Mindlessly scrolling through Facebook Reels a few weekends ago, I came across a reel that mentioned having a co-dependent relationship with struggle. The idea being that some of us have convinced ourselves that struggling through everything is a necessary part of how we function. It’s impossible for things to come easily for us. To be successful, we have to earn it, and we earn it by fighting through struggle. I felt called out by a Facebook stranger—he had just described the primary mindset of my life.
As a kid in the 80/90s with undiagnosed, mixed-presentation ADHD, learning was an incredible struggle for me. The thing about having an undiagnosed learning disability is that you don’t know what you’re working with and because of that, it’s impossible to know what you’re working toward. Every successful strategy and approach that you learn comes at the end of a long line of trial and error. I was painfully slow at reading, so any reading or English assignment took me hours. Sometimes, it would take me an entire hour just to get through a page of text. Memorization was an issue. Learning vocabulary words in science, for example, was difficult because you have to pay attention first and repeatedly to memorize a word and its definition. Math, every aspect of it, was a complete disaster. I remember being in tears many nights over math homework. No matter how patiently my parents tried to explain the concept or the procedure, I couldn’t grasp it. It was incredibly defeating. I learned that learning vocabulary or remembering dates in history was a thought easier when I wrote it down. So, I started taking notes during class. When that wasn’t enough to have me retain the material, I started to rewrite those notes at home. When that didn’t allow me to review the material enough, I started making flash cards for myself from my notes, so that I could study whenever I had a chance. These techniques worked for me. I eventually became academically successful. Unfortunately, I made that trade at the expense of my mental health. I came to believe that if I didn’t study or review things obsessively, then I would never learn them. I had an intense amount of test anxiety by high school, and I thought that if I didn’t get nervous about a test, or if I walked out of an exam feeling like I did well on it, then I would fail. Essentially, I was slowly convincing myself that making myself sick with anxiety was not only appropriate, but it was necessary to my success. That line of thinking would carry me all of the way through a master’s degree.
In addition to my academics, my ADHD impacted the way I interacted with the world and with people around me. If I was in a group where several people were talking at once, it was difficult to pull focus and listen to what any one person was saying. Instead, I would catch pieces of every conversation, never really understanding the full context of any of them. Also, my auditory processing is slow and dysfunctional. I will often mishear what people are saying, especially if they are speaking quickly or in a funny voice or accent. I still do this today, but I’m much more comfortable saying, “My brain heard (blank). What did you really say?” I didn’t and still don’t like talking on the phone. Without the context clues of people’s facial expressions and body language, it was even more difficult for me to interpret what is being said.
My thought processes were also embarrassingly concrete at times. Meaning that I would take what was said to me literally. It took me a long time to understand sarcasm and to match tone, facial expression, and body language to the words that were said to determine if the statement was to be taken at face value or interpreted with more nuance. I developed ways of coping with this and masking it so that it wasn’t glaringly obvious that I didn’t know what was going on. Unfortunately, putting that amount of cognitive effort into every social interaction that you have throughout the day is exhausting. Most individuals with ADHD also develop a strong habit of self-reflection and subsequently, self-criticism. I would mull over interactions incessantly trying to decide where I made an idiot of myself and what I could do next time to prevent it from happening. Inevitably, this wears on your self-esteem. You start thinking that there are only a few ways for people to like you. One, just be quiet and keep to yourself. When forced to interact with someone, be as kind and helpful as possible. Two, absorb people’s overall attitudes and vibes and reflect them back to that person. It’s easy for people to like you when you’re reflecting who they are right back at them. Or, three, scrutinize the feedback you get in social interactions and problem solve ahead of time how to elicit more of that reaction or prevent it from happening again. For me, I ended up with a combination of all three of these. This mentality leads to a lot of cognitive static. Your brain is always processing something. Eventually, it becomes easier to avoid social interactions. There’s not much fun about something that causes you anxiety before you go, while you’re there, and after you leave.
While all that is going on, you’re developing your sense-of-self, growing a harsh inner critic, establishing a solid relationship with anxiety, and a lack of self-esteem in your intelligence and your capability to do hard things. In childhood, these seeds are just being planted, but by high school they really start to take root and in college, they’re sprouting. Unfortunately, the result is a garden of resentment, depression, self-doubt, anxiety, and unhealthy comparison of yourself to everyone around you. I remember being a freshman in college and being so jealous of my friends who could successfully balance their coursework with a social life. I resented that I had to bust my ass to get by while they could put in substantially less academic effort and do just as well, if not better than I was. I hated the fact that just getting through my daily classes burned out 90% of my cognitive battery. It was not only exhausting, but I was far from being a person having a typical collegiate social experience. I was too damn tired all of the time and I didn’t have the brain capacity left over to navigate social interactions. Go clubbing on Friday night? Who are you kidding? I wanted to be in bed by 10:30, not just heading out of the door. I was in survival mode semester to semester and I had a significant depression. I used food to cope with my stress levels and I wished away every semester day by day, week by week, until it was over. I only felt like I could breathe when we were on breaks. That’s a really sucky way to spend four years of your life, especially years that are often looked back on fondly by most people. Looking back now, I would have made the time to utilize the free counseling center on campus. When I finally did break down and seek out this resource, it was because I was having intense panic attacks during exams in graduate school. It was tremendously helpful in learning how to deal with my anxiety, and it opened the door to the wonderful world of therapy to me. I would return to psychologists several times throughout my adulthood and, now, I work with a psychologist and a psychiatrist on a regular basis.
Only now, in my 40s, am I coming to realize that not everything has to be a struggle. Not everything has to be difficult. Not everything that I say and do needs to be rehashed and scrutinized later. Without labeling it, I have been working diligently on breaking up my co-dependent relationship with struggle. I can’t say that I’m all of the way through that process, but at least now I can acknowledge that it’s happening. Whenever I begin a new endeavor, like starting this blog, for example, I still expect a struggle to occur. I still feel like anything that I do that is successful will only come after a hard-fought battle. Whether that’s from learning something new, fighting through depression to function on a daily basis, or shelving self-doubt and low self-esteem to appear more competent and confident than I feel—the struggle feels necessary.
Slowly, I am accepting that I can give myself grace. I can make mistakes without belittling myself. That I can try things, and I can walk away from them if they don’t feel right. I don’t have to just put my head down and barrel through it to prove something to myself. Most importantly, I’m learning that I don’t need to live in a perpetual state of fight or flight to feel like my life has meaning or like I’m doing something important. Ironically, getting to this point in my mentality has been a hard process! When I felt ready to do so, I began working with a psychologist to really dive into my ADHD and to explore the vines of it that had wound their way around my life. Of course, other things come to the surface, as well, that might not be directly related to my ADHD, but that’s the natural progression of therapy. If you have considered therapy, but you’re hesitant because you don’t want to feel vulnerable and exposed to a stranger, allow me to help you look at it differently. In my years of doing therapy, I have learned that your mental health professional comes into your session without judgement, without expectation, and without ego. What they do bring to the table is a fresh perspective, a safe place to let out all of your maladaptive thoughts, and well-vetted strategies, techniques, and programs that will give you the tools to carry your own shit more easily. We have a saying in occupational therapy that our job is to work ourselves out of a job by making our patients more independent, thus not requiring our services anymore. I feel like a lot of mental health providers feel the same way. They want to help you deal with the immediate concerns and teach you how to effectively deal with future ones. The goal is that, eventually, you won’t need them anymore, or at least, maybe not as often.
Regardless of the methods that you choose, I can attest to the fact that doing the work on yourself on a mental and/or spiritual level is worth it. Whether you need to unravel a diagnosis that impacted your life, you need to process loss or grief, or you need to verify a concept you found on social media that really struck a chord—you’re worth the work. For me that work looks like therapy with a trained mental health professional. Maybe for you, it looks like taking long walks or keeping a journal and letting your mind drift. Maybe you’ll find solace in practicing yoga, or maybe you’ll find what you need in a church pew on Sunday. The method of the work is less important than doing the work. So, while I’m here working on breaking up with struggle, my hope is that you find your own co-dependent relationship and start working your way through it. I wish you nothing but the best.
If you’ve read the introduction on my site, then you know that I have found myself at the end of my rope more often than I’d care to admit. Luckily, I found therapy at the end of my rope and I’m eternally grateful for it, but that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I found the inclination to be kinder to myself. Sometimes, I found how to extend grace. Other times, I found the beginning of a new rope to climb.
For example, my high school classes were never more than 45 minutes in length, so going to college where classes were routinely 50-90 minutes, or more if it was a lab section, was exceedingly difficult. My brain had not developed the stamina to attend to a lecture for that long. After forcing myself to pay attention for 20 or 30 minutes, I would find myself spacing out. Now, I realize that my brain needed that break, but at the time, it was something that I would berate myself about. How could I be so irresponsible? What did I need to do to prevent it? Obviously, taking notes was somewhat helpful, but this was back in the days where everything was handwritten. Not everyone had a laptop on them. So, note taking could also be physically taxing. I would re-write notes and search the texts to fill in gaps that I might be missing. That took forever, though, because my reading speed had decreased. Where I had gained some momentum in reading novels, when it came to technical reading, my brain would revert to it’s default setting….painfully slow. After re-writing notes, I would make notecards from that material so that I could study whenever I had time. I would talk out loud to work through difficult concepts (I lived at home, so no one was judging me, at least).