PILLS CAN BACKFIRE –
Aug. 2022 – I had been a restless child. The first night I slept in a bed rather than a cot, I rolled on to the floor nine times. Even before I could walk, I was constantly wriggling, fidgeting, climbing things. My parents nicknamed me Tigger, after the perpetually bouncy Winnie-the-Pooh character. “You were cute and charming – but very annoying,” my mother recalls. Still, the idea that I might have ADHD never came up. In the UK in the 90s, it was cast as a disorder of naughty boys who struggled at school. I was socially adept and academically successful – gifted, even.
I drove myself regularly to exhaustion as a teenager, but it was only once I left home to go to university in London that things really began to fall apart. Without the structure of regular mealtimes and bedtimes, my rhythms became erratic. I couldn’t sit still and study unless I was physically exhausted. I set myself unrealistic goals and took on too much: training for a half-marathon, two part-time jobs, a rule that I couldn’t eat anything I hadn’t cooked myself. After frantic waitressing shifts and studying benders, I drank to get to sleep.
With a brain like mine, you’re always “on”: a torrent of thoughts and sensations come in like spray from a fire hydrant, and you’re left desperately trying to stem the flow. Even when sick, I feel like I’m being driven by a piston engine, pushing me to move even though my muscles are worn out and my mind is begging for peace.
