better late than never: being diagnosed with ADHD at 43

In January, I was diagnosed with ADHD.

I have the "combined presentation type," which means I demonstrate symptoms of both inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity. Receiving that diagnosis didn't just explain what had been hard for me, it has recontextualized everything. The struggles, yes, but also the wins. I feel like I can see my whole story clearly for the first time.

After my car accident in 2007, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. For close to twenty years, that had been the profile I was trying to treat, with varying levels of success, through a combination of medication, therapy, and lifestyle approaches.

And yet I had a nagging feeling, for years, that something was just not right.

PTSD was, at first, a diagnosis I struggled to see myself in. But once I was able to accept that what I had experienced — living through a car accident that killed my best friend — was "bad enough," I went all in on trying to address my symptoms. I did all kinds of different types of therapy including cognitive behavioural therapy, sand tray therapy, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). I did sleep studies. I experimented with various medications, including anti-seizure medication to block the catastrophic dreaming.

I still could not seem to find something that made me feel right.

When I finally went off on burnout from work in 2023, I followed all the advice of my treating professionals. I took the time I needed. I went back to work with boundaries that I so desperately lacked. I started back gradually. When burnout started to appear again, I decreased my hours. I eventually left my career because I could not find the balance I was searching for.

And still, something felt off.

Perhaps perimenopause was setting in? In 2024, I started working with my GP and a naturopath to examine my hormones. The results indicated I was in the early stages, and so I started taking steps to regulate my hormones. After trying a few different approaches, I landed on an IUD, which began to help with the night sweats and brain fog. It was progress, but the deeper feeling that something was missing persisted.

During this time, we were also on a diagnostic journey for our daughter, a neurodiverse child who masks and had been misdiagnosed for years. The more I searched for answers for what was happening to her, the more I started to see myself in what I was reading. Frequently losing things. Oscillating between struggling to start a task and hyperfixating on it. Feeling like I was driven by a motor. Having trouble resting. Finishing other people's sentences. Having a hard time waiting for my turn to speak and sometimes interrupting. Being easily distracted. Making small, constant movements with my hands or feet (if you have ever sat beside me, this might have been enough to tip you off).

Until now, there was always something that I could attribute these things to: burnout, being overwhelmed at work, new mom brain, pregnancy brain, anxiety, depression, or sleep deprivation from the PTSD dreams. It had been easy to overlook. It was feeling less so now.

I decided I wanted , no needed, to know. I sought out a psychologist (who was fantastic) and she completed a comprehensive assessment. Having gone through the process with my daughter, I knew what to expect, but it was still fascinating to go through it myself.

The assessment asked me to think back to when I was a child. To picture myself in the classroom. At home. With friends. I was asked about my years in university, when life became more unstructured and I was living on my own for the first time. It was revealing to go back and really sit with those memories.

As I moved through the process, it became increasingly clear to me that I likely had ADHD — so it was not at all surprising when I received the diagnosis during my feedback session. What did surprise me was that the assessment found I did not meet the criteria for PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, or depression. 

In the clinician's opinion, while I had reported symptoms of hypervigilance, I did not report symptoms of active trauma. While I had demonstrated signs of anxiety, the report noted it was likely highly connected to my ADHD, likely exacerbated by the fact that I had never received any supports or accommodations and that I had coped by setting high expectations for myself and using anxiety as a fuel for productivity.

The psychologist presented her findings with trepidation. I could tell she was watching carefully to see how I would react.

My initial reaction was surprise, which was followed by relief.

I have had a complicated relationship with my mental health diagnoses for close to twenty years. Maybe partly because they arrived in the wake of the worst moment of my life, following the death of my best friend. But also because I never felt like I could get ahead of them, no matter how hard I tried.

Now, all of a sudden, it was like someone could actually see what was happening inside my brain. They could articulate things I had never been able to put into words. And not only did they see what was happening, but they acknowledge all the work I had done. They validated that the work had been beneficial. The report notes that "assessment responses reflect considerable resilience and hard work in navigating the challenges that were caused by her past trauma."

In that moment, it felt like a weight had lifted. I could accept that it was not my fault for struggling to manage something was never correctly identified. Maybe I had never been working on the right thing.

In the months since, the surprise has faded, but the relief has held. What has also arrived, in quieter moments, is grief.

I am sad for the younger version of myself who never had the supports she needed. Education was always important in my house growing up, and I was born to please. I can see now that I developed coping strategies very early, as a small child, to make sure I could hide my deficits. I developed my own brand of perfectionism meets overpreparation, with a side of people-pleasing. I was the "good girl." I took perfect notes. I studied hard. I never coasted. I always put in 110%. I did everything that was expected of me.

This worked reasonably well through elementary and high school. Those highly structured environments made it easy to succeed, and I was rewarded with high marks. But what got me through high school was not going to get me through university.

Going away to school, I was experiencing life on my own for the first time, while also adapting to a school environment where you were just a number. I excelled at making new friends — friendships I have maintained to this day and that have made me who I am — and at throwing myself into student life, which Queen's University was known for. Socially, those were some of the best years of my life. Academically, I struggled. I went from top grades in high school to barely passing some of my classes.

Knowing what I know now, my deficits in executive functioning undoubtedly made my life harder. Of course three-hour lectures felt excruciating. Of course starting an assignment felt impossible. It led to stressful outcomes: countless all-nighters to write papers. Desperately scrambling to catch up before exams. Completing make-up work to improve my grades. It's no wonder I was a C student.

And yet, looking back at that C student, I am genuinely proud of her.

That same C student was accepted into a Master's program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I managed it because, during my time at Queen's, I learned another coping strategy: leaning hard into my strengths to compensate for my weaknesses. It has gotten me into trouble from time to time, but more often it has pointed me toward what I do best.

At Queen's, that meant leaning into my love of service and politics. It exposed me to a wide range of experiences and led me to build relationships with university administrators. The same administrators who later vouched for me for graduate school. There is a line from a reference letter that Principal Emeritus William Leggett wrote for my LSE application that has stayed with me ever since: "academically, she is an average student, but her contributions to the University have been anything but."

That instinct, to outwork my deficits, to find the side door when the front one felt impossible, has carried me a long way. Through graduate school into my career. For a long time, the strategy held.

But a brain that never stops is only an asset until it isn't.

I think about the role ADHD likely played in my burnout in government. My body tenses when I picture my colour-coded calendar, highlighting days of back-to-back meetings. I remember being on Teams calls while carrying on side conversations with staff in my office, while also reviewing emails. My brain never shut off. As my responsibilities at work increased, so did my responsibilities at home. I moved to the management cadre for the first time shortly after returning from my first maternity leave. I became an Executive with a one year into the pandemic with a 3.5 year old and homeschooling a seven year old. It's no wonder I burned out.

And yet I am proud of that version of myself too. Not only did I rebuild post-burnout, I came back with boundaries and stuck to them. I knew, going back, that work and my boundaries would eventually conflict. But I tried anyway. It's like even before my ADHD diagnosis, I intuitively understood that being an executive in government was not going to work for me long-term.

My assessment simply confirmed it. As part of the report, the psychologist included a series of workplace accommodation recommendations. It included things like protected, uninterrupted focus blocks, transition time between meetings, frequent short breaks to reset working memory, and the ability to schedule demanding tasks during peak alertness.

Reading them now, with distance from that role, I just laugh. I cannot picture how those accommodations could have been meaningfully honoured in that environment. If it was hard to maintain very reasonable personal boundaries, I was right to trust my gut.

I want to be clear: I know there is a duty to accommodate. I also had the kind of management team that would have made genuine efforts to make it work for me. But some environments, some jobs, just are simply not built for certain profiles. 

For a long time, I felt like a failure. Like I could not hack it.

What my diagnosis has helped me see is that I was the right kind of person in the wrong kind of container. And really knowing that changes how I look back on everything.

The longer I have sat with my assessment, the more empowered I feel. It has provided me parts of my story that I have felt have long been missing. I also have realized that I have become who I am today both in spite of and because of ADHD. The drive, the sense of fairness and social justice, the ability to hyperfocus on things I love, the willingness to overcompensate — these are not separate from my diagnosis. They are part of the same wiring.

I am in transition. Moving from antidepressants to ADHD medication. Building new work habits. Learning to shape my environment around how my brain actually functions rather than how I always assumed it should.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am working with myself, not against myself. And I think that changes everything.