EP 9. ADHD Pt 1

In the first of two episodes, I talk about having ADHD, how it has shown up through out the course of life, and establish the setting for the second episode, where I'll talk about strategies for managing some of the obstacles I anticipate ADHD will put in my way.

Articles mentioned in pod:

“I’m Smart, So I Should Be Able to Overpower ADHD. Right?”

High Intelligence and ADHD in Women: Unraveling the Paradox of Exceptional Intelligence and Attention Deficits

High IQ May "Mask" the Diagnosis of ADHD by Compensating for Deficits in Executive Functions in Treatment-Naïve Adults With ADHD

Instagram and Tiktok: @MichelleLovesGaelic

Music By: Ó hEadhra, Brian & Mackenzie, Fiona: "Latha Dhan Fhìnn am
Beinn Ioghnaidh" (A Day for the Fingalians of Beinn Ioghnaidh)
Performed by Ó hEadhra (vocals), Brian, Mackenzie, Fiona
(vocals) and Vass, Mike (fiddle)

Licensed courtesy of Naxos World

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is the word for neurodiversity in Gaelic? Neutral Imadal. Welcome to the ADHD episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hi, my name is Michelle Hughes, and this is Michelle Learns Gaelic. Shinchin. Hamidul.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Okay, my bad. In true ADHD fashion, I was feeling overwhelmed by the wall of awful that I was imagining that I would have to overcome to actually research, script, and record this episode. And um, so put it off a little too long. ADHD and language learning is at the heart of this week's episode. And it's kind of a long one because this is a topic near and dear to me as someone with ADHD and anxiety. And I'm deeply invested in understanding how to work with my brain in a way that supports my learning goals rather than derailing them. However, I also kind of want to give you some more insight, I guess, about myself and my personal ADHD journey. I just think that maybe it will be helpful to some of you out there who might also be wondering if you have ADHD or other neurodivergences. And, you know, it was a conversation with someone else who had ADHD who really got me started on understanding myself better. So yeah. Anyway, I took some time to think about what it was I was really wanting to say. I had found myself going down a rabbit hole, researching whether ADHD has been demonstrated to inhibit true fluent acquisition of an L2, etc., etc. You can imagine where this is going. But when I reflected on which studies I was feeling drawn to, what I really uncovered was that I have a very deep fear that I'll not actually be able to achieve my goal of fluency because of the ADHD, that I might become nearly fluent or even highly competent as I was in Japanese, but that the way my brain functions will always be a barrier. The good news is that literally none of those studies that I was reading found that having ADHD meant that you couldn't achieve fluency in another language. And like, yeah, of course, I already knew that to some extent. But fear is not logical. However, those studies did confirm that it would also be potentially much, much more difficult to become fluent. Of course. Most people are aware of ADHD and actually have a much better understanding of it than society used to in the 90s when the term ADD first really entered into like the pop culture lexicon, accompanied by much hand-wringing and demonizing of ADHD medications like Ritalin. However, to make sure we are on the same page, I'd like to offer up a definition of ADHD. The Attention Deficit Disorder Association defines ADHD as a neurodevelopmental disorder and a lifelong condition affecting the brain and its executive functioning. And for further clarity, if you are unfamiliar with the phrase executive functioning, this is essentially something that the frontal lobe of the brain is in control of, and it's responsible for things like time management, organizational skills, working memory, planning, prioritizing, paying attention, regulating emotions, and self-censoring. So if you can imagine how important these things are to just getting through a single day of life in general, you can already imagine their relevance to language learning. ADHD makes every single one of these things harder to do. And while there are many ways to manage ADHD's interference with them, such as medication, therapy, meditation, masking, etc., there isn't any silver bullet. And often, due to late diagnoses and early childhood experiences in non-supportive or non-understanding environments, there are compounding issues such as anxiety. So I figured I'd tell you my own story at this point. Or at least the parts of it that I think are most relevant. And there is one point in here that is particularly cringe-inducing for me, but it is relevant to my own understanding of myself and how ADHD impacts my life and to my experiences. So yeah, I'll be sharing that too. I learned how to read around the age of like three or four. I remember my sister trying to teach me. She was in first grade at the time, I think. She got immediately irritated with me. And definitely not the first or the last time, and left me alone, and I just started reading out loud to myself. From then on, I became an avid reader. Absolutely mad for reading. To the point that I remember being like super sick to my stomach, like Barfy, but still feeling unable to put down Laura Ingalls-Wilder's Farmer Boy from the um Little House on the Prairie series, even though reading the somewhat graphic details about the butchering they were doing of some of the animals on the farm made me want to hurl. Is the Gallic for that, for those who are interested. I also had to attend speech therapy classes and like kindergarten. I'm honestly not sure if that's when it was. I only have like the most vague memory of it, but I do remember thinking at the time that I didn't know why I was in this weird new class all of a sudden. I also remember another incident when I was in first grade and we had just moved to the area. The teacher asked me if I would take a message to a different teacher down the hall. I felt so excited that she had called on me and had tasked me with something so important. When I got to the other classroom, I couldn't remember what I was supposed to tell her. So I went back down the hall and asked what the message was again. This happened two more times, and the teacher said to me that would have just been faster at that point if she had done it herself. I felt super embarrassed and knew that she'd never give me another chance to do something important or special. I wasn't trusted to do a good job anymore. In fourth grade, I didn't do my homework for the entire year. And my teacher told my mom that if I didn't finish and turn in every single piece of homework that had been handed out over the course of the year, I wouldn't be allowed to move on to fifth grade. My teacher gave me two weeks, I finished it all in one. In seventh and eighth grade English class, we would be given tests at the start of a unit, and if we scored an A plus, we didn't have to stay in the classroom while the lessons were being taught. We could sit out in the hallway and do whatever we wanted. Presumably we were meant to study, but like for real that wasn't happening. I never had to do a single in-class lesson. I never once read any of the required reading in high school. In fact, my senior year in an AP English class, I was paired with a classmate to do an oral report on the Hobbit. I started the oral report and my partner finished it. We got an A. I still have not read The Hobbit to this day. In college, I studied Japanese and international relations and diplomacy. We had to memorize long conversations in Japanese for performance in class. I would start memorizing them about 20 minutes before class and then execute without issue. For my other classes, I would do the research for and writing for like 10 to 15 page papers at 3 a.m. in the morning the morning they were due. Was I a bad student? No, insofar as I got good grades. But I never learned how to study. And the idea that I could put things off until the last minute and succeed made the idea of doing boring prep work incomprehensible to me. And I felt like I couldn't actually do anything I needed to with that extreme pressure, especially if I found it tedious or boring. And despite the fact that I loved reading, assigned reading, I just could not, I couldn't make myself do it. I remember trying to get past that first page in um, oh my god, what's the book? The Charles Dickens book about the French Revolution. I don't remember. Right. Hmm. But yeah, like I could never get past the first page. I just, for some reason, being told I had to do something made me extremely resistant to it. I rarely attended lectures in college because I couldn't stay awake just listening to someone talk at me for 50 minutes, even if it was a subject I was interested in. I did best in the classes where we were required to talk and engage and trade ideas or perform in a target language, like be ready to be called on to contribute based on what you were learning and hearing about, or if music was involved. At the same time, I was working, often full-time, and going through all the things that young adults do around that time. Working adult life after college was a different kind of tedium, and the most difficult things in any role were the things that interested me the least and that I had the least amount of skills to navigate, dealing with office politics and petty interpersonal relationships. And you know, actually, I'm gonna stop right here. Mostly because even as I read back over this, I can hear how none of it sounds like the typical characteristics of ADHD. Part of that is because it's mmm actually quite difficult to talk about my internal world, how we was feeling in these situations, or what regularly led to them. Part of it is the curse of being double gifted. You'll find out more about that in the cringy part. Even though all this sounds like everything was easy for me, I had very few friends, crippling performance anxiety, huge emotions all the time. Everything was incredible and awesome, or terrible and life-ending. I was always late for things, and I struggled not to interrupt others. For most of my life I've been told that I'm too sensitive or too much or too emotional, too passionate, to everything. And yet I was never given the tools for how to navigate this. I was so impatient. In the workplace, I would be light years ahead of people in terms of understanding problems and finding solutions, and it would frustrate me to have to slow down to explain everything to them, especially when working in fraud and risk management when time is of the essence. I struggled to understand why they didn't understand what I was saying and that what I was saying was right the moment I said it, especially when they would eventually do what I suggested to begin with. I thought these were people with more experience and and and who were smarter than I. Why didn't they just get it? And I hated being challenged because it meant I would have to try to figure out how to go back through my thoughts and reconstruct how I got to my conclusion. And honestly, by that point, I'd probably forgotten. I was just left with the conclusion. I became a perfectionist, and there were so many things I started and stopped because I couldn't see the point if I felt like I would never be perfect at it. And I felt like if I didn't do things in the best way or in the the most perfect way, well, what did I have to offer to anyone? I'm not saying this is the right way for me to go about things, or that I was always in the right, certainly no. And I learned plenty of hard lessons, some of which were for the better, and others which dimmed my light considerably, because I didn't have the self-confidence to understand the difference between what was objective, constructive criticism, and what was just like projection on other people's parts. Still, this in combination with the ADHD turned self-awareness into hypervigilance, aka a much less healthy form of self-awareness. Eventually, I was blessed to meet someone who had become a really good friend, but who started as one of my direct reports. When she let me know that she had ADHD, we talked about how that might have an impact on her work, or how she might show up in certain ways in the workplace, and what I might be able to do to help her put her best foot forward. Through these discussions, I started to see myself. The more we talked, the more I realized that I was doing more than just empathizing with her. It felt like I was hearing someone else narrate so much of my own life. My mom died later that year, and I chose to find a therapist to help me with the feelings of nihilism that had taken over. It was an extremely difficult time. We talked about many things, but my therapist asked in one of my sessions whether I had ever been talked to about a possible ADHD diagnosis. I said no. You know, I mean, I had been teased my entire life about possibly having ADHD. And if um you have ADHD, you might be familiar with the the thing that people do when you suddenly go on a tangent, or or I guess you let that intrusive thought you have about the thing that distracted you in mid-conversation stream with another human out, and they're like, oh, squirrel. So yeah, no. And she recommended, well, she being my therapist, recommended that I reach out to a psychologist to maybe discuss a possible diagnosis, and that there were some things that she and the psychologist could work with me on if indeed I did have ADHD. So I went to the psychologist and answered a barrage of questions about my childhood all the way through my adult life. By the end of our conversation, she said that she felt confident, very confident in giving me an ADHD diagnosis, but that she wanted me to come in and do some testing. So, in for testing, I went. The tests were a bunch of different like trials that seemed to essentially test my reaction time plus accuracy, impulse control, my ability to hold and manipulate information in real time, pattern detection, etc. For example, she would repeat a string of numbers, and I would have to repeat them back to her in the correct order, but backwards. And every uh and every next turn, she would add a new number. So, like these tests took probably about like two and a half hours, and I'm telling you, I was so exhausted by the end, my brain was fried. So, are you ready for that cringy part I mentioned earlier? When the psychologist finally had me come in to discuss my results, she said that she actually didn't think I had ADHD anymore because I had performed so well on the test, better than she had ever seen anyone do, and that I had tested in the 97th percentile for IQ. I don't remember the exact IQ number, because honestly, I don't really care. But I do remember thinking three things. One, cool, and what good has it done for me to be this smart? I guess this means I was smart enough to avoid all the mistakes I've made, and yet I made them anyways. Great. Two, girls and women have historically been underdiagnosed because they are better at masking and tend to have the inattentive type of ADHD rather than the hyperactive type seen commonly in boys and men. 3. Alright lady, but I've done a ton of reading prior to coming to your office, and not just of the WebMD sort. And to cite just one of the many studies I read, quote, adults with ADHD and more elevated IQ show less evidence of executive functioning deficits compared to those with ADHD and standard IQ, suggesting that a higher degree of intellectual efficiency may compensate for deficits in executive functions, leading to problems in establishing a precise clinical diagnosis. And to just kind of add on that, honestly, was also, you know, in my late 30s, and someone who had made her way quite to quite a reasonable level in in, you know, in my career. So I had had to develop all kinds of coping mechanisms and um all and and have such a strong mask in order to be able to survive. I didn't always do it well, but I did it well enough. And that is extremely hard to disassemble in uh you know after like 20 some odd years of practice. So yeah, I went ahead and used those IQ points I supposedly have and drew the conclusion that the psychologist was incapable of making. ADHD it is. I have to say though, it's not all bad stuff that comes with having ADHD. I actually like super love the way I think. I'm creative, I'm able to think in such a way that lets me link together seemingly disparate pieces of information to draw meaningful and accurate conclusions, often way faster than my peers. I'm an extremely quick learner, super curious, and well, have a healthier risk appetite than most. I may have been called weird most of my life, at first as a derogatory term for not conforming, and later on as praise for my nonconformist ways. I'm an enthusiastic person and extremely empathic, a skill that I believe I developed as a result of feeling misunderstood for most of my life, especially when being understood and accepted was something I desperately wanted. And though sometimes I I am tired by this, or or I I would say I hate it sometimes, my big feelings are actually really beautiful, vibrant signs of life. Like it's it is a blessing and a curse to feel so deeply and strongly and and vibrantly. I'm proud to be who I am with the brain that I have. Honestly, I think I'm pretty cool. Alright. Since I just kind of gave you my life story up to this point anyway, I think I should probably split this into two episodes. I I wanted to kind of discuss, you know, some of the things that I thought I well, I wanted to discuss some of the issues I might face in learning to fluency because of ADHD and also the strategies that I need to consider putting into place to overcome those things. I have like a whole giant list. So I I think it's probably prudent to make that a second episode. I'm really trying not to get into hour-long episodes of just me speaking for both your sake and mine. Maybe like when I start doing those interviews I keep talking about, and like I really want to do them. I'm just like a little nervous about it. I just need to take the plunge and do it. Uh, but that's neither here nor there. Regardless, I'll get the second part of this out probably within the next week, simply because it's already written and I it I just need to record it. I'll also put some links to relevant articles that you can read if interested. I promise you that if you do, not only will you end up knowing even more about my inner psyche, ooh, you might even feel seeing yourself for the first time. Worst case, you'll have a lot more understanding and empathy for those in your life with ADHD. Thanks for you know listening through my my saga. I I know that this maybe doesn't do anything for your Gallic journey, but I suppose it's not only a way of sharing with others out there who might have ADHD who are learning Gallic or just learning any language in general and and kind of um saying, hey, here we are, I see you, you know, and and maybe you'll see something in my journey that resonates with you. But also I just think like we all just have all these different like barriers, all these different roadblocks and hurdles and things that we are trying to navigate, you know, as as we keep walking towards the finish line, no matter how far off it is in the distance. And you know, frankly, this is one of mine. So yeah. Any hoodles, um, yeah, thanks again. I I appreciate you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Let's get better together.