Smart Girls with ADHD

ADHD isn't one-size-fits-all

I'm Beth, a half Northern Irish-half Texan linguistic researcher and QA Analyst from Northern Ireland. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 28, despite managing to not fail at life up to this point. 

About Me

 

Maybe you've already been diagnosed with ADHD. Maybe you just know you have it. 

For a long time I thought, "hey, that ADHD thing sounds a bit like me". The thing was, I always managed to get by. I was a reasonably good student. Then I got a reasonably good career. I wasn't the loud kid who ran around like they'd just devoured a bag of sugar. In fact, I was shy. And I wasn't confident. People assured me of that... a lot.  

At my dad's desk aged 3

After leaving school, I managed to get an undergraduate and master's degree in Linguistics. Then I returned to university a third time to study Software Development. However, I always found it difficult to concentrate on paying attention in class, keeping up with the amount of reading and studying on my own. Sound familiar yet?

The diagnosis took a long time mostly because I'm reasonably smart and quiet and managed to be mostly okay at life. I managed to get two degrees and a postgraduate diploma and a job as a linguist. The problem was, the ADHD manifested itself as anxiety instead. I couldn't relax and my brain raced at a thousand miles an hour.

Now that I've been diagnosed and I take the right medication, I feel less anxious. I can concentrate now: I can make it through a whole movie without daydreaming for the last hour (well, mostly) and my brain even has stopped obsessing over the future in the middle of the night. I can now get past the first paragraph of a book without stopping to do something more exciting (like playing a card game on my phone, thrilling stuff). I'm more organised. My bedroom is a (little) tidier. I feel like, finally, I'm better at being a human.

I've created this blog and online community for misunderstood girls and women with ADHD like me. The ones who get told they don't have ADHD because they have always managed to get by. Intelligent girls who didn't know they were smart (maybe they still don't). The anxious. The messy. The overachievers. The creative types. Girls who have had ADHD since they were young, the recently diagnosed, and those who think they may have ADHD but are struggling to find the right diagnosis.