ADHD memes

Congrats. I had a similar experience, in that medication was life changing. It feels so great to find a medication that works, as well as validation about one's experience. I am chronically depressed, but the medication helped so much that my mood was buoyed for months.

Apologies for the unsolicited advice, but I'm going to tell you what I wish someone had told me:

At some point in the future, your medicated experience will become your norm, and you'll no longer feel the sharp contrast that you're feeling now. You may find yourself sometimes struggling with tasks in a manner that reminds you of before you were medicated. When that happens, I want you to remember that although medication helps a ton, it's not a cure. You will always have ADHD, and it's not something that can be medicated away. It's normal to experience "flare ups" of symptoms if you're experiencing extenuating circumstances, like life stress. That can creep up on you because when we're feeling capable, we tend to grow our lives to match our increased capacity. That's a good thing, but it can cause us to feel like we're doing worse than we are. It's easier said than done, but be kind to yourself.

The point I'm making here isn't "you might feel good now but you're going to feel shit in the future". Instead, I'm suggesting that whilst medication is necessary for many, we need more than that if we're to thrive. I've learned so much by being in community with other ADHD folk — concrete strategies that have helped me to better understand myself and engage with a world that can be incompatible with how I work. Those steps don't feel as life changing as medication was, but it's incremental, so harder to notice.

Just try to remember how you're feeling right now, and when you feel yourself struggling , use this to remind yourself that progress is always possible. Many ADHD folk have become used to thinking of themselves as broken, especially if they're diagnosed as an adult. A diagnosis (and especially meds) can be so liberating because it challenges this idea. We do ourselves harm by trying to force ourselves into a mould that we can't fit into, and I've seen a lot of people (including myself) slip into that pattern after getting medicated, because we feel like we're fixed. You can't be fixed, because you're not broken.

I hope my comment doesn't come across as too grim, because my intended sentiment is one of hope. Diagnosis can feel like an ending, with how it explains one's past experiences, but in many ways, this is just the start of things. Medication can facilitate the kind of exploration and growth that would've been impossible before — opportunities to craft a life that fits you, and to be a part of the wider conversation where we ask "how the fuck do we reconcile ourselves with a world that often seems hostile to our existence?". That's an open question that will never have one neat answer, but we can work on it together.

TL;DR: I'm excited for you, and I'm glad to have you here with us. A diagnosis isn't necessary to be valid or welcome here, but I know that it can feel hard to participate if you're not sure whether you belong.