ADHD in Women.

When I was a child, I was deemed as emotional, smart, and talkative. I would cry over the smallest look, spilled milk. I learned to read and spoke in full sentances by the age of four. What my mother didn't realize is I was showing signs of ADHD in girls. My teachers called me “spirited.” I guess that was their polite way of saying I couldn’t sit still. I would ask a hundred questions before they’d finish answering the first one, bounce from one thought to the next without missing a beat. My crayons were scattered across the floor like breadcrumbs. It wasn’t that I didn’t pay attention, it’s just that my mind was a crowded city street, and everything—every little thing—was shouting for my attention.

As I started puberty, I began to be more impulsive, and starting smoking weed to calm my brain. The overthinking would consume me. I would smoke a bowl in my childhood closet. I was successful in school- so what did it matter how I felt on the inside? I started showing signs of depression. I got an associates degree the semester before I graduated high school, bachelours two years after that, and a masters two years after that. Success was never the issue.

I guess I wasn’t “wrong” enough for anyone to notice. The boys who couldn’t sit still in their seats were the ones who got called out. But me? I could manage to stay under the radar. I felt like I was failing. Lazy. Distracted. My grades depended entirely on whether I liked the subject. If I was interested, I could go hours without noticing time pass. If I wasn’t? It felt like trying to run a marathon in sand.

It wasn’t until I hit my twenties, after bouncing through job after job, trying to build a life that felt like mine, that I got the words for the thing that had been tripping me up for years: ADHD.

The psychologist was gentle when she said it. “You have ADHD,” she told me.

I couldn’t stop the tears. It wasn’t sadness. It was relief. It was finally hearing a name for the storm inside me, for the tornado of thoughts that I thought everyone else was managing better than I was. ADHD. It wasn’t a character flaw. It wasn’t laziness. It was just… me. A part of me that needed understanding, not shame.

It was a light bulb moment, but also a hard one. I realized ADHD wasn’t just about being forgetful or distracted. For me, it was like living with a brain that was constantly buzzing. It’s like being on a high-speed train, except everyone else is walking at a regular pace. I couldn’t control the pace of my own thoughts, and the emotional sensitivity? It felt like every single feeling was turned up to 11. A comment in passing could ruin my whole day, and I could lose hours obsessing over it.

And the interruptions. I couldn’t help it. I’d start speaking before the other person had finished, not because I didn’t care about their words, but because if I didn’t get my thought out in that instant, it would disappear.

But there were other sides to it, too. ADHD wasn’t just a mess; it was also my superpower. When I was fully immersed in something I cared about, I could create entire worlds in my head and bring them to life. My creativity soared. I saw connections between things that others couldn’t, and when my mind finally clicked into that space, it felt like magic.

It’s not that everything got easier. No. But I learned how to manage it. I found people who understood. Other women like me—who had also been misdiagnosed or ignored, who had built lives around their wild brains instead of fighting them. We shared tips, tricks, and stories. We didn’t try to fix each other. We accepted the chaos, and in doing so, we found a rhythm that worked.

Some days, the world still feels too slow. My brain races ahead of me, and I can’t seem to catch up. Other days, I’m hyper-focused and productive, racing through tasks like I’m sprinting in a marathon that only I’m running.

But I’ve come to realize something important: being a woman with ADHD is like living with a fire inside you. If you don’t know how to handle it, it can burn everything to the ground. But if you learn how to work with it? You can set the world alight in a way that only you can.

And me? I’m learning to let that fire burn.