ADHD AWARENESS MONTH: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN 🧡
A blog post from Josée Lewis.
When I wrote my first post, I was fresh from my ADHD diagnosis and still processing what it did and didn’t mean. When I wrote my second, I’d seen a growing number of posts about ADHD as a “superpower” and felt there needed to be an honest counterpoint to a condition that can also be incredibly challenging.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my grandmother about my ADHD diagnosis and found myself wondering:
“What would teenage-me have wanted to hear?”
(Part of the “Iceni” Contingent from Norfolk Scouts in Wiltz, Luxembourg, 2006 and at the World Scout Jamboree, 2007)
Teenage-Josée was always on the go. I had a regular gaming group, went to Scouts and Explorers, helped with Mum's Brownie unit, spent time gaming and roleplaying, and always seemed to be involved in some club, activity or hobby. I had a plethora of interests, and a terrible inability to just stop and relax.
You were right, there are “normal” things you find difficult.
I distinctly remember feeling like I was “playing life on ‘hard mode’”. Things that my classmates found easy, straightforward and ‘normal’ were things I actively had to focus on to remember. One of the biggest ones was the ‘morning routine’ which wasn’t something that was rote for me. At the time, I assumed everyone was having to consciously remember these things and was simply better at it than I was. Even now, I must have visual cues for the process, and I’m 33. When I was at Sea Scouts, sailing on the Broads, one of the leaders would always bring a second towel; I remembered everything, every time, except that. Even now, if I need to bring things into work, I have to have a calendar reminder that goes off before I leave the house (otherwise they get left – like my lunch in the fridge)!
Don’t bother trying to revise or study on your own – get yourself a body double.
Homework was a non-starter unless it was interesting, and even then, there was a risk it would get forgotten as the next lesson started and new things needed to be done. I also felt remarkably tired after school, not endearing me to the idea of more work. Looking back, I often worked better in the school library than at home, though I didn't know why at the time. Only in recent years have I realised that I work best when I have a person (or people) with me. They can be doing something completely different, but their presence helps keep me on track. This is a known thing, called body doubling, and was an absolute revelation.
Reading by streetlight is fun but put the books down and sleep!
Sleep hygiene was an unknown to me, and I now understand this to mostly have been something known as revenge bedtime procrastination. Revenge bedtime procrastination is when you stay up later to reclaim time that feels lost during the day. Combined with ADHD's time blindness, an extra half-hour quickly became several hours and far too little sleep. I didn’t realise until recently that this had been part of my life since I was about 7 years old – and is still something I struggle with now.
(In the back garden, reading a Harry Potter book, 2003)
I lived on a housing estate as a child, and there was a streetlamp outside my bedroom window. When my parents tucked me into bed, I would wait until I heard them moving about downstairs and then pull out the Harry Potter book I had tucked by the side of my bed. I’d kneel on the bed and rest it on the windowsill, reading by streetlight. I was very good at hearing my parents coming upstairs and stashing the book away (Sorry, mum and dad!)
This developed into full-blown insomnia during my Undergraduate years. I would like to pretend that I don’t do this anymore, but I’ve definitely had a few nights where my husband has had to not-so-gently chivvy me to bed!
Alarms are your best friends. Please listen to them!
I mentioned in my 2024 blog that “I was reliant on to-do lists on post-it notes and writing down anything I might forget”. One of the best ways I’ve overcome this is through having alarms set for times where I need to do things. The biggest risk with alarms is that I will set them, hear them go off and have that instant momentary thought of “I’ll just finish this off and then…”
No.
There is no “and then…” with my brain. It gets done now, or it gets lost to the aether! This was always a challenge when teaching, putting down one job only to forget to pick it back up later. In my university years, it genuinely made me worry about my memory. Finding out that time blindness and working memory challenges are strong parts of Inattentive ADHD has been a revelation. I’m not losing my mind; I just need to scaffold around it better!
You’re not broken. You’re not wrong.
And I finally (sort of) understand you.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I looked back at my teenage self with disdain; I saw myself as lazy, distracted, oblivious and weird.
It’s difficult to look back and see some of those aspects I loathed as anything other than failings. I’ve had two years now to process the diagnosis, and to try and look back on myself with a little more kindness. It’s not always easy. One of the traits of ADHD is rumination or “looping”. Most people have experienced a moment of embarrassment or regret resurfacing years later; looping is where it becomes almost cyclical, and very difficult to break out of. In my teens and early 20s, these were almost constant, impacting my mental health.
It seems strange to say that a diagnosis helped quiet those thoughts, but it did. I’m quicker to spot the loops, quicker to challenge the assertions those thoughts make, and to be a little nicer to the child/adolescent/young adult I once was. The diagnosis doesn't make everything make sense…but I’m a lot less of a puzzle than I once was. And I think that those words are exactly what teenage-me needed to hear. And, with the pride of youth, she’d hate to hear her older self say…
There is joy, hilarity, embarrassment and pride for you to find yet.
Undiagnosed, it sometimes felt like I was driving off road in the world’s least equipped car, with no-one who understood me because not even I understood me. Some days were super tough, some nights even more so. And sometimes it felt like that off-road drive was traversing some really perilous roads.
I know that adolescent-me would hate to have had an older version of herself tell her that she doesn’t know it all, and that patience is a virtue…but it’s true! The car journey of her life has some twists and turns, several potholes, and some very haphazard diversions, but the road does continue. The road isn’t less bumpy, and the car she’s in isn’t any more suited to it, and she definitely still wants to find the brake pedal every so often; but she’s learnt where the lights are, and how to use the windscreen wipers now, and the suspension’s a little more forgiving.
(The East Anglia Primary Team – (L-R) Me, Jamie and Sonia)
Luckily, I'm not on this journey alone. Along the way, I've picked up friends, colleagues and a husband(!) who help make the difficult days easier. Here in the East Anglia office, I'm lucky to work alongside a team who accept my quirks (and the team have plenty of quirks of their own, too!), pull me out of rabbit holes, and remind me that nobody gets through life entirely on their own. ADHD might be part of my story, but so are the people who help me navigate it.
So, to teenage-me, and to anyone else who might recognise a little of themselves in this story: you're not “broken”, you're not “wrong”. The road ahead may be a little unconventional, occasionally chaotic, and sometimes unexpectedly steep, but it isn’t insurmountable. Understanding yourself won't remove the obstacles, but it can make them far easier to navigate. And trust me, there are so many beautiful, interesting sights along the way, if you’re able to grant yourself the grace to recognise them. Teenage-me certainly didn't see them coming.
- Josée Lewis, Education Recruitment Consultant in East Anglia
Josée's 2025 & 2024 blogs can be found below:
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