Learning to Drive Your Undiagnosed ADHD

You’re given a car, and it’s time to learn to drive. You’re passingly familiar with how cars work, and you’ve got an instructor on speakerphone conference call:

“Ok, let’s get started! Literally. Hold down the left pedal – the brake, and turn the ignition. Keep your foot on the brake.”

You do this, and the car starts.

“Find the transmission control, typically a big stick next to the seat, or something behind the steering wheel. It should be labelled with the letters P R N and D. Keeping your foot on the brake, move the transmission to D, for ‘Drive’.”

There’s a big obvious stick control next to the driver’s seat, but the only letter on it is ‘R’ – the other labels are numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the stick isn’t at any of them – it’s in the middle. There is no stick with PRND on it. You try to get the instructor’s attention but they continue:

“Let’s get moving! Take your foot off the brake pedal and gently put it on the one on the right –the accelerator pedal. When you’re ready to stop, gently press the brake pedal.”

You take your foot off the pedal you were told was the brake – the leftmost of the three pedals – but nothing happens.

“Did you put it Drive like I told you?”

Again you ask for clarification – there’s only R and the numbers – but are told you must be reading it wrong and to keep looking. Everyone else seems to be getting on, why are you holding people back? You move the stick to the 1 and try again. As soon as you take your foot off what you were told was the brake, the entire car shudders violently for a second and the engine dies.

“What are you doing? That’s not supposed to happen. Quit being so disruptive. You must be doing it wrong. Try harder.”

After many tries and a lot of derisive berating from the instructor, you figure out – while the instructor is helping others – that you have to ease off the brake pedal while simultaneously pressing on the accelerator, using both feet. But when you push on the pedal on the left, the car doesn’t stop! You almost crashed into something but took your foot off it in time for the car to shudder violently to a stop, which only earned you more scorn.

You’re told again and again that you’re doing it wrong, you’re not trying hard enough, you’re not listening or paying attention, and you’re accused you of making stuff up when you try to explain there isn’t a PRND stick but a 12345R stick instead.

While others are learning to parallel park, you’ve figured out that the middle pedal is actually the brake, and when the transmission control is at the 1, you need to depress the leftmost pedal to prevent the car from seizing up if you’re not using the accelerator. But you’re topping out at 15 miles an hour while the others are easily getting up to real traffic speeds.

People keep telling you to harder, but it feels like you’re already working a lot harder at this than anyone else. Eventually you figure out that once you get to the top of the speed range with 1, you have to move it to 2, and then to 3, and so on. You’ve learned – with some close calls – that it’s a tricky ordeal to get going from a dead stop when going uphill, and it takes a lot of practice before you’re comfortable with parallel parking.

Years pass. You’re getting along, but you have a reputation for being a bit late, being prone to car trouble. One day it causes a big enough problem that you go to a mechanic, who listens your description of your car problems and says,

“yeah… you’ve got a stick shift, and you’re trying to drive it like an auto. I see it all the time.”

After learning a bit more about how manual transmissions work, you’ve been driving a lot better. And you learn about other things commonly found in cars with manual transmissions: It turns out you don’t have the backup camera most cars have, nor power windows. Some manual transmission cars have these, but not yours – but you have air conditioning, which a lot of manual cars don’t.

You still have the nagging feeling you’re not that good at driving, at learning in general, at listening or paying attention, thanks to how your experience of learning to drive, and it turns out the residue of those experiences have also been causing you a lot of problems. Your mechanic recommends you a therapist.

This is not – as you might have guessed from my title – a story about learning to drive, but rather an anecdote about what it’s like to grow up with undiagnosed ADHD.

I didn’t get my diagnosis until my mid-forties, by which point I already had a lot of systems in place to help me manage the parts of my life where I’ve had challenges. Getting the diagnosis didn’t do much for me with life management; none of the typical medications worked for me better than coffee, and I already knew I had challenges with holding focus, dopamine regulation, and time management and had been figuring out how to deal with those for decades.

Instead, what the diagnosis helped me with was a better understanding of psychological effects of a late diagnosis, and the types of comorbidities common to ADHD; for me this includes Dysthimia, Auditory Processing Disorder, and Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, and learning about each of these and similarly accepting them as “this is just something my body does” instead of making them some judgement about my character, and it helped me figure out strategies for managing them, including an anti-depressant medication which has proven extremely helpful.

The biggest quality of life improvement however was something I didn’t expect – the recontextualization of my past: taking this new understanding of how my brain works and revisiting old memories with a lot of emotional pull to help undo the damage of decades of hearing things like “you’ve got a lot of potential, but you need to try harder”.

My therapist introduced me to Complex post-traumatic stress disorder with: there are a lot of very bad things a person could experience at the top of the list of why someone might have this, and you’ll rightly claim that what you experienced was not that bad; nevertheless, you survived a hostile environment for a sustained period of time, and there’s a shape which that kind of experience leaves on a person. This is what we call that shape.

When you’re told in school, for years, “Sit still, pay attention” and don’t yet have the understanding that, for you, those activities are mutually exclusive; and when you’re then punished and humiliated for your continued failed efforts at doing both simultaneously, at some point you start believing the problem is with you. Even decades later, discovering the source and seeing the patterns that led to the creation of a faulty self-image was a salve worth the effort.

I had suspected the ADHD diagnosis for almost a whole decade before seeking it out, unsure about what it would change, and unaware of how ADHD manifests differently in adults – and fearful that I might turn it into a self-limiting excuse the way I’ve seen some people do. In hindsight, that fear was unfounded – I’m not the sort of person to let things like that dictate who I am or what I’m capable of.

Getting the diagnosis opened the door for me to both heal decades-old wounds and better understand and manage my related conditions. I wish I had done it sooner, rather than waiting for the stress of the early pandemic quarantine era to seek out help out of desperation. The other side of that door has been wonderful and has helped me feel at peace with myself for the first time in my life.

If this resonates with you, and you’ve been on the fence about seeking out a late diagnosis or help for a neurodivergent condition like ADHD, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, or similar, I hope I’ve made the case that it can be worthwhile. It may take some effort to find a qualified professional with a contemporary understanding of how these things manifest in adults – and especially in women – and who understands the how kinds of residual damage I described can manifest, but for me it was more than worth the effort.