In 2022, I started seeing a therapist on a weekly basis, as well as began to take medication for both my depression and my life-long battle with ADHD. Growing up, I distinctly remember being tested for attention issues in the seventh grade. They gave me these questionnaires to pass along to my teachers, which they would base their diagnosis on. One of the questions read “Does the student compulsively steal things or set things on fire?” which really should have been an indication of what the outcome was going to be. The early 2000s were a strange time for mental health.
As I moved into high school and college, the attention and other issues that are rolled into attention disorders were put on the backburner as I worked through the haze that is depression. The symptoms really reared their ugly head when in my sophomore year I had planned to take my own life. I tried (and failed) to sit through group therapy sessions, transferred schools, and maintained. No other attempts to treat myself or go to therapy. Masking had become second nature, and the fact I was an actor cemented it.
In college, also my sophomore year (we love a pattern), I couldn’t get out of bed. I nearly lost my academic scholarships, and nearly dropped out of a production. And was told by a student director that my difficulties seeking help and communicating my feelings were going to ruin the production. That I had literally ten lines in. But that’s another story.
A few forced therapy appointments and I pulled myself together enough to make sure no one asked any more questions. It wasn’t until I graduated and had my first full time job and insurance that wasn’t my parents that I asked a doctor about medication. My first appointment with this new PCP and I was sobbing in her office about not knowing what to do and needing SOMETHING.
Fast forwarding to now though, to 2022 and the relative stability I’ve found myself in. I have come to terms with the fact that maybe, just maybe, the ADHD is something I should have been working on all along. Apparently, executive disfunction and misplacing your phone in your small apartment 7 times a day isn’t normal? Who knew. With the help of my therapist, and writing habit books I’ve picked up here and there, I’ve been working to gear goals specific to the way my brain works.
Macabress Manuscripts 