Is It My ADHD? (eBook)

Navigating life as a neurodivergent adult

Grace Timothy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
400 Seiten
Allen & Unwin (Verlag)
978-1-80546-248-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'It's now top of my recommendation list!' - Dr Jo Steer 'Empowering' - Anna Mathur 'A revelation' - Char Bailey 'Engaging... well-researched' - Dr Tony Lloyd Darkly funny, relatable and unflinchingly honest, Is it My ADHD? gives irreverent and intersectional insight into what life is like for women living with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Much like the 3-4% of the British population with ADHD, Grace Timothy always felt on the outskirts of 'normal'. After a lifetime of mental and physical symptoms that didn't quite add up, she was finally diagnosed in 2021. At the time, information was scant. Now, neurodivergence is the hot topic on everyone's lips. With this increased awareness, we've encountered a new challenge: how can we circumnavigate the misinformation and better understand our own brains? Writer and podcaster Grace Timothy speaks to those living with ADHD to explore traits specific to women, grounding each chapter in clinical research and expert commentary. Offering comfort and real, triedand-tested tips along the way, this book is for anyone who's ever wondered, is it my ADHD?

Grace Timothy is a lifestyle writer who has previously contributed to Vogue, Glamour, Sunday Times Style, Grazia, Red and Stylist, and now freelances from her home in Sussex. Grace is also a brand consultant specialising in fashion, beauty and helping companies better support neurodivergent customers and staff, and the host of the Is It My ADHD podcast. Since being diagnosed with ADHD in 2021, she has been on a mission to spread awareness of the true lived experience of ADHD in women and non-binary people, in whom ADHD is so often missed, thanks to the fact that the diagnostic criteria and research is so heavily skewed to the white male case study.

Textauszug

Introduction

It’s nearing the end of 2020. I am thirty-seven. I am in the UK, which is between lockdowns thanks to the outbreak of Covid-19. I am in a hospital, which is the last place I want to be during a pandemic; my husband Rich works in this one as a neuro-physiotherapist, and has said the numbers of Covid patients in the intensive therapy unit are creeping up steadily now the kids are back at school. I’m here to see an ear, nose and throat (ENT) consultant about my dodgy hearing. Until today, all appointments have been held over the phone, which is fairly pointless when you consider the problem. But here I am, six months later – restrictions have been momentarily lifted, so I’m sitting in front of the consultant for the first time. My once blonde hair has six inches of dark roots across the crown, a tally of the time I’ve spent in lockdown, which is to say all the days since 23 March.

If this whole pandemic had happened when I was still working as a beauty editor in magazines, I suppose I’d have had to brave the salons, but it’s now been over a year and a half since my last commission for a newspaper and seven months since my last sponsored social media post was cancelled, and I’ve been happily hiding ever since. I love lockdown. I rarely say so, not just because it’s an unnerving privilege to find any positives in it, but because Rich will worry that I’m retreating from the world again. Truth is, I thrive in this set-up, especially since my part-time job as a copywriter was furloughed, so I haven’t even had to work much this year. I relish the life of a recluse, at least in the short term. With fewer demands on me I perform better – looking after my daughter, cooking meals, defleaing the cat, calling my mum, staying on top of the patch of mould in the bathroom, reading the news… I’ve been mending ripped sweaters and sewing on buttons, for Christ’s sake. I’ve removed the covers from my daughter’s car seat and washed them; the four-year-old chocolate milk stain has gone, just like that. I’m not drinking as much alcohol. I’ve sown seeds and tended to them properly until they were seven-foot-tall sunflowers. I’ve never been this person before. When the world opens back up, she’ll be forgotten.

It’s no wonder I’m irritable, then, having to creep out of my hiding place to come to this appointment. I have had to sit for over an hour in a waiting room for this largely silent consultation. Several of the nurses bustling back and forth are wearing their masks as chin hammocks, so I have a dry mouth and a sinking feeling in my stomach. My leg bobs up and down as the consultant silently scrawls his notes

By the way, pandemic anxiety is (almost) universal. This is a normal reaction to the Covid-19 crisis we’re in the middle of, I’m told. Any mention of ‘normal’ calms me right down. Even the unflappable, perpetually underwhelmed Rich has shown signs of strain after seven months working in a hospital during repeated outbreaks. At many moments during the pandemic, I’ve been the calm one.

It has been suggested that I might have health anxiety. It’s true, I’ve spent a long time in and out of the doctor’s surgery trying to pin down a reason for certain feelings: tiredness, nausea, chest pains, dizziness… This time a couple of years ago you’d have found me lying fetal on the bathroom floor watching a soothing Giovanna Fletcher vlog on my phone to distract me from the enema I was self-administering, ready for my 10 a.m. colonoscopy. A couple of years before that I had an awkward conversation with a gynaecologist I initially met via the NHS about how the new set of examinations she’d just performed on my cervix weren’t covered by the NHS, so I’d need to pay the £500 I definitely didn’t have in my account. It was OK, though; she let me pay with a signed picture of my dad. For context, he was an actor on prime-time telly at the time, so although the request took me by surprise as the doctor was elbow-deep in my vagina, it wasn’t unusual. Nice to be able to pay for your smear with your dad’s face, but I popped a Cadbury’s Creme Egg in too (with the autograph, not into my vagina), because I didn’t want her to think I was cheap. I’ve also had a full blood test done a number of times over the past couple of years, to see if it’s my thyroid or an underlying deficiency of some kind plaguing me.

‘Nothing physically wrong here,’ the GPs trill each time, their eyebrows raised so high they’ve disappeared into their hairline.

However, it was Rich who pushed for this ENT appointment – my hearing is the one thing he considers an actual issue. It’s also at his request that I’m limiting my show of frustration at this ridiculous wait-time to a leg jiggle I’m barely aware of. My loud, often sweary expressions of annoyance in queues, waiting rooms and traffic are, he says, not ideal in his place of work, and after I yelled fucking cunt a stone’s throw from his office in the hospital’s labour ward in 2012 (and there were extenuating circumstances, so I don’t think it’s fair he’s still bringing it up), it might be nice if I could just swear internally while on the premises. So I’m jiggling and examining my split ends, looking darkly at the consultant’s loose mask (I can see the pores on his nose, for Christ’s sake), counting my teeth with my tongue and occasionally tutting, which I hope he can hear from behind the two masks I’m wearing.

Inside my body it is like a Baz Luhrmann dream sequence at double-speed, sprinkled with cocaine and chilli powder, all frenetic shaking and loud noises, a blur of colour and flashing lights. I am shooting up and down inside like a pinball, ricocheting off the confines of my skin; my arms and legs responding in micro-twitches from time to time as the adrenalin overflows. I am fizzing. Outwardly, though, I’ve mastered the art of near absolute stillness. My dad thinks it’s one of the most powerful things an actor can do, but for me it means I draw less attention. I literally speak to my limbs: don’t move, don’t twitch. You don’t need to catch that strand of hair from your view, even – let it stay there! Just stay still. Blink slowly, savour that little outlet, and then: still. I cross my legs and cross them again, so that the top leg is looped all the way around the other like a creeper around a tree. I wonder what it looks like when I’m still. Is there a poised kind of haughty elegance about it? Or do I look as unnatural as I feel? I know I’ll be floppy and monosyllabic this evening, spent from hours of restraint.

I’m better at donning this disguise than I am at editing my language. A sweet little fuck will definitely sneak out in a minute when I want to make a good impression on my consultant, or a shit when my glasses fall off my face and onto the floor, or he tells me I have a tumour in my ear.

I can hear his pen scratching across the paper, which is positioned just beyond my view. I mean, I can hear the pen, and the ticking of the clock on the wall, and the nurse who just bellowed ‘JACKIE!’ into the corridor. So why am I even here for yet another hearing exam? Maybe I’ve got the ‘selective hearing’ my mum says my dad has. He hears me opening a Solero from upstairs, Grace, but does he hear when I ask him to descale the kettle? Does he fuck. I also speak very loudly, according to Rich, in restaurants and cinemas, and at home when I’m animated about something. Still, it wasn’t until a colleague told me about the hearing loss his brain tumour caused that I saw a GP and got a referral. This appointment is to look at the reasons behind my hearing loss, namely: are my ears not normal? I wonder how much longer this will take and why doctors don’t have a better shorthand method for note-taking, despite the fact I’ve never learned shorthand myself during my fifteen years as a journalist. Finally, he speaks:

‘I’m only referring you for an MRI to be absolutely sure nothing is growing or is incorrectly formed,’ he says, still writing while he shrugs off the need for an MRI. ‘Then come back and we’ll do another hearing test to see if it is in fact deteriorating.’

‘Sure.’ I pointedly pinch my mask over the bridge of my nose to secure it. ‘So a tumour is very unlikely then; I mean, I passed all of today’s tests – balance and everything?’

‘Yes, all fine.’

My relief makes me feel chatty and I forget I’m cross with him for making me wait. ‘See, between you and me, I don’t think my hearing is that bad. I think I’m just loud. And my ears help me disassociate.’

I’ve recently read something on Instagram that said one symptom of anxiety is partial deafness, as your body shuts out the external threat. I’m trying it out here, because I think anxiety is the real reason behind my hearing loss and blocked-up sensations, as if my ears and sinuses have filled with the blood I can hear swooshing around my head. Even if I don’t feel anxious, this could be a bodily signal of it.

He stops writing and looks up at me, his brow furrowed like I just said something really stupid. But it’s too late; I’m now on a roll and can’t shut it down.

‘It’s like at a party or on Christmas Day...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.2.2025
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Krankheiten / Heilverfahren
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Psychiatrie / Psychotherapie
• Schlagworte: adhd book recommendations • adhd experts books • adhd in women book • adhd in women symptoms • adhd memoirs • adhd misinformation • adhd uk • best books about adhd in women • best new nonfiction 2025 • books about ADHD • books about adhd for parents • books about adhd in women • books about adhd relationships • latest books on adhd • new nonfiction 2025 • parenting with adhd book • parents with adhd parenting tips • parent with adhd symptoms • women with adhd
• ISBN-10: 1-80546-248-2 / 1805462482
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80546-248-4 / 9781805462484