One week ago I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. It’s been a couple of years of questioning whether I might have ADHD, and about 15 months of actively pursuing a diagnosis (don’t get me started on that whole long process!). During this time I began identifying as ‘ADHD-adjacent’ and found that much of the language for common ADHD experiences, like object impermanence or hyperfocus, were helpful ways to describe what I was experiencing. Those who are close to me probably got sick of hearing me talk about ADHD experiences constantly, and as my housemate put it last week, “we all knew/suspected.”
But as soon as the diagnosis became official last week, something strange happened. Even though this was the outcome I’d been pursuing for over a year, sitting down in the psychologist’s office to go through the 31-page report together left me questioning things all over again. In my head I knew the psychologist was right, and I wanted her to be right, and I knew I couldn’t argue with the pages of clinical data in front of me… but there was a deeper, more instinctive part of me that felt on an almost bodily level that this couldn’t be right—that maybe I’d just tricked us both into thinking I met all the DSM-5 criteria, or maybe I was only ‘a little bit’ ADHD (sidenote: we know that’s not how ADHD or any neurodivergence works).
It’s hard to put into words if you haven’t experienced something similar, but it felt like there was an invisible barrier inside me that prevented me from being able to integrate this new information with how I viewed myself. It felt like an invisible forcefield surrounding some off-limits zone, where every time you try to approach that space, even though you can look in and see that zone just a few meters away, you keep coming up against some physical barrier, a concrete and impenetrable forcefield that keeps you away.
I’ve been reflecting on why I felt so much internal resistance to this, and it seems to me that this just reflects the experience of undergoing a paradigm shift in real time. It felt like a paradigm shift because it wasn’t just learning one new idea about myself but receiving an entire framework: a lens through with to view everything else. This article described paradigm shifts as not incremental developments in thinking but a revolution of knowledge. A paradigm to me feels like an entire framework with the explanatory power to make sense of a whole swathe of interrelated ideas.
The problem with a paradigm shift is that it requires the abandonment of the old paradigm. That’s a costly and psychologically demanding shift. A single idea, no matter how novel, would be relatively easy to integrate with my existing sense of self, but a whole paradigm demands letting go of explanations of my experience that have ‘worked’ for me for 28 years and the integration of entirely new explanations that are often at odds with my old paradigms.
A paradigm shift underscores our own fallibility and exposes the limits of our self-knowledge.
It’s deeply vulnerable to let go of explanations you’ve held on to for a lifetime, and even more vulnerable because of what this reveals: that you can have ways of seeing the world that make sense to you and have explanatory power, and then wake up one day to realise your perception was totally wrong. It underscores our own fallibility and exposes the limits of our self-knowledge.
Because it’s so vulnerable to admit a paradigm shift to yourself, I’m convinced our brains (or at least my brain), sometimes protect us from the psychological distress by ‘blocking’ us from seeing things differently until we have the mental resources to cope with that change. It feels like our minds create protective ‘invisible forcefields’ that keep us out of these no-go zones until we are resilient enough to go through the whole process of deconstruction and reconstruction. This is why our ways of thinking might have such cognitive dissonance but still feel like they internally make sense to us.
Our brains only ever allow us to see what we have the mental and emotional resources to tolerate seeing.
A paradigm shift to me feels less like the subtle change in direction you get when Google Maps tells you they’ve found a faster route to your destination and offers you a minor detour; a paradigm shift feels more like when you arrive at your destination and realise you put “Brisbane Street” in the GPS instead of “Brisbane Road” and you’re at the wrong place entirely and need to turn around and start over (and yes, this actually happened to me and it was for my first appointment for the ADHD assessment, and yes, I had to explain to them why I was embarrassingly late. It was pretty funny.).
So there I was sitting in the psychologist’s office, reading the words on my report and still not fully believing in my body what I knew to be true in my head. I even, quite embarrassingly, asked the psychologist how much confidence she actually had in the diagnosis—could she maybe have gotten it wrong or could I have led us both astray? (She simply laughed and remarked that from the moment I’d walked into her office for the first appointment she’d thought to herself, ‘Yep, he has ADHD’ and all the tests just confirmed that with more evidence.)
Even while using ADHD-specific language to describe myself for several years, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it yet. It felt as though I was using these terms as an analogy to describe my experience while distancing myself just enough to feel comfortable because I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to fully identify with that. I felt like a fraudulent imposter who was appropriating language for myself as an outsider to that experience, and I felt like I was always waiting for someone else—or even my own experience—to contradict me and expose me as the fraud I was.
The diagnosis was quite a turning point for me. But even with the validation of a clinically certified diagnosis after 9+ hours of rigorous testing, and even as someone who spends every day in an extremely neurodivergent-affirming environment, it’s taken me time. How much harder would paradigm shifts be in areas where you don’t have the validation of an unambiguous test result? When does someone who’s been exploring whether they’re on the asexual spectrum finally get enough clarity to accept this paradigm shift and see their life differently? Do they get to use these words to describe how they actually see themselves, or do they feel like they have to appropriate them as the closest analogy for their experience while mentally distancing themselves from identifying with it? How much more resilience, fortitude, and self-insight does it take to be able to accept these paradigm shifts without the option of any external verification?
A while back I met a young queer Christian who shared with me their experience of identifying with a different gender than the gender they were assigned at birth, but when I asked them if they’d like me to use that gender’s pronouns, they hurriedly asked me not to because they said, “I’m not ready yet for how it would feel to experience that gender euphoria and have everything change.”
I’ve also known several bi friends who’ve spent months or years in that liminal space of knowing they’re queer but not quite being able to psychologically admit this to themselves or others yet because they weren’t ready for that paradigm shift. In some cases, they even managed to come out to others before coming out to themselves—that’s how powerful our brains’ protective feature is, that you could have a conversation with someone where you disclose (in coded language) an experience that you haven’t even fully admitted to yourself yet.
My paradigm shift is still in flux, but it’s well on its way now a week later. Time works wonders for expanding our tolerance threshold.
The other factor I’ve found to be particularly powerful for processing paradigm shifts is community. With community comes representation. To quote Marian Wright Edelman, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” There’s nothing like finding people with a shared experience and shared language to remind you that you’re not crazy and you’re not alone. I may not be ‘normal’ but I’m also not special. There are people like me.
What’s even more powerful is watching someone else undergo a paradigm shift in community: having someone model in real-time trying on an entirely new framework that explains their world differently, and beginning to ask whether that framework may work for you too. In the last week, I’ve already had four different friends start exploring ADHD diagnoses of their own as a direct result of hearing about my experience. When we see someone else find language and paradigms to understand their world better, it gives us permission to do the same. When we see someone else not just surviving but thriving after deconstructing old frameworks and adopting new ones, it takes some of the psychological discomfort out of the uncertainty.
That’s why I want to share my experience here—because as much as I’m in process and will continue to change paradigms, even hopefully one day repenting of some of the stuff I’ve written, I want to model an authentic exploration that shows others you can too.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
Singled Out 