years of history signifying the abuse of women by the hands of those who form the diagnoses. That is why you never go but people don’t understand so your answer to those who ask is always the same: it's too expensive and you’re already steeped in debt because you're bad at managing your money. Besides, impulse shopping feels better than diagnoses anyways.
Then one day, you’re scrolling on TikTok and your “for you” page is flooded with videos from women who discovered they had adhd later in life. And the things these videos are talking about strike a cord deep within your soul. Their early childhood experiences that were warning signs of adhd are eerily similar to your own. How people treated them as kids, the struggles they faced in school, and now in adulthood are all things you’ve experienced too. So you start hyper fixating on what adhd is.
You go through a long period of research, but you remain skeptical. Your skepticism remains while researching because all you ever previously knew about it was that adhd meant little boys who played too rough and had too much energy in kindergarten (which you later learn is a misconception due to the rampant sexism in psychology and the medical world in general), or adhd meant lazy losers who were addicted to adderall and would never amount to anything in life (you can thank your mother for this misconception). And in the early stages of discovery every time you talk to your mom about what you think is wrong with you she shushes you and tells you that everyone struggles with what you struggle with but they aren’t lazy or they know how to motivate themselves better so they can still get things done. She is always angry at you for even suggesting that the struggles you face are more than just a form of your own failures to be a functioning person. She sows the seeds of doubt that have kept you from relief all your life, and because you respect your mother and revere her opinion as fact you take those facts with you when researching what could be wrong with you.
But though you remain skeptical, the voice of your mother loudly repeating inside your mind, you move your research beyond anecdotal evidence from peoples’ personal stories and start consuming study after study. Some are old and leave a bad taste in your mouth, but the newer studies are different. They expand beyond the white, American, male test subject-focused findings of the past. You begin to question if this is the answer. And it gives you hope.
Hope that you are not broken or a failure or the worst person on earth, but rather that you are just different. That your mind works differently and more importantly that it's okay your mind works differently. And now that you have the words to describe what it feels like is going on inside your brain you have a starting point for finding more answers. Now that you have the words you can search for solutions. But you still aren’t one hundred percent sure.
So, with this glimmer of hope you start taking quizzes and assessments, trying to find if you actually have adhd before going and wasting money on a doctor. You take every quiz under the sun, from Buzzfeed to the CDC. And when you begin to worry that you are under confirmation bias you start to sneakily give your parents the kinds of tests designed to help parents decide if their children need to be screened for adhd. You test them as vigorously as you tested yourself. The results are always the same, you definitely showed signs of adhd as a child.
But past experience with doctors still prevents you from getting an official diagnosis. So you continue to learn, pushing your research from diagnosis to management. And slowly but surely you learn how to manage your adhd. It feels like you’re fighting uphill, but for you knowledge is half the battle. And slowly things get better and after a year you notice that people aren’t leaving you the way they did before. You know deep down there is still an expiration date, but now there is hope that the people in your life now will stay much longer than others in the past.
What it Feels Like to Live Undiagnosed
Undiagnosed is a deeply introspective and raw exploration of my own personal struggles with mental health, self-perception, and the search for understanding the years I’ve lived not knowing I had adhd. I wanted Undiagnosed to delve into the experiences of feeling misunderstood, what it’s like to be constantly grappling with emotional and behavioral challenges, and the impact these have on relationships.
I wanted my writing in this to take a more confessional and contemplative form that still placed readers in the shoes of the narrator. I achieved this by using second person narration coupled with personal real life experiences to lend more recognition that even though these are my personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions, those who have also lived with adhd can recognize their own struggles in Undiagnosed.
Also on a social level the fact that Undiagnosed explicitly revolves around the impact of undiagnosed adhd is very current given the new revolutions in mental health that have been taking place online and in the public sphere of consciousness. Like how many people are in a season of exploration into what adhd is outside of what it’s been thought to be for generations Undiagnosed explores the challenges that the “you” in the story faces due to the lack of understanding and recognition of their struggles by others, including friends, family, and the medical system. Because of this renaissance of mental health discovery I really wanted Undiagnosed to dive into the frustration of feeling different, misunderstood, and grappling with self-doubt and the consequences of untreated adhd symptoms.
I wanted to capture the emotional turmoil and the inner conflict undiagnosed people face through portraying a sense of longing for validation, acceptance, and identity. I wanted to vividly portray the struggles with time management, impulsivity, emotional regulation, and the self-medication techniques employed to cope with these challenges. On the flip side, despite a few comments from a workshop I had participated in with this piece, I wanted to stay away from diving too much into the healing side that often comes after learning about and recognizing adhd. The reason I made this decision is because I don’t want readers to take away that there is a “right” way to cope with adhd. The fact of the matter is there isn’t a one-size fits all solution to adhd. It is an uphill battle. Often when learning to live with adhd in a way that is more socially acceptable in a neurotypical society, each step forward in one aspect of life can make other aspects of life feel like two steps back.
One thing from the writing workshop that really helped me in editing this piece though was that the other participants helped me see where I could expand, and what struggles they thought needed to be addressed based on their own experiences with adhd. For example, the paragraph diving into where the “you” does things not because of good reasons but because of adhd-related reasons, and the section talking about the harms of the “medical industrial complex” were both added based on comments from the workshop. These changes ultimately helped me to show a journey of self-discovery and research, while still being able to criticize the limitations of the medical system and societal perceptions surrounding mental health.
Ultimately what I want readers to take away from Undiagnosed is that accurate and inclusive research and self advocacy is vital in changing the lives of and giving hope to those with undiagnosed neurodivergency like adhd. Overall, Undiagnosed is a personal and introspective piece that raises awareness about the impact of undiagnosed ADHD, mental health stigma, and the transformative power of self-understanding and acceptance.
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