Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In

It’s been one of those days. After it was all over, I felt like crying. No more pain but a huge bill to pay. I’d find the money from somewhere, that’s for sure. Still, that’s enough about the bill I’ve just had to pay the vet for removing five of Reg the cat’s teeth. Something else happened. I had my ADHD assessment.

I’d like to say that I’ve been waiting a lifetime for this, but that would be untrue. I didn’t really have the first clue about what ADHD was. I hadn’t thought there might be a reason why I could not learn and then retain information, why I was so easily distracted, why I was told at school I had a “butterfly mind” and why I am often a non-stop fidget. Then, therapists kept saying things like, “Have you ever been assessed for ADHD?”

As my loyal reader knows, it’s been a long time coming. I was on an endless NHS waiting list for an assessment, successive GPs having endorsed the opinions of therapists. But time, I felt, was running out. If not now, then when? I’m a matter of days away from my bus pass – not that it’s here yet – and I have lost countless friends who died at a much younger age than I am now. And the loss of friends has reminded me of of one main thing: this is life, not a trial run. I have to do things now or I might never do them. Holidays, gigs, books, sights, writing – now is the time, not tomorrow. My lifelong objection to private healthcare had to be overcome by necessity. Fuck you Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, May, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak. You made me do this, just like you make millions of others suffer, many much more than I ever have. No thanks to you, I know now.

And what I know now is that I have ADHD. What’s more, I have always had it. When my grandfather exasperatedly blew his top at my constant fidgeting – ” SIT STILL, RICHARD!” – that’s what he was shouting at. He can’t have known so why should I be angry about it? The same thing doesn’t apply to my woodwork teacher at secondary school, Mr J as we shall call him for the benefit of this blog. He hated my guts from the very moment he realised that I didn’t understand anything he was saying or doing. And he never forgave me for laughing uncontrollably when he had a head fit one day in class and stormed to his little room, only to catch his apron in one of the vices and off flew the buttons one by one, high into the air. Who would not find that funny? Mr J for one. He summoned me into his office, his face contorted with rage, and he tore me off a strip for my insolence, reminding me how useless I was at woodwork. It was a double lesson but at the break little 15 year old me thought, “Sod this for a game of soldiers” and I walked home. I did go back to his class the following week, once my mum had spoken to the deputy head, and Mr J had changed his tune. He basically ignored me for the rest of our time together, only speaking the following autumn when the CSE results were out. “Yours was the worst woodwork result ever recorded at this school,” he told me. How do you answer that? By thanking him?

The boy, who was “easily distracted” and “didn’t concentrate”, had a condition, but no one picked it up. I’d already seen a psychiatrist by the age of 12 for panic attacks and night terrors and I was visiting Off The Record on a near weekly basis by this time as depression set in. No allowances were made, no special help; nothing. My lone parent mum, a Dutch woman in a strange land, gave me all the support she could but in the end I had to find my own way.

I carried the ADHD into the world of work where, somehow, I held down a full time job for a few months short of 40 years, never rising much through the ranks, because my work was never good enough to deserve it. I must have come up with strategies to deal with the fact that here I was in an office-based environment and could not understand much of what I was supposed to be doing. From 1993, I was privileged to work for some great managers who knew my many weaknesses but played to my strengths, such as they were. What some would regard as straightforward clerical work was beyond me. In the back of my mind, up until 2014, when I left the civil service, I wondered if I would be found out and exposed as the fraud I was sure I was. As it is, I cannot thank my managers and colleagues any more.

Once my assessment was over today, I went upstairs, closed my eyes and later woke up. After two hours. I have been living this assessment in my head for months, waking up in the middle of the night, doing walk-throughs of what might happen today. Utterly pointless, I know, but what else do you do with a brain that never sleeps? I slept, for once, dreamlessly, waking up to get my head around a simple diagnosis. I have, and have always had, moderate to severe ADHD. So, what happens next?

This was a private assessment, so the company, as befits a run-for-profit healthcare company, will want more of my money. They even have packages going from Bronze to Gold to suit my overdraft. I was under no pressure to spend anything else because I was mentally wasted when it was all over, but I’ll do the right thing after I have spoken to my GP, always assuming I can get an appointment this side of Christmas. A cloud of brain fog has appeared so apologies if this blog is even more incoherent than usual. That would be some achievement.

It’s been one of those days, all right. A momentous, potentially shape-shifting day, an explanation of what has been going on for all my life; closure, almost.

I’m not going to say I’m starting a new life. No one starts a new life. What we do is to pick up the bits of the old one, try to put them back together and get on with it. Whoop-de-do, I’ve got ADHD. Maybe there’s a book to be written?