I would have loved to get my diagnosis and start taking meds before I dropped out of college twice. Would have saved a lot of pain and money.

I got diagnosed at 29.

My life has gotten so much fuckin better since it's amazing.

It's me in this clown makeup and I don't like it.

College was really hard for me. A big bundle of distractions at a vulnerable age in my life. I about failed out twice out of STEM degrees. I finally found a Liberal Arts degree that I could get a BA in.

Then a few years later, I had married somewhat. I went back and completed by STEM degree, somehow.

Now I'm back at it again 20+ years later, working on my Masters in IT. It takes all of my ADHD coping skills. Making lists. Exercise. Counseling. Supporting friends and family.

It's possible, but it's hard.

My pediatrician told my parents that I definitely had ADHD, needed to be properly tested to confirm, and to get some medication to straighten things out.
I vaguely remember my mother saying that she didn't think it was right to medicate away childhood exuberance, and that I just wasn't challenged at school.

Fast forward 30 some years, and I get diagnosed and some medicine. My passionate love for a million different things hasn't been diminished, but now I can actually make progress on hobbies, and sometimes finish projects.

I feel as creative as I've always felt, just able to direct it more coherently so that it's actually productive.

I built shelves and put all the tools away afterwards. In the tool bag even, which is now back in the garage, and not just tucked away in a room I wasn't using.

I didn't get diagnosed until just last year, and I'm in my early 40s. While this new knowledge has certainly had a significant impact on my life, I can't help but wonder how different my life would have been had I been diagnosed in the 3rd grade when I came home and point blank asked my Mom if I had ADHD... spoiler: she told me no.

Is lazy a synonym for adhd?

To be fair, it is possible to have all of those problems and still not have ADHD.

This helped me understand my brother a little more.

I got diagnosed pretty early compared to most of my friends, and it still got attributed to laziness.

I know that I have it and I have struggled just like this my whole life. I recently lost the only job I’ve ever been able to keep because the company sold. I’ve got three weeks before my life starts to crumble.

I am treated for opioid addiction. No one will help me because of that.

It’s a fight to get the damn diagnosis. My poor daughter definitely has adhd. They’re trying everything first, and I don’t blame them, especially with my history of addiction. It just sucks.

She started high school last year, one year after her mother died from breast cancer. She almost didn’t get through the year because she literally can’t focus on anything and never has been able to. Her room looks like a landfill if I don’t go sit in there with her and remind her over and over again that she’s cleaning.

I’m hoping we get the diagnoses and treatment before school starts or I don’t know what we’re going to do. She’ll end up doing exactly what I did. She’ll drop out.

I’m going to stress this to the doctor next visit.

EDIT: Oh, whooops, I genuinely misread the subreddit as being the autism memes one, I'll still leave this one here, that rant felt too good to delete.

Yes, I feel this one so much. Only make it "in my thirties" - and I completely internalised my masking, leading to self-hatred and inability to properly overcome it. I got misdiagnosed with a whole slew of different disorders over the course of my life, too. Which made me try so fucking hard to do what is right and push myself again and again, only to break down into long phases of complete withdrawal, burnout and depression every damn time, even though I did "the right things" to overcome stuff like anxiety and depression. Now, to be fair, it's correct to be noted that throughout that life, I also developed a personality disorder from internalising all those things I heard, being lazy, having to remain restrained in my behaviour at every moment, questioning and repressing every intuitive emotion out of fear of it being "wrong".

I only very recently ended up being able to recontextualise all the prior shit in my life, am currently in a phase where I am reconnecting with my anger, which I had forbidden myself completely and repressed it deeply into my unconscious in my early teens, after having had daily aggressive meltdowns in my childhood, which led to both physical violence and deep shaming and essentialist shaming of me "being wrong" by my parents. And looking back at my life, considering I was in different kinds of psychological and psychiatric care almost my whole life, I simply don't understand how no one even considered autism at any point. Yeah, sure, it was not as well known as today in all its details, but the more I reflect, the more things I discover in my past that were just clear signs even back then.

im in this photo and i don't like it

literally just suffered failing my classes last semester, everything fell apart, and im just still called lazy

Not to 1-up everybody, but I strongly suspected & brought the suspicion to a psychiatrist at age 43. He felt unable to to confirm, deny or somehow check.

At 46, finally a referral to a clinic by my GP, who believed it. No appointments available though, not even in the distant future.

1.5 years later, I'm in the process of getting checked, and it looks like I'll get a "yes" or "no" (very probably "yes") within a few months.

Obviously a dropout, too, but I managed to get a fraction of my potential due to an unexplained (to this day), 5 year lasting obsession with IT in my 20s, which caused me to study frantically day & night. Came and went, but a lot of it is still relevant.

In the past 20 years, I managed to land fat jobs over and over again, but like relationships and everything else, the fuss around the work itself gets "too much" and I quit after 6 - 18 months.

That weird 5 year study-frenzy was a blessing overall, but it also got me to think I was just an assclown before and after, rather than having a medical condition.