I’d given up. No amount of willpower was enough. Every time I sat down at the computer I got up again soon after, the empty Word document a shameful testament to my lack of focus. Some days I didn’t make it to my desk. It felt as if my thoughts were written down on Post-it Notes, hundreds of Post-it Notes that were swirling around in a giant wind tunnel. I was in the wind tunnel too, frantically grabbing at each slip of paper.
I was supposed to be a writer. But I was a writer who didn’t write. Instead I lay in bed, paralysed with ennui and despair.
I kidded myself that this mental shutdown was a result of lockdown. It was November 2020 and a second wave of Covid-19 was coming. The existential angst that accompanies life – like the background hum of a refrigerator – had been dialled up a notch and was now an ear-splitting roar. Everyone was struggling to concentrate; we were all in the same boat. I would probably be fine once things settled down again.
However, in my case this had been building up for years. Blaming it on Covid was a coping mechanism, one final dogged rationalisation. It was time to see someone about it, whatever “it” was.
I had hit a similar wall during my schooldays. I knew I was different. My brain was frenetic. Sometimes frenetic and at other times like a sieve.
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It’s striking how often the same comments appear in my school reports, year after year. “Prone to interrupting”; “poor presentation”; “great difficulty concentrating”; “easily distracted”. These evolved into disciplinary problems as the years trickled by. I went from distracted child to problem child. I thought I was dyslexic for a while. I couldn’t spell and my handwriting was illegible. Other kids would write sentences, whereas I’d put squiggly lines on paper. I was that familiar classroom underachiever: disorganised, often surly, always lost in a world of my own.
But then, so apparently were my teachers. My school reports should have given away that something was wrong. While the teacher’s hand glided across the blackboard at the front of the class I was sat at the back. Some people experience mental fog. Excessive mental energy was my problem. A constant, bustling, uproarious rollicking of neural activity.
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Symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children are frequently mistaken for bad behaviour. Sometimes the frustration that accompanies ADHD gives rise to children and adolescents “acting up”. Children with ADHD face a higher risk of engaging in criminality when they get older.
I was 16 when I started smoking cannabis. It slowed everything down in my head. For most people that’s one of its drawbacks, but it made me feel normal. It was as if treacle were being poured over my brain; my thoughts became stickier. According to the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions in the US, adults with ADHD use cannabis two to three times more than adults without ADHD.
I took my GCSEs that summer, and I smoked with friends almost every day. One of those friends was sectioned a few years later for psychosis. Another went to prison. I had run-ins with the police, spending a night in the cells. I got suspended from school a few times. The deputy head used to tell me I looked “zonked out” when he walked past me. I fell asleep in the middle of my GCSE history exam and dreamt I was lying in a field filled with sunflowers, the rays of the summer sun warming the skin on my face. I woke up to see the headmaster’s face, which was a lot more moon-like, staring down at me. “James!” he bellowed. A sea of heads turned and stared. In a mere syllable the message was conveyed. “You are letting down the school.”
It was from talking to the novelist Tim Lott, who had ADHD diagnosed in 2016, when he was 61, that I began to reflect on my employment history. At 29 he was made the editor of the London magazine City Limits because he was “so bloody good in the interview, against very stiff competition”. However, two weeks later he had to resign because he couldn’t cope.
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This was a repeating pattern.
“I was a TV producer for a while, and I was promoted very quickly up the ladder because my ideas were so vibrant. But I couldn’t do the organisation, and so I got sacked. That was the last job I had, 30 years ago.”
I worked in a series of low-paid jobs when I left compulsory education. At a petrol station. A yoghurt factory. A toilet paper factory. As a bus driver (although, mercifully for the pensioners of Weston-Super-Mare, I quit before my first day).
It recently dawned on me that I’ve never held down a job for more than two and a half years. Tim says that, like me, he “can’t really exist in a structured environment”.
Restlessness and poor attention to detail – classic symptoms of ADHD – don’t help much either. Eventually I managed to get to university. I’d retaken exams, then done my A-levels. It was in Nottingham, at university, that the penny began to drop. Maybe I wasn’t just lazy and mischievous at school; perhaps it was something deeper. I was doing a degree in politics and international relations. I skipped lectures and wrote the essays in my halls, the night before they were due in. While some classmates struggled with the work, I found most of it easy. I was passionate about the subjects I was taking. And I could approach the coursework in my own eccentric way.
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Extracting myself from the hole I’d fallen into at school turned out to have a paradoxical effect: it made it harder to dig myself out of a deeper hole ten years later, during lockdown. At university I thought I was getting away with it (whatever it was that I had). Ha! I may have been wildly disorganised, but did half-arsed academic achievement not make a person seem cool and enigmatic? A housemate at university said I was brilliant but lazy. My stepfather had just said I was lazy. This seemed like an upgrade. And besides, wasn’t that what they said about Peter Parker in Spider-Man? I could live with that.
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What no one saw was the sheer Sisyphean willpower it took to strap the figurative harnesses on a brain that was forever racing in a thousand directions at once. Sitting down to write an essay was an act of endurance, the cognitive equivalent of an expedition to the South Pole.
As the years passed, the herculean feats of concentration it took to produce even a modest amount of work increased. For a book I was writing I was working undercover at a call centre in 2016 when I had another indication of what might be wrong. I found myself falling behind during our induction and having to copy notes from the teenager next to me. The material wasn’t difficult – cold-calling scripts aren’t – yet I’d notice my brain teleporting elsewhere. It was like being back at school. Only now the dysfunction felt incongruent to who I was. I had a few achievements under my belt by this point – why couldn’t I concentrate on these stupid scripts?
When I got back to London I decided to see a doctor. I did some ill-advised googling prior to my appointment. An anxious hour passed. Did I have a brain tumour? Was I going mad with syphilis, like Nietzsche? Yet I was starting to gain some clarity. Everything pointed to ADHD. I dialled the surgery.
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The ten-minute walk to the doctor’s on the day of my appointment was exhilarating. The world felt brighter, a new start.
When I arrived I sat fidgeting in the waiting room. My name flashed up on the screen. I knocked on the doctor’s door and steadied myself. I felt as if I were auditioning for The X Factor. I ran through my personal story in minutes, from my earliest school days through to my irritability, forgetfulness and the impulsiveness that so often marred my adult relationships. The speed at which I reeled off this abridged version of my life story ought perhaps to have been a sign that I had ADHD (“Thoughts are put together quickly and linearly in conversation” – the ADD Resource Centre). I was definitely a severe case, wasn’t I? The doctor will see that, surely.
I finished, breathlessly. The doctor blinked a few times. He looked at me blankly. I returned his gaze, expectantly. He got up out of his chair and left the consultation room.
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Maybe he’d gone to get a second opinion.
He re-entered the room, sat down and handed me a leaflet. He tried to look sympathetic, but it was obvious he didn’t have a clue. He wrote down the number of a charity, which he said I should call. Really good at that sort of thing, he told me. I thanked him. Then I walked home, following the route I’d taken 30 minutes earlier. The day didn’t feel as bright. When I arrived home I’d forgotten the name of the charity. I tried to forget about ADHD for the next three years.
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ADHD didn’t return the favour, of course. I’d snap at members of my family and start pointless beefs on social media. Distractedness became the bane of romantic relationships. “Yes, I am listening to you,” I would say, as the probably quite important words coming from the direction of my girlfriend floated past me like a cloud. They were competing with a thousand racing thoughts. I’d use the line “It’s not you, it’s me”, and I’d actually mean it.
The last person I was in a serious relationship with told me I made it obvious when I didn’t like someone. I didn’t pretend to hide it, she said. It wasn’t that – I really did like her friends. It was just that when a conversation took a ponderous turn my brain would take that as its cue to leave. My physical form would still be there, rooted to the spot, but my mind was off elsewhere.
Josh Feldberg, 39, a digital strategist from London, is a good friend of mine who has ADHD. We were talking recently about relationships – he has stories like mine. “People will make you a nice dinner, and you plan to go, and then you’ve just forgotten all about it. I honestly do care, but when that happens people think you don’t give a shit.”
About 1.5 million adults in the UK are believed to have ADHD. It runs in families. Josh’s mum has ADHD. Tim Lott had an uncle who had it. I’ve never met my dad; perhaps he had it too. He certainly had commitment issues. ADHD tends to be present in childhood. ADHD brains can sometimes be identified in MRI scans, with parts of the brain found to be smaller in people with ADHD while other areas are larger. Some studies have suggested that people with ADHD may have neurotransmitters that misfire. The result is often a shortage of dopamine in the brain, which sends them on a restless search for it elsewhere.
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Hypersexuality is sometimes associated with ADHD. This can cause problem pornography use in some men. Inattentiveness can lead to other “issues” in the bedroom. The sex therapist Stephen Snyder has written that some people with ADHD “use sex to self-medicate anxiety and need to have it all the time. Some get so distracted by other things that they forget about sex entirely.”
I spent the summer of 2019 in Las Vegas. I was in the city for work, but Vegas is like a lucid dream for someone with ADHD. It’s a world of sensory stimulation that pummels your brain as soon as you step out under the luminescent lights of the Strip. I don’t take drugs and I barely drink, but research suggests that ADHD can lead to compulsive sexual behaviour, which is an interesting neurotransmitter malfunction to have in the most promiscuous city in the world.
“In my thirties and certainly in my twenties I was very consumed by the need for stimulation,” Tim tells me over the phone. “If I’d have been more attractive, I’d have probably been a sex addict.”
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Part of my reluctance to confront my ADHD was driven by the fact that I’d written an 80,000-word book. And it’d turned out all right – it got good reviews and caused a modest splash. It was the first thing my friend Josh remarked upon when I told him about my ADHD diagnosis. “But mate, how the f*** did you write a book?” he asked incredulously.
This is where the so-called ADHD superpowers come in. There’s no ripping open of shirts to reveal a giant letter “A” – “ADHD MAN, the most abstracted superhero of them all”. But, like being Spider-Man, ADHD does come with a few added extras.
Creativity is one of these superpowers. Put me in a room with ten people and there is a good chance I will come up with the most interesting, off-the-wall ideas (others may also say “most troubling”). At school I used to write stories in the back of my exercise books; my imagination became a sanctuary from the other parts of my brain that were forever trying to sabotage everything. Ask me to put my ideas into some sort of structure, however, and I will sink like a lead weight in water.
Tim tells me he is brilliant at coming up with ideas, but that like me he often struggles to follow them through.
These days he intermittently takes a low dose of medication and is able to sit very still and “enjoy the moment”, which he calls “a great liberation”. That said, the way he’s working on his latest novel sounds familiar.
“Even now as a writer, I’m just so unstructured about it. One day I’ll do 5,000 words, and then I won’t do anything for three weeks. I know I am going to get there in the end. But it’s not the way most people work.”
“Hyperfocus” is another ADHD superpower. I can focus intensely on a task, for hours, to the exclusion of everything else. I can lose several kilograms in a week because I forget to eat. But this is rare. I must be extremely interested in the topic at hand. With ADHD it’s often impossible to concentrate on something about which you aren’t passionate. That was how I wrote my books and essays: I homed in on topics that fascinated me, and I shut out the world.
These fluctuations – between flashes of brilliance and a disorganised, frenetic stupidity – were one of the most confusing aspects of ADHD. I might deliver a glittering performance in a job interview, or give a talk in which the words flow through me like an electrical current, or be free and charismatic in a social environment, as if someone were whispering lines from Cyrano de Bergerac into an earpiece. Then I’d get up the next morning and I wouldn’t be able to tie my shoelaces. Or I’d forget the name of a close friend.
I’ve always struggled with names. I’d have to write things down as soon as I thought of them or I’d forget. The only other person I knew who did that was my grandmother, who was in her nineties. Out at a bar I’d forget the name of the woman I’d been talking to for several hours. I remember once testing out a strategy I’d read about that involved imagining an object associated with the other person’s name floating in the air above their head.
Her: “What are you thinking about? You seem distracted.”
Me: “Um, an elephant.”
Her: “OK.” *woman leaves*
Sometimes I come across as rude. Perhaps I am. Although if we’ve ever met in person, I wasn’t being rude to you. That time it really was my ADHD.
I also had a problem with binge eating. During a routine blood test before my ADHD diagnosis my doctor asked me why my liver enzymes might be elevated. I’d inhaled several giant bags of crisps every evening the week before, together with tremendous amounts of chocolate. I wasn’t going to tell him that, though, so I just shrugged instead. “Interesting,” I said solemnly.
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Until my formal diagnosis, I still had my doubts that I had ADHD, if I’m being honest. I noticed books on Amazon with titles such as There’s No Such Thing as ADHD. Films like The Social Dilemma showed how algorithms were designed to nurture an addiction to digital platforms by giving users dopamine hits in a similar way to drugs. Maybe I was just struggling to shut out digital distractions?
There were some “ADHD-typical” behaviours that I didn’t possess. I had few problems locating my car keys. I wasn’t clumsy, nor particularly good at multitasking, which made me anxious. Nor had I been physically hyperactive as a child.
I wasn’t immune from the residual cynicism about ADHD that permeates popular culture. Some see it as a status badge of victimhood, a fashionable affliction in an overdiagnosed, overmedicated culture: a get out of jail free card for idleness and ineptitude. Cantankerous columnists blame ADHD on video games. These people were in my head, as were the stories about American kids “souped up” on “study drugs”.
Armchair experts often superimpose the American experience on to Britain, even though it’s much harder to get a diagnosis here. We arguably have a crisis of underdiagnosis: 5 per cent of children are thought to have ADHD, yet only 3 per cent are diagnosed; 1 per cent receive medication. Millions of kids are probably like I was.
“What you want is to get a bit of fresh air,” my 91-year-old grandmother, whom I’d been locked down with for most of 2020, said on the morning of my ADHD consultation with a psychiatrist. In her mind fresh air has magical virtues attached to it, a cure for everything.
The established ways weren’t going to solve my problems, however. I was going to follow through this time, to finish what I’d started; to go against my ADHD instincts and make the call for my appointment.
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I had a Zoom consultation at 12.30pm with Dr Rahman of the ADHD Centre. A week earlier I’d filled out one of the centre’s online forms. I went private because waiting times on the NHS were reportedly five years in some parts of the country. And besides, the health service was overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients.
It was 12.33pm. I dialled into the call.
We ran through some of the behaviours that are associated with ADHD. Prone to lateness? Check. Leave tasks incomplete? Check. Impulsive? Check. Poor concentration? Check. Prone to making careless mistakes? Check. Struggle to wait my turn to spea…
“Yes!”
The assessment went into much more depth, of course. There are three main criteria for ADHD. There must be deficits in attention and hyperactivity. These must be significant impairments, and they must have been present since childhood. There’s also an appraisal of the person’s collateral history, which involves things such as school reports, as well as testimonies from relatives or friends who’ve known them during childhood.
Since my consultation with Rahman I’ve been prescribed medication. I take 50mg Vyvanse, a stimulant medication, each day in the morning. It helps me to lock in on tasks: writing this article, for example. I’m productive again – extremely so, in fact. I no longer have ten books lying around, each one bookmarked after the first few chapters. I don’t need as much sleep either.
Medication is not a panacea; there are lifestyle adjustments I’ve had to make. I’ve had to give up caffeine in combination with the medication or my heart beats intrusively and I struggle to sleep at night. Diet plays an important role in managing my ADHD. If I eat too much sugar my concentration suffers the next day. I set lots of timers. I meditate. My internet browser has more locks on it than the Pont des Arts.
When I tell friends I have ADHD, they sometimes diagnose themselves with it on the spot. They will often pathologise their use of social media. “Oh, I think I’m a little bit ADHD,” they will say, before talking me through their scrolling habits and screen time. I feel like telling them that they’re trivialising my condition. I can still be an arsehole like that. But since I started taking medication I’ve become more attentive to other’s feelings. Most of the time I just stand there and nod.
I’ve had pangs of resentment since the diagnosis, especially when I cast my mind back to wasted years and unfulfilled potential. Why didn’t my teachers notice something? Reading my school reports, it seems obvious I had ADHD. Different times, I guess.
Rahman gives me a more philosophical way of looking at my life prior to diagnosis, aged 37. “I have met plenty of people like you, who had the ‘dead-end jobs’, as you call them. You didn’t stick with them; you didn’t like them. You went back [to education] and you found [journalism]. But if you had [always] had full treatment of your symptoms, would you have gone on to find something that absolutely grabbed you?”
In other words, an extremely low threshold for boredom can have its rewards. Chronic restlessness propelled me into finding work that I actually enjoy, as the doctor puts it.
“I’ve met many clients who have not done well in employment roles, but thrived when they’ve flipped it to self-employed.”
Rahman did go on to say that cases like mine were “far outweighed by the number of people that don’t do well, who don’t find something that grabs them”. Often because they aren’t being treated for their ADHD. They’re lost, like I was; they just don’t know it. They’ve never been given an accurate map to navigate the world.
“When I first started, there was a cohort of people who have a condition that’s treatable. But because it’s not treated, they’re going down the criminal justice route rather than the health route. That was the main reason for me wanting to work with ADHD,” Rahman tells me.
I feel lucky. I’ve come to terms with my ADHD diagnosis. I’m starting to see it as a gift, even if I’m still learning how to harness those mysterious superpowers.
I only wish I could go back in time, to have a word with the ten-year-old kid at the back of the class. I’d tell him not to worry about the stuff going on in his head. To try to make the most of the powers he’s been endowed with. You’re basically Spider-Man, I’d tell him. And with great power comes great responsibility.
Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Skelley. James Bloodworth wears blazer, £279, trousers, £119, tedbaker.com; T-shirt, £70, sunspel.com; trainers, £175, russellandbromley.co.uk. Second image Cashmere rollneck, £415, beggxco.com; trousers, £119, tedbaker.com; trainers, £185, russellandbromley.co.uk
