Please allow me to reintroduce myself.

I am not who I was and I'm not who you think I am either.

In her poem “I have been a thousand women,” Emory Hall tells us to “make peace with all the women you were,” but how can I? None of those women were me.

I’m 55 years old, and I do not know who I am.

---

I was a good kid. I was an avid reader, got great grades, was super creative, in the gifted program at school, and I wanted to be a veterinarian. I was the best seller of Girl Scout cookies in my home state the year I was 11. I was in the middle school marching band. I was skinny and pretty and confident enough to not only throw myself a killer 12th birthday party but also to wear a velour dress with side slits much to my mother’s chagrin.

Me with my mom’s side of the family the summer I was 13. My mother is behind me.

Then puberty hit, and everything changed.

The changes were external and internal because we moved from Albuquerque to East Lansing, Michigan so my mom could get her PhD. I started high school there and quickly everything went south. I didn’t know anyone, I felt like a freak, and the place didn’t make sense to me because it was raining and raining and RAINING.

I’d never felt more alien, out of place, and broken.

I dropped out of band within a month even though I’d loved playing the flute since 3rd grade. I floundered for the first time doing math in algebra and I struggled in science classes. I couldn’t keep track of my assignments, my grades sucked, and my dreams of being a veterinarian went out the window. Things went from bad to worse fast.

I was bored and angry and ended up with the stoners at school, and I started drinking regularly. I partied with friends at a house I was hired to house sit while the owners traveled, eventually going joyriding in their car and ending up in trouble with the police. I found someone else’s alcoholic boyfriend to steal, a group of older drop out college-aged boys to hang out with, and got drunk daily.

Throughout high school, I spent HOURS meeting with teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and therapists. Everyone said, “You are so smart and have so much potential! Just work harder!” I tried but always gave up because I could not get it.

Me in high school, probably about 16. My friend Kate Sumbler took this photo.

I barely graduated high school with a GPA of 2.18. By the following January, I’d experienced the dangers of roommates, was sexually assaulted by a landlord, and was so broke I had to steal food from my job at a fast food restaurant to feed my dog and cat. So when my mom offered to take me with her when she moved to Philadelphia for work, I said yes.

The next decade was spent in a hot mess of joy and insanity; I finally got to work for veterinarians for years, but my messy life made it hard to employ me. I met the love of my life, and I started writing and reading poetry, even hosting a poetry series. Then a brief romance with cocaine and heroin landed me in twelve step meetings learning to live sober.

Things did get better. I rediscovered my love of camping and hiking, I found work that I really enjoyed, and I had an amazing community of friends and support. My first five years in sobriety were amazing.

But I still struggled. It was hard for me to sustain interest in my jobs. Around the two year mark, I start to flail and my bosses start to sense it, so off I’d bounce a new job. It was an endless struggle to stay financially above water. But I stayed sober.

Then my husband’s mom got Alzheimer’s, and we had to find placement for her, process her estate, and manage all her affairs.

Then my mom nearly died, causing her to lose all her jobs as an adjunct professor. Her condo went into foreclosure. She moved in with us, much to the detriment of my mental health. We finally moved her into her own low-income senior apartment, but she couldn’t manage the rent so we helped pay causing more financial stress. Then she got Lewy Body Dementia and had to go into a home herself.

Menopause showed up and made all of the above ten times worse. Life continued to be a struggle everywhere. There was never enough money. I felt pathetic and hopeless and helpless.

…..

I’ve tried everything to fix myself. I went to AA for over twenty years as well as Al-Anon, Overeaters Anonymous, and even Debtors Anonymous. I learned many, many useful things about how to human from the people in those groups, but it did not fix me. I meditated and prayed and did service while I hammered the FUCK out of my behaviors with the twelve steps. I made amends to those I harmed. I paid back the money I stole in my youth.

But I wasn’t any better. So I did years of therapy. I dieted myself to insanity. I became a fitness nut. I poured my heart and soul out to the internet for ten years. I took SSRIs and mood stabilizers. I prayed. I joined a church, even the choir. I practiced all those principals in all my affairs, but things got harder, not better.

…..

Somewhere in the middle of all of the above, my kid tells me he thinks he has ADHD. In the process of figuring out how to get him assessed, I mentioned this to my current therapist. “You should also get an assessment,” she told me. “Neurodivergence typically runs in families.” So I did.

That’s how I learned I have severe ADHD, dyscalculia, and time blindness.

It changed everything I’ve ever known or understood about myself.

…..

I still don’t know who I am. But here are the three things I’ve learned so far.

1. My brain needs dopamine, not serotonin.

In fact, SSRIs are contraindicated for my brain, and the reason I had a terrible response to SSRIs — becoming intensely anxious, angry, and agoraphobic — was due to the drug causing serotonin syndrome.

But my psychiatrist’s male boss — who I met only during the serotonin syndrome episode — decided my reaction was due to my being bipolar, not neurodivergent. When I tried to argue with him that I’d never been manic or had depressive episodes, he ignored me until I raised my voice in frustration and then he declared, “See, you’re being manic NOW!”

He doubled my dose, and added a mood stabilizer.

This is a VERY common experience for neurodivergents with two x chromosomes. Most common misdiagnosis are: bipolar 2, borderline personality disorder, and of course anxiety and depression (although living a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world CAUSES anxiety and depression). I took these unneeded medications every day for 13 years, gaining over 100 pounds. My mood was more…subdued, but overall unchanged. I felt awful on the meds, too. Eventually I started having an issue with low sodium blood levels, my meds were the cause, so I was weaned off them all. I immediately felt better, and I haven’t needed them since.

2. I don’t know if I am an alcoholic.

For 15 years, I abused drugs and alcohol. There is no doubt about that.

But the prevailing concepts of recovery — that it’s a disease or an “allergy” and the only way to treat it is with complete and utter abstinence — no longer makes sense to me. When I think of the hundreds of people I met through recovery, there is one common thread: TRAUMA. Add in the amount of people who are also neurodivergent in the rooms, and what I see now in those rooms isn’t merely addiction — it’s people who use alcohol and drugs to soothe their brains and provide some distance from their pain.

This is why I support harm reduction programs now instead of complete abstinence. When you are so broken and raw you need a layer of bubble wrap to protect you from the brutality of the world, drugs and alcohol provide that. Recovery is all about “raw dogging” life and I’ve gone to too many funerals of people I loved who could not survive living in this world without some sort of cushion between them and the world.

I do not drink but I am no longer in recovery, and I do not consider myself sober.

For me, it also goes a bit deeper. After working the trauma with my therapist I began to understand how neurodivergence touched every single aspect of my life.

I also realized that my 4th step — the one where you write down all the people you’ve harmed and how you harmed them to figure out your “character defects” — was 85% related to ADHD traits (and I’m not saying that didn’t harm people; it’s just not something I can control). The rest was trauma.

In the 1990s when the first SSRIs hit the market, people in recovery meetings said it was “mind altering” and you couldn’t use those medications and be sober. That’s changed, but overall the rooms are unforgiving about outside solutions — and there’s zero tolerance for most ADHD medications. I even got crap from people in the rooms about one of the meds I used to manage my migraines, and the number of young people I heard share they were being treated for ADHD but their sponsor said they had to stop meds when they got sober is huge, and a lot of them are now dead thanks to relapse and/or suicide. (Ironically, this is how I learned why I never enjoyed using meth when I was doing drugs — it just made me feel normal.)

For a program that claims to be all about accepting that which you cannot change, I was told over and over again that I MUST change these things about me or I was selfish and self-centered. Changing my ADHD isn’t possible, and hacking at it with the steps trapped me in self-hatred and shame.

---

This section is for the people who are rolling their eyes at the idea that a little learning disability like ADHD and/or neurodivergence can cause whole-body harm and trauma — and the people who say, “Ohhhh, you’re one of those ‘suddenly neurodivergent’ people because of social media. We all have a little ADHD, after all!”

No, you fucking do not.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About ADHD

1. It’s connected to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and other tissue disorders, hypermobility, MTHFR genetic variations, and more. There’s also increased sensitivity to pain, gastrointestinal problems, TMJ issues and more. It is not just about not doing homework — neurodivergence means our brains are physically different from neurotypical brains. WE ARE LITERAL MUTANTS. Our brains and bodies are actually different from neurotypicals — and trying to live in a neurotypical world as a neurodivergent person is an exhausting nightmare. I carry a variant on the MTHFR gene (yes, the “mothefucker” gene that was revealed during my infertility treatment), I have hypermobile joints (but tight muscles! so weird), and terrible GI stuff, and ADHD explains it all.

2. Everyone thinks ADHD people just can’t pay attention, but we do. But we pay attention to EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE ALL THE TIME. The problem isn’t focus — it’s narrowing your focus down to just one thing. I am clocking every single thing in my environment all the time — the bus I hear coming a block away, the neighbors standing out front chatting, the neighbors next door arguing, Charlie downstairs, my emails, texts, and slack messages, what we should have for dinner tonight, when the phone bill is due, AND writing this.

3. It’s not a learning disability — we just need to learn differently. Sitting at a desk all day is a stupid fucking way to learn things. I still couldn’t do math or memorize the table of elements when I started working as a vet tech, but being hands on and learning on the job was perfect for me, and now my head is jam packed with pet science and health info. I taught myself all about wild plants, how to use Photoshop, how to do graphic design, and more all on my own. Learning is easy for me if I’m allowed to learn in a way that works for me.

4. People with two X chromosomes are far less likely to get diagnosed with ADHD because it presents differently. Instead of physical hyperactivity, we struggle with “inattentiveness” and “disorganization.” Basically, our brains are hyperactive, not our bodies. We’re also diagnosed much later because we are really, really good at masking our symptoms. Also, unlike those with Y chromosomes, our ADHD gets WORSE in puberty, not better. I had to fire my psychiatrist because she insisted no one has ADHD as an adult — even though she’d never, not once, researched adult ADHD.

5. Undiagnosed ADHD people chase dopamine — which leads to bad decisions, impulsivity, destructive behavior, drinking/drugging, acting out sexually, and more. This is the ADHD version of “stimming.” We tend to have deeply messy lives as a result (inability to budget, for instance, is common in us neurodivergents). I didn’t just abuse substances to get dopamine and ‘stim’ — I also used food. A LOT. One of the reasons I’ve lost so much weight since my diagnosis is that binge eating no longer works as a dopamine source because I’m aware that is what I am doing and can seek it in a more healthy way.

6. BONUS: For ADHDers, out of sight is truly out of mind. Sometimes we even forget things ever existed in mere seconds — including people we’ve met. One of the first tricks other ADHDers taught me was to put my produce in the door of the fridge or right in the front on a shelf in order to remember to eat it. My perfect fridge, in fact, would be wide as fuck but only one item deep so I can see everything in there at a glance. My mother taught me to despise clutter, but if I put things away they vanish from my universe.

---

Back to our regular posting.

3. I am not a Christian.

I have significant religious trauma. My mother joined a “born again” christian church that was a friendlier version of an evangelical church when I was 6 until I was twelve. During all those years, I was at the church 3-4 times a week; bible study, choir practice, youth group, services. In fact, I went to BOTH Sunday services because the kid’s choir sang at the 8 AM service. I wasn’t harmed by anyone at the church, but I was fed a lot of ugly ideas (like the Sunday school teacher I loved telling our class that a woman had been raped because her shirt was see through).

I was harmed, however, by the concept of original sin. My therapist pointed out how the twelve steps are deeply entwined with the idea that we are all sinners who must atone, which makes sense since the very conservative christian Oxford Group was the inspiration for AA.

Did you know only christians believe in the concept of original sin? Christians believe just by the mere act of taking a breath, a baby angers god — and now that baby must atone for that sin the rest of its life or burn forever in hellfire.

WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK.

What a powerful tool of control and manipulation. What an excuse for abuse.

I have spent the majority of my life in both the church and the rooms of recovery being told that I am bad and wrong, and my entire goal in life was to force this square peg into a round hole, to be of service to others, and more — simply to prove I’m good enough to be there — whether it’s the recovery rooms or in heaven.

---

Now that I’ve stripped all of that away, my masks are all gone.

I no longer try to be normal. This makes most people VERY uncomfortable.

I’m a twitchy, weird, subject-hopping hot mess — but I’m also discovering I am creative as fuck and I’m also really great at the work I do. Now I have the info I need to build the tools that make my life livable in this neurotypical world, so I’m going to shape this twitchy hot mess into a functioning human.

And I guess I’ll be writing about it. Join me?