I had been wondering whether my recent ADHD diagnosis would make any difference to my life. Given the complete absence of NHS support and because I can’t take any more drugs, I was resigned to more of the same. But yesterday was a lightbulb moment. A low energy lightbulb moment, perhaps, but a lightbulb moment nonetheless. And oddly, it happened at the food bank.
There are two main jobs for us volunteers. One is the meet and greet, take the orders role and the other is in the store room, searching out goods and packing them. The first, involving direct contact with food bank users I enjoy and think I’m quite good at (although it is not exactly near the complexity of rocket science, to be fair) and the other, having to search things out at speed, spacing the good roughly equally in bags and then weighing the bags (we weight it all in and we weigh it all out again, as Brian Hanrahan might have put it). I can’t cope with the latter and have said as much to colleagues and volunteer coordinators. But I am still repeatedly asked to work in the store room and until yesterday I didn’t say why, not least because I didn’t have a proper ADHD diagnosis, but now I have one and I finally came out.
Given that we were short on numbers, I was yet again asked to work in the storeroom, by a fellow volunteer and not a coordinator. It brought back memories of being asked to do stuff throughout my life at school and at work where I had been pressured into being under pressure, if that makes any sense. I simply said that I wasn’t going to do it. I then decided to ‘come out’ to a coordinator with my ADHD diagnosis and explain how ADHD felt to me. It was accepted without question and I resumed working in the job I feel comfortable in doing. But I know there just might be consequences.
The storeroom isn’t a great place to work. It’s very small, oppressive and claustrophobic, certainly for me, but someone has to do it and that someone, I have decided, cannot be me. There is no threat here. And I believe that my lovely colleagues are sympathetic to my condition, but if I learned they weren’t I would walk away, not in a fit of pique, but because I don’t want to be the disruptor of something so important to the community.
There’s a very big difference where I am today than where I was before. If I was to walk away from volunteering, there would be no financial loss to me and only a small and temporary staffing issue for the food bank. In the wacky world of work, it would have been a massive decision which might have seen us plunging into near poverty. Thank God, you might think, that I didn’t know I had ADHD back then. I’d have been able to come out before but the consequences could have been disastrous. Still, as my dad always said, never worry about things you can’t change. For one night only, I’m going down that road.
Clearly, I have been overthinking everything, mind-reading what others are thinking, which of course can’t be done, but try telling me that. I definitely see this as a form of progress. This is me, this is how I am, I’ve always been like this and I’m not going to change because I can’t. This may have consequences for others but now the truth is out there, I have to live with it. Sorry, but I’m not sorry. In life’s rich pageant, I’m nearer the end than the beginning. I can’t cure my ADHD but I can deal with it better. And now I am doing just that.
