Part 3 of 3: Sources of Overwhelm—My Executive Functioning Disability

I started swimming lessons with the classic “water babies” classes taught at the local middle school. With the exception of long bouts of travel and pandemic restrictions, I don’t think I’ve spent much time away from the pool since then. I’m the farthest thing from athletic, and swimming was no exception. I have the opposite of what would make an effective swimmer’s body: a short torso, long legs, and a stoutness not conducive to flowing with the water. But, it turned out I liked being in the water even if I wasn’t built for it. Maybe because it was a source of calm I didn’t know I needed.

I’ve now written about two of the major sources of overwhelm in my life: school and finances. This isn’t to say they’re always overwhelming and debilitating, but they are two areas I’ve had to learn and continue to learn how to manage. Interestingly though—and I wonder if it comes through to readers in my writing—a lot of what made me overwhelmed in both of those situations was going to extremes. Whether it was taking so many classes because I was curious about so many things or the hyperfocus I had when I paid down my debt to the my social connections: It became clear I struggled with attention in ways I never fully grasped. These two characteristics are very common for people with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder): difficulty dividing attention and a tendency toward hyperfocus on one thing.

I’ll back up bit to say that I’ve studied developmental disabilities (mostly in the speech and language domains) for over ten years now. I learned about ADHD by treating children with speech and language disorders who often have this as a concomitant diagnosis. My goal with this post is not to talk about my disability from a clinical perspective. I know there are nuances in diagnosis for example, and while I’ve worked with a clinician who confirmed I have many ADHD characteristics, I have not gone through formal diagnostic testing. It’s possible given changing DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—the go to book for diagnosing behaviorally defined disorders) criteria, that I would not meet the guidelines. My purpose here is not to talk about disability from a clinical standpoint, but rather from my own perspective as a person who’s come to recognize that there are ways in which my mind works and ways in which the world is structured that make it challenging for me to learn and interact with others.

Learning about my ADHD characteristics has perhaps been the greatest and most helpful experience of my adult life so far. As I mentioned, I’ve worked with children diagnosed with ADHD. That’s to say, you might think I could recognize some of the characteristics in myself—but other than the sense of overwhelm I’d get again and again —I never knew what was ‘wrong.’ Because, yes, something always felt ‘wrong,’ ‘off,’ or just challenging about how I felt in the world.

I started calling it “anxiety” in my early 20s. And anxiety is a piece of it. But I never realized–until the right therapist came along–that the anxiety flowed from the sense of overwhelm I got from struggling with focus and executive function more broadly.

I’d perhaps always felt something was a bit different, but school (where I spent most of my life up until my first job out of grad school) was actually very predicable and stable. And as much as I could feel overwhelmed in school, having good teachers and quiet spaces to do my work in school and at home counteracted that. So it never became really clear that attention was something I struggled with until I started working as a clinician after grad school. The world I worked in was much less predictable and much more demanding of the types of energy I found to be scarce with my ADHD symptoms (this will be a post of its own).

When I’d mention feeling worn out at my job and needing caffeine throughout my entire day as an in-home clinician, my therapist explained that this can often be the case for people with ADHD: they tend to be exhausted earlier in the day than neurotypical individuals.

Speaking of caffeine, I started drinking coffee at the end of high school and have been an avid caffeine consumer ever since. It’s a way for me to compensate for depleted energy, and it’s a common self-medication for people with ADHD, again, as my therapist described. She mentioned it acts similarly to medications that are prescribed with ADHD. Without caffeine, especially in the morning, my mind feels likes it’s spread out in a thin layer across a giant space—focus is hard, to say the least.

I don’t want to get into every detail here and now, but I do want to share how vital it has been for me to be aware of my own challenges with executive functioning, and how I would characterize these as a disability. Don’t get me wrong—I’m mostly able bodied and able minded. I’m continually learning from the amazing community of disabled activists and scholars. Mine is a smaller piece of a much larger story.

But I did not think I’d be able to be honest in writing about overwhelm if I didn’t clearly explain my own disability. It’s a part of me. It explains a lot about me. But more importantly, it helps shine a light for me when things are too much and I need to pause. It also shines a light on systems that need restructuring or better accommodations, when, for instance, I find myself getting overwhelmed in the same situations again and again.

I want to be honest and open about the reason why I chose the word “lazy.” Something that goes along with having an executive functioning disorder involves moving too fast and thus having trouble with matching my speed to the tempo of the external world.

Sometimes, ADDers like myself are perceived as being ‘lazy’ when we start to tune things out from the overwhelm.

While not exactly the reason I chose the word in “The Lazy PhD,” I’m not unaware of the negative connotations it holds for the disabled community. And perhaps, by using the word in a new context, it might lose some clout as a way to mischaracterize the overwhelm in those of us struggling to take in so much of the world all at once.

I hadn’t thought about it until I sat down to write this, but I wonder perhaps if my love of swimming was possibly an antidote to the overwhelm. I swam through middle and high school and recreationally once I stopped competing. When I’m swimming, I find it to be both astonishingly quiet and also regularly/calmingly noisy.

At the end of many of my days, I was in the pool, the perfect balance of calm to all the noise.