A woman in her 20s has opened up about being diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood. Robyn Clarke was told she had ADHD last year, aged 25.
Robyn went to visit her doctor because she related to some TikTok videos about the condition. At first, she brushed off the likelinesses as a 'coincidence'.
But a lot of the symptoms resonated with the freelance social media manager's personality and she couldn't shake the feeling off that maybe she had ADHD. She said: "It was things like being unorganised, being forgetful, forgetting what you’re talking about halfway through a sentence, not being able to focus on work, not being able to focus on relationships, all these things.
“I struggled with mental health my whole life, so I always just put it down to that and then I just couldn’t get it out of my mind that maybe it could be something else. I spoke to my doctor, we went through everything and it took over a year and a half for me to get diagnosed, it was a very long process.”
Robyn believes that she had to wait so long to be diagnosed because lots of other people and seen similar vidoes on TikTok and had also went to the GP. Speaking to the Manchester Evening News she said: “I think people were waiting even longer than I was to be honest.
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"The process was kind of like, you get put on a waiting list and get forgotten about until it’s your turn. Some days were kind of really hard for me because I wanted an answer and some days I would just completely forget about it.”
Looking back at her childhood Robyn believes she may have 'flown under the radar' because she was a smart girl and the stereotype of young people with ADHD at the time being “hyperactive little boys that couldn’t sit still”.
She explained: "The main things for me was just really struggling at uni and work.” When I was at school I kind of flew under the radar because I was smart but I would also get things on my report card that would say like ‘she would do so much better if she could concentrate or just stop talking for five minutes’.
"Which is obviously a clear indicator of ADHD. When I got to uni I really started to notice that I couldn’t manage my own time, I couldn’t turn up to things on time, I was missing my coursework deadlines, just things like that.
"Obviously, I finished uni and went to work and had the exact same problems, just amplified, and obviously there’s a lot more support at uni whereas when I’m at work, if you can’t do you work you get fired.”
But what does it actually feel like to have ADHD? “Honestly, it’s a mixture of emotions at all times." Robyn said.
“I’m really up and down with my emotions, I can either be really hyper-focused on something and that’ll be the only thing I’ll do, I forget that anything else exists basically.
“On the opposite side, I’ll feel very overwhelmed, really anxious. It’s like I’m very aware of the fact that I can’t manage my time and things but no matter what I do, it just doesn’t seem to get better.
“It’s hard as well because I didn’t realise I had ADHD until I was quite older, I always just thought I was lazy and it was my own fault and it wasn’t a neurological thing.” Robyn says that the day she got her diagnosis was a ‘mixture of emotions’.
Since then she has taken steps in her life to help her cope with conditions like going freelance to set her own work schedule and use social media to connect with others in the ADHD community. “When I got my diagnosis I got the biggest sense of relief. It was like ‘wow I have an answer now, I can go out and learn about my brain and put some processes in place to help me’.
“On the flipside I felt a lot of resentment for the fact that I had been in and out of the child mental health services until I was 14 and it had never been picked up on. I did kind of feel disappointed that I could have had extra support put in place had they noticed. But at the end of the day I’m just glad that I know now.”
