Greetings!

[Emergingme]

Hi All, I am newly diagnosed with ADHD at 53 years. Funny thing, I've been a teacher for students with disabilities including ADHD for decades. I know I am just catching up with a lot of research. How could I and my colleagues miss my ADHD? Easy. We were never looking for it. Society hands a lot of self blaming reasoning to us all. I just thought I was a mess.I'm trying many of the strategies I teach, and what do you know, they work for me! I was able to get non-stimulative medition that allowed me to experience working memory. A gamechanger for me! Looking forward to hearing from this group and learning more.

Enjoy your day!

[Gettingittogether]

Funny you just thought you were a mess.

True story. I'm also a teacher and I got diagnosed in my 40s about 15 years ago. At first I was telling people I have ADHD.

And then at work I came up a new phrase: I'm not good with details. I'm not good at attending organizational meetings. I've used this to get out of all kinds of committee work and detailed work while I just focus on teaching.

So the "I'm spacey and I'm not good with details" is my way of announcing my ADHD. But I could only do that when I was feeling confident and clear about my strengths. So "I'm not good with details" = your "I'm a mess." I just reversed the context.

So first step, identify your strengths. Teach to those strengths as much I as possible.

BTW: I started studying what my highly organized students do and started to talk to them. What surprised me is how much time they take to plan out what's coming up. They just don't do everything as if naturally. They give themselves a ton of cues and reminders. Oh 90 percent of these students use paper planners!

Now part of the problem with ADHD is that we can be terrible at estimating how long tasks take, seeing the full outline of the project, seeing the steps we can break the project into, anticipating where we will need to take a break for other stuff and so on.

I found a monthly planner (just me) to be enormously helpful because every time I open it I see upcoming appointments and my body just unconsciously makes room for me to get to those appointments.

But seriously no need to feel bad. After I got diagnosed, I called my two brothers. One is severely ADHD, poor guy. The other more mild to moderate. But the second brother told me that his students (he's also a teacher) had been for years telling him he had ADHD--they called it "A D D." Didn't make sense to him until I called with my diagnosis.

My other brother with the severe case couldn't even organize himself enough to take any action on treatment. My sister also has it as does my mother. None of these people were diagnosed, mind you. My father was the only one who didn't have it.

It's easy to miss. I can think back to posting homework assignments and taking me 2x or 3x the time of my coworkers and I have no idea how I never inquired about that.

So to answer your question you missed it because people like us just shamed ourselves and then minimized it--we had no narrative or explanation, so we didn't "see it."