![]() There are many women like me: “lost girls”, so we’ve been called. As a child who was prone to inattentiveness and impulsivity, I was repeatedly told to “stop daydreaming”, “slow down”, “hurry up” and “act like a lady.” Overwhelmed by the world, it wouldn’t take much for my cup to runneth over or for me to completely disassociate – I got very good at both. The cherry on top is that girls who do suffer from impulsivity are often palmed off as “tomboys”. The frequency of zone-outs, disassociations and meltdowns caused by our hidden internal restlessness and our brain’s inability to regulate information and emotion goes unnoticed. Because of society’s gender norms, girls with ADHD are often dismissed as “daydreamers” and “overly sensitive”, as if we are a romantic, quirky caricature from a John Green novel or the Disney Princess canon. Women are more likely to have inattentive ADHD, rather than the more observable impulsive type. As a child I was repeatedly told to 'stop daydreaming', 'slow down', 'hurry up' and 'act like a lady'ĪDHD presents differently in girls and boys too. And it wasn’t until 2002 that we got our own long-term study. Unsurprisingly, ADHD in women is hugely under-researched – females weren’t even adequately included in findings until the late 90s. Statistics have traditionally shown ADHD is more prevalent in males, but recent research suggests this could, in part, be due to misdiagnosis. But it can also make little girls feel like they’ll never be good enough. The default assumption about ADHD is that it’s what makes little boys disruptive. You don’t remember what kind of bird it was. Dazed, you sink under a dark cloud of self-loathing, lamenting another lost day. Two terrine recipes later, the train has long passed and night has fallen. You discover cassowary eggs are bright green and in 2005, UK police found a leg of swan in the Queen’s Master of Music’s freezer. Curious, you pull out your phone, Google the bird and get stuck in a “pigeons of the world” vortex. On a bad, a bird might land in front of you. On a good day, it’s like watching a train whizz past you while you’re trying to read the text on the side and make out faces in the windows. Despite the name, ADHD doesn’t exactly result in a “deficit” of attention, but more an issue regulating it, making it harder to plan, prioritise, avoid impulses, remember things and focus. In Australia, it affects approximately 814,500 people and around five to 7.1% of the population globally. But it can also make little girls feel like they’ll never be good enoughĪttention deficit hyperactive disorder is a condition that presents at first in childhood but often goes undiagnosed. The assumption is that ADHD makes little boys disruptive. And like so many more, I had no clue what that meant. It turned out, like many women in their 30s, I had been masking severe ADHD my entire life. ![]() It would be another burnout, two more doctors, a blood test, a hormone test, a three-month wait to see a psychiatrist and another year-and-a-half before I had an answer. What is wrong with me? As soon as I got home, I collapsed on to the floor and tucked my limbs under myself into a ball – which I did often. But these were byproducts, not the cause. ![]() I left the psychologist’s office with zero helpful tools and as much hope. The session, I can say with full confidence, was a failure.
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