Perfectly as designed: How a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis led to my creative breakthrough
Some required context: the following is a story I read at The First Time: an award-winning live storytelling and music show produced by CHIRP Radio. The quarterly showcase features 6 storytellers each telling a personal story about a different “first”. The August 2023 theme was “First Pass.”
Listen to the live recording, including possibly the world’s GREATEST cover of RuPaul’s “Supermodel”, performed by the First Time Three (aka: members of Frisbie) here:
A young Sarah circa 2015 in Reno, Nevada, the morning before driving into my first Burning Man.
I’m going to tell you the story of a first pass by first telling you my entire life story via a convoluted series of vignettes and asides. I’m going to need you to trust me -it will all make sense in the end.
The year is 1985. I”m three years old and I’m sitting in the quiet box at Star of the Sea preschool in White Rock, BC, Canada. Mrs. Annette is handing me supplies to make our Halloween craft project: tissue paper ghosts. Hold on, Sarah: “what is this quiet box?” you’re asking. In a totally progressive move for mid 80s suburban Canada, the quiet box was a small, cozy space with a blanket and pillows inside where anxious kids could seclude themselves. From drop off to pick up, I spent months in that box. I was super shy, and felt so different from the other kids, but I didn’t know why.
I remained a memorably shy kid, and it wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I finally started to shake my crippling shyness. “But Sarah” I can hear you all saying, “You’re obviously an extrovert -this does not compute!” Trust me, I know. I didn’t make sense to myself, either. Over decades, bit by bit I developed coping mechanisms. Bit by bit, I built confidence by pursuing my interests.
And I’d always had a lot of them. I had a great imagination, and lots of ideas. As a kid, I particularly dreaded when adults would ask the question: “So Sarah, what do you wanna be when you grow up?” I could never settle on one thing. My responses were like a musical:
I want to be a marine biologist, paleontologist, rockstar, dancer, and cook
An astronomer, psychic astrologer, actor, writer of books
A high school teacher, a Manic Street Preacher, a witch and rebel for life
A make-up artist, a lawyer (the smartest!), and David Bowie‘s wife
Speaking of Bowie… I took comfort in the rebels and oddballs of the world -folks that created their own path. I remember the first time I saw David Bowie. I was six. He was the Goblin King in the Labyrinth. His luxurious mullet, perfectly arched eyebrows, and giant codpiece haunted my dreams for years. I was in love. He was the ultimate shape shifter, and I loved him for it.
And then, speaking of shapeshifters!- there’s RuPaul. 1993, Supermodel of the World comes out, and there she is, blowing up my 11 year-old world simply by loving her OWN self in the most over-the-top, hilarious way.
Then there’s Sinead O’Conner. I remember when she ripped up her mom’s picture of the pope on SNL. I was too young to fully get what was happening at the time, but I saw she was pure fire. For years, her shaved head was the butt of so many late-night jokes. I always admired how clearly she was able to hear her own voice in a world that delighted in tearing her down.
Knowing that people like these existed in the world gave me hope that there was a place I could fit, too.
So let’s fast forward: it’s 2015, I’m in Vancouver, working a real adult job in applied statistics for the Canadian government. It’s at this point that I want to introduce you to my best friend of 30 years, Krista. All you need to know about Krista for this story, is that we’re childhood friends, and growing up we’d always hear stuff like: “you guys are exactly the same person.” “You guys speak your own language.” Or from my cute Canadian mother: “Ohhhhh, you’re two peas in a pod, eh.”
Krista’s got an extra ticket to Burning Man. It’s mine if I’m willing to drive to Nevada with her. It’ll be cool, she says: we’ll camp in the desert for a week, take showers with vinegar spray and moist towelettes, and for the first time in your life your limp-ass skinny-ponytail hair will have volume… from the dust that will slowly fuse it into a single dreadlock. But, there’ll be art, fire, and weirdos.
I’m in.
We get there. We’re meeting all these great new people at the camp. Fellow wanderers. Brilliant, interesting people committed to making community in an inhospitable, extreme environment. Mad Max style.
The Temple at Burning Man 2015
Then I meet someone. Picture this: as an oversized, smiling Scrubbing Bubbles brush drives by in the distance, the flap of a crisp, beige utilikilt catches my attention. “Is that a utilikilt?” I ask. He’s tall and dreamy, and looks just like the lead singer from Baroness. He slowly lowers his dust goggles from his eyes. “No, it’s just a knock-off. Hi, I’m Chesley.”
“the flap of a crisp, beige utilikilt catches my attention.”
(perhaps no longer so crisp here…)
Over the week, I get to know Chesley. I’m still an awkward weirdo, but he’s an awkward weirdo too, and so, in a way, we felt like family. He tells me he’s a licensed stock broker, and though I barf a little in my mouth when he says it, we’re both deeply philosophical, silly, and former bass players, so I can overlook the detail. Oh yeah, and he lives in Chicago.
Burning Man ends. I go back to Vancouver. Back to work in my government pension-earning workplace. I’ve more or less become a functioning adult: successful on the outside, yet increasingly feeling like an alien inside. I knew I was capable of something greater, but if adults bothered to ask me, I STILL didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I tried filling the void with hobbies outside of work. On the outside I was fulfilling my childhood dream of having all the careers:
Statistical analyst, dancer, activist, comedian & office drone
On the inside, I felt like somehow I wasn’t living authentically.
Three years later, I move to Chicago and marry Chesley, my Burning Man boyfriend. Soon after I have more titles: wife, radio DJ, art teacher, mom. And as much as I loved all these new pieces of me, I found myself really struggling. I had developed all these coping mechanisms for myself over the years, without even realizing it, and suddenly those coping mechanisms didn’t work anymore. I felt like I was drowning in my own life. I became depressed.
So here my dear friend Krista makes her way back into the story. The year we turned 40, we went on a trip together to celebrate. We’re hanging out on the beach one afternoon, maxxin’ relaxin’, and she tells me: “Sarah, I need to tell you something. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD.” So of course, when my sister from another mister tells me she’s got ADHD, all *I* hear is “Sarah: bitch, you got ADHD.” If my spiritual twin’s got it, of course I have it. That’s just science.
And I realize lots of folks have ADHD. But me?! Never even considered it. You see, when I thought of ADHD, I thought of the hyperactive boy in class that can’t sit still -NOT the cripplingly shy, compliant girl in the quiet box.
So I go down the research rabbit hole. Particularly the new research on ADHD in women, now that they’re bothering to research us. Turns out it can present in different ways, and it can present just like me. I get a diagnosis, and along with it, new insight into how my own mind works, an understanding of my gifts, my challenges, and what I can do to support myself.
You see, there’s a pain in having an internal struggle your whole life, especially when you present so well. It’s a struggle that others can’t see. Knowing now that I’m neurodivergent, it’s a new lens through which I can look at my past, and heal my relationship to it.
Getting an ADHD diagnosis at 40, I finally understood there was never anything wrong with me. I’d always been working perfectly as designed.
Eventually I was able to drop the self-criticism, accept myself, and claim space for myself to be authentically seen, just like those rebels I so admired: Bowie, RuPaul, and Sinead.
So I can hear you: “cool story bro, the theme of the show is first pass!? What does this have to do with that?” Simmer down, cowboy. Bitch, I’m making you wait for it.
You see, since this perspective shift, my creativity has really started to flow. I’m not standing in my own way anymore, and I’ve been able to embrace my work as an artist, and my work is prolific. My goal for 2023 was to share more: to get myself out there more, and invite more people in. My daily mantra: “I have something to share today.”
Last April, I shared in a new way. I’m a quilter. I create nontraditional, nonfunctional quilts for display. They’re cool. You should see them. I haul out all of these quilts that I’d been making in my basement, and exhibit them to 20k people at the One of a Kind show at Merchandise Mart. It was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. I finally stepped outside the Quiet Box and claimed my first artist's pass.
