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Wellness > Mental Health

Getting Diagnosed with ADHD at 20

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at IUP chapter.

 

At a young age, I was taken to a room and had to do a whole bunch of different tests to determine whether I was “gifted” or not. As it turned out, I was. This determination then sent me on an educational path of getting taken out of class and being considered “the smart kid”. However, I would talk a lot in class and procrastinate on my work. The talking always ended up in a comment on my report card almost every time. The procrastination caused me to plagiarize once and get a zero on my project. Yet I was still maintaining my grades.

(Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne)

I was one of the “smart kids” until my junior year of high school when I wasn’t just struggling in english any more. It felt like I had hit a wall. While everyone continued to improve and become more intelligent, I just… stopped. I couldn’t keep and retain information and doing schoolwork came at a challenge even more so than usual. I did so much that I couldn’t balance my load anymore. Somehow, I still made it through.

Cut to college. I still feel like I’m at a wall. I know that I am getting more intelligent and learning. Or am I? People seem to be catching more concepts and understanding them at a deeper level. I keep missing the obvious and coming up with crazy, unnecessary solutions that only have a 50/50 shot of working. My creativity was definitely there, but I felt like I couldn’t apply it right. The heavier the course load got, the more I struggled to keep up with assignments. It got to the point where I was just playing catch up the entire semester.

(Photo by Christopher Lemercier)

For the past year, I had been taking medication because I struggle with anxiety. This was very commonly known and it seemed to help a little bit. Everything else just seemed like laziness or bad procrastination that I was choosing to take part in. But I wasn’t. Everything in my day took a certain amount of energy. However, my brain was really good at making every tiny little thing take enough energy that the task as a whole seemed like too much.

In July of this year, I went to a psychiatrist and got diagnosed with ADHD. Getting diagnosed this old isn’t uncommon, as ADHD remains very underdiagnosed in general, but especially with women. There are a lot of aspects of life that it can affect, but I mainly struggle with executive functioning. This is what allows your brain to time manage, rate tasks by importance, start tasks, and break them down so you can accomplish them. I have struggled immensely all my life with starting and completing tasks as well as time management. So it was a breath of relief when I found out that I wasn’t just lazy or severely ingrained in bad habits. My brain is just wired against me.

(Photo by Radu Florin)

Now I take a medication that helps me function on a daily basis and life feels so much easier. I can do more of what I actually want to do instead of feeling paralysed by my inability to just do. Though it’s going to take time and effort to build better habits than the ones I have now, I can finally take control and live the way I want to live. 

Gabrielle Bonnar is a current undergrad student at IUP who enjoys writing for HerCampus. She enjoys writing articles as a way to express her opinions and experiences throughout her life. Also, this acts as an outlet for her to write about new interests and ideas that she might not be able to express as well through her other artistic mediums. Being a member of Her Campus has strenghtened her abilities as a writer and she is excited to see where this portfolio of pieces takes her in the future. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @typical_guby.