Long road to diagnosis

Women with ADHD are often misdiagnosed well into adulthood.

I was.

Depression they said (yep i was depressed)
then generalized anxiety disorder(yeah ok, who doesn't have that).

Then every freaking medical test known to man.
healthy as a horse.

Some people thought i was using drugs.
I wasn't.
I remember distinctly a boss that asked me that years ago and i was floored!
What?!?

What could i possibly be doing to make him think that?
I was dumbfounded.

I am often referred to as a free spirit and im good with that.

All my life I've heard:
"I know you are so smart, why can't you finish things, keep your house orderly, find your keys, maintain a budget, pay your bills on time?" blah blah blah.
Really kills the old self esteem after awhile, especially because I knew I was smart.

HOWEVER newsflash!!
My ADHD symptoms have nothing whatsoever to do with my intelligence!
Neither do yours.

I was so tired, so unmotivated, so overwhelmed and so deeply depressed.
I couldn't understand how mom's could keep their house clean.
how they kept track of their kids school stuff
how they maintained "star" charts
and had sit down dinners every single night!

And so it went on like this until I was 46.
At 46 I gave up wondering what was wrong with me.
I was deeply depressed and decided i was going to have a time out and a tune up.
I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and began going to group therapy.

It was there a Psychiatrist after observing group for a month suggested I take a test for ADHD.
So I did, but i was confused.
I was not hyper I was exhausted.
And i was woefully uneducated regarding ADHD despite the fact my two boys had already been diagnosed.

The Psychiatrist let me know that i had ADHD-PI.
Im sure my mouth dropped open before the sentence
"oh bullshit!! I'm not ADHD, im exhausted not hyper!" flew from my mouth almost as fast as the thought entered my brain.

He chuckled and said that fatigue was a symptom of ADHD of the primarily innattentive type.
My eyes began to glaze over and he said, come into my office(we had been in the hallway)
He gave me a book called "Women and ADD" by Sari Solden and said "take this home and read it"

So I did.
I took that book home and read it.

Twice in two days.

And I cried. But they were not tears of sadness.
They were tears of amazement.
They were tears of relief.
They were tears of joy.

Because that mystery I'd been trying to unlock for years

all the searching, all the reading, all the doc appointments
all the therapy appointments in an attempt to discover that mystery
and live and maintain
a good ordinary
orderly
daily life with good mental health

that mystery had been revealed to me
after I gave up my search

It felt like christmas when i was a kid
and i got that present I'd REALLY been hoping for

I literally felt LIGHTER
and I knew
that now my life was going to be different

Because I knew now what i was dealing with
and I knew I had a wealth
of information at my fingertips

Nothing could stop me now...