I’m in the same boat, inattentive ADHD. You’re not the only one who feels that way. It sucks.

I’ve spent most of my life masking so hard that I have managed to lead what most people would call a “competent” life, at the cost of my mental health, my sense of self-worth and my social interactions because I constantly feel I’m a faker and that people are going to find me out. It’s gotten so bad that I’m working with my therapist to allow myself to exist without masking, and to allow myself to be happy for the first time in my life.

When I hear stories about people struggling so much harder than me, having difficulty holding jobs, or in education, my low self-esteem makes me downplay my own struggles, and the very real damage that forcing myself to live masking has done. Yeah I can sort of navigate social situations, but that leaves me drained, exhausted and feeling like shit. I can concentrate sometimes, but only if the stars align correctly. I want to fidget and move, but I know that people would think I’m weird for doing that, so I force myself not to.

I feel lucky for the privileges I’ve had, and how my neurodivergence has panned out wrt life, but I have to remind myself that I’m not doing great, even if I try to convince everyone and myself that I am fine.

I used to, a lot. I thought that I wasn’t disabled enough, or neurodivergent enough, to justify telling people and getting the help I need. I’m kind of at the point now where I realize that’s bullshit, and I can usually tell when I’m hindered my my AuDHD and anxiety. Probably helps that I’ve always had a diagnosis for the AuDHD, and my anxiety is so clear to everybody around me.

Quite a lot. And I thought I was a late ADHD diagnosis in my late teens.

It’s been less frequent after college, where there is no carousel of moderate-future requirements that “ruin your life” if you don’t meet them. In fact I’ve found that as long as tasks for work don’t extend beyond one day/shift and don’t have me getting on a PC, it’s really easy to meet them. Then I can do whatever I want (let the meandering stream/hyperfocus take me where it will) for the rest of the waking hours that I’m not working. Leaving academia meant giving up on a dream, but many radical dreams appeared and made life a lot more fulfilling and exciting than what I could have imagined.

If you don’t have kids super young, don’t have addictions to alcohol or tobacco or other substances, sidestep car ownership with carpooling and/or mass transit, and don’t live in a super expensive city, you can support yourself quite reasonably on 20 hours a week. Being able to do this, plus lending a bit of slack to local radical projects on top of that, made me feel so much better about myself.

I was diagnosed very recently; and like you; I still sometimes don’t think I have it and everyone I talk to doesn’t believe it either because I don’t match the stereotype of people on the spectrum.

Everyone also denies my other identities too because I also don’t fit their stereotypes and I think that repetition of that experience is driving me away from doing the homework since there’s nothing that reaffirms this identity unlike some of my others; especially so w LGBT & Brown.

That is until I stumbled upon this community a few days ago; reading some of these posts about spectrum behavior makes it feel like everyone here is gossiping about me without calling me out by name. Lol

All the time

ND comms is popping off tonight. I love this lol. ASD here with a few co-morbitities

I read a lot of people end up with imposter syndrome after or running up to a diagnosis.

I got it after like 6-8 years of occasional research, which is a telltale sigh you might be autistic. I finally got a diagnosis last year from my therapist. Not the big diag but she was still like " you’re hella autistic" and she’s pretty dang smart about neurodivergence.

But I still had the imposter syndrome stuff going for a couple months after. Since then I’ve even met people in the ND space that could tell in like 5 minutes of meeting me. I also even did more reading on it. I’m finally more just accepting and learning how to mask properly(never really learned so guess who the weird kid was?)like, I do mask but poorly. I borrow phrases and postures from friends and such but I didn’t know that was masking until my last deep dive.

ImpSyn is pretty much gone at this point but I also recognize when I’ve been heavily masking and after I can stop I go into decompression mode for a few hours and am back to a baseline. Goofy, sarcastic, dorky me.

My clinical major depression and anxiety has me like this always.

If I feel ok for a while, I’m second guessing being depressed at all. If I feel an episode coming on, sometimes I lean into it and make bad choices to increase my depression, to prove to myself I’m not faking. Especially if I can feel myself being able to work out of a depression earlier than usual or stop it from getting as bad as or could.

I know that feeling.

I’m still on a wait list for some specific tests that my biological parents never bothered to even consider, and sometimes I ask myself “am I pretending?” or something unhelpful like that, while my neurodivergent friends keep assuring me that I definitely am neurodivergent and the adult testing is just a formality.

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Sometimes some of us get hyper-critical about ourselves. I don’t know why it happens - maybe it’s a symptom of some condition, or the effect of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world.

When you get to feeling that way, I encourage you to tell yourself that it doesn’t matter how the symptoms manifest, the simple fact that you are struggling is what legitimizes your condition.

The categorization of conditions is useful to calibrate treatment and support but many people’s conditions do not manifest as all of the textbook symptoms, and neither do their responses to treatment. The professionals should understand this because they work with it day in and day out. The improved descriptions of conditions has allowed advancements in treatment but remember that the ultimate goal of is not to perfectly understand arbitrarily delineated conditions (and invalidate care for those who don’t match them perfectly). The ultimate goal is to reduce actual suffering experienced by individuals. So what matters in terms of “deserving” treatment and support is not the specifics of your condition, but simply whether or not you are struggling (e: whether or not you realize it! if you’re questioning it at all then you probably are!). If you are struggling it doesn’t really matter why you are struggling, all that matters is that you get the help that you need.

I hope this perspective helps next time these thoughts pop up. You deserve to live the best life that is available to you.

Ye

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