Living Authentically

Living with ADHD can be a challenge, to say the least. Each day often brings a variety of struggles: keeping up at work, finishing what you've started, losing things, saying things you didn't mean to say, and more. Of course, ADHD affects each person differently. But regardless, there are chronic, lifetime struggles we with ADHD all face.

I've met few adults with ADHD who have not had their self confidence knocked out of them. As children, they were told to "just try harder"; that they aren't living up to their potential. Try as they might, their report cards often didn't reflect their true abilities due to distractions, procrastination, and more. Children with ADHD typically hear way more negative comments about themselves than positives and they grow up with that image of incompetency in their head.

As adults, they've heard negative comments about their lack of housekeeping skills, poor job performance, less than stellar social skills...and the list goes on.

What often happens is the adult with ADHD begins to hide their authentic self because they're working too hard trying to fit in; trying to appease their spouse, family members, friends and colleagues. Undoing the words heard in childhood can be a lifetime effort. Endless hours are spent working against their ADHD- looking for lost items, working extra hours each day to stay caught up, hiding their messy, secret lives.

This almost always comes with a price tag. Creativity is shut down. One's natural sense of humor becomes lost in a pool of self doubt and even depression. Anxiety takes its place, with constant worries about fitting in and trying to "look normal."

These behaviors begin to take a life of their own until the person with ADHD (hopefully) wakes up one day and wonders where their authentic, real self has disappeared to. At this point, there's a huge choice to be made: to continue racing through life trying to be who you aren't, or...making a healthy decision to return to the person you are and were meant to be.

Living authentically means acknowledging your limitations, getting help for them, but to then move forward. It's not easy to shelve the words echoing in your head about not being "good enough", whether at work, at home or even within yourself. What stops most people from living authentically is a broken sense of self and believing the old scripts that have been tossed at them since childhood. For many, it's extremely hard to change this and often, psychotherapy with someone who understands adult ADHD is the way to go.

Let me give you an example of how I recently experienced an exercise in living authentically:

From the time I was about 12 or so, my dream was to be in a band. I was always a musical sort and had learned to play a variety of instruments by the time I reached my teens. Some of those instruments are not exactly commonly played by a female, let alone a middle aged one. So for years, the only time I'd pick up my electric guitar, bass or drumsticks was when no one was around. I was not being my authentic self!