Published by: Happiful
Written by: Emma Mahoney

For her whole life, Emma Mahony has shamed and blamed herself for not being like ‘neurotypical’ women. It wasn’t until her son was diagnosed with ADHD that her journey of self-discovery began, leading to her own diagnosis at 52

Because of the way my brain is wired, I can’t help but get things wrong. Even at the age of one, when I learnt to speak, I would say everything backwards. Butter was ‘tubba’, birds were ‘dubbies’ and it took a while for my parents to transpose the letters and see that I was making sense.

The merest trifles that most people do naturally – arriving at places on time, remembering their wallet, not losing things constantly, such as keys, mobile phones, and credit cards, paying fines, avoiding speeding tickets – are rather boring things at which to excel in my world. I’ve made them that way so as not to beat myself up when I fail at them regularly.

However, the older I get, the more I realise that these boring things are actually important, and how exasperating it is for people when they think that I do them ‘on purpose’ or, more recently since my diagnosis, that I ‘use ADHD as an excuse’.

ADHD is not a moral failing; it is a neurological one. It is not ‘all in your head’, and there’s no ‘subconscious intention to forget something’, as one professional continually suggested before diagnosis. It is just that I am neuroatypical. Click here to read the rest of the story.