Autism, ADHD and me

I realised some years ago that I probably have ADHD. The waters had long been muddied by trauma-related dissociation, but even as the years passed and the fallout from my marriage started to fade, my distractibility persisted, familiar from earliest childhood and embedded in a mind with no idea how to stay in the moment and be still.  

Eventually I got my act together and earlier this year, I went to see one of our local GPs. At the end of our ten-minute appointment, she looked me in the eye and said 'Well, I'm pretty sure you do have ADHD, but I also think you have autism'. 

I was dumbfounded. Two of my four children had been diagnosed with autism at the ages of four and three in the early 1990s, and I thought I knew all about the condition and the diagnostic process. 

'But I don't tick any of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments,' I protested.

She laughed. 'That's very old school!' she said. 'We diagnose it differently these days, and the hyperfocus and sensory overload you just described definitely indicate autism. I'd refer you for assessments for both if I could work out how to do it.'

Intellectually it made sense. I was aware of what's informally known as AuDHD, of course - it's hard to be on social media, in my sort of bubble, and miss it. And I had to agree that a lot of the tricky contradictions a combination of autism and ADHD might throw up (and hurl around your head like roof tiles in a high wind) felt all too familiar.

But emotionally it was another matter altogether. My little family had been considered an anomaly back in the day, with not one, but two small, non-verbal children a considerable way along the autistic spectrum at a time when autism wasn't thought to be hereditary.  As a result, we'd been invited to participate in several medical studies over the years, and I always said yes, thinking the research might help other families in my position. 

But in all that time, not one of the many medical personnel we encountered ever suggested that I too might be autistic. The only finding that was ever remarked upon was my score in the word recognition section of one of the tests we underwent: the highest they'd recorded to date. (I did rather less well on the spatial reasoning test.)

In the event, my GP referred me for just an ADHD assessment, as that seemed to me to be the condition most relevant to my daily experience, but sure enough, when my assessment came around months later, my eventual diagnosis was combined ADHD (hyperactive and attention deficit) with autistic traits.  

Again, there's lots of processing to be done, and it's going to take a long time. In the immediate aftermath, I feel I need to reframe my whole life, to pick through everything that happened to me, and perhaps view myself and the decisions I made a little less harshly than I have up until now. In that respect, this diagnosis will, I think, turn out to be a relief. 

But at the same time, I grieve that it's taken me 64 years to get to the point where I might start to understand myself, and allow myself the same compassion I extend to others. And I grieve for earlier me: for the avid six-year-old reader, who, once her books had fewer pictures and longer blocks of text, found herself reading the same page over and over without taking any of the content in, and convinced herself she'd somehow forgotten how to read, but was too ashamed to tell anyone; for the teen who loved her friends but found their company and the shifting of group dynamics draining (and still does); for the exhausted young mother with no emotional support and no ability to self-care, who gave up any chance of a career to look after her children on a promise from her husband he had no intention of keeping; for the woman entering middle age, who felt she had no choice but to keep her head down and put up with it all and who completely lost what sense of self she had in the process.  I've always known those years were hard, but I never realised quite how hard until now. 

At the same time, I can celebrate the leaps that allow me to write poems that seem to come from nowhere, and an ability to hyperfocus that makes even essay-writing exhilarating and infuses the most mundane of dog walks with an intensity that's addictive. 

I'm grateful to those who have stuck by me regardless - my lovely, long-suffering partner, three of my children, successive dogs who have loved me unconditionally, my longtime friends and wider family, my friends in poetry, and my publishers, who've enabled me to realise the one dream I held onto through all those years not once but seven times. I love them all, with every bit of my distractible, avoidant, oh-look-squirrels heart.

A poem for Neurodiversity Pride Day 2025

This is a poem from my 2014 collection, ‘Map Reading for Beginners’. I wrote it in 2010 about a trip to Oxford in January of that year, for the purpose of having a MEG scan. This, it was hoped, would reveal how my brain was wired and whether there were genetic implications with regard to my children’s autism.

Years ago, neurodiversity had yet to be recognised as a thing, autism wasn’t considered a hereditary condition, and my family had long been deemed something of an anomaly for containing not one but two autistic children. As a result, we got roped into several scientific studies over the years. The one with the MEG scan came comparatively late in the day and was the last one we participated in. It was researching the molecular genetics of autism, and involved hours of videotaped interviews and tests over quite a few years. (I remember I was told I’d achieved the highest score they’d ever recorded on word recognition, but was really rather rubbish when it came to spatial awareness.)

On the day, after being stripped of metal, wired up by the wrists, forehead, eyelids, cheekbones, and that tender spot behind the ears, and clamped into a sort of all-body salon hairdryer, it turned out the scanner wasn’t working properly, and I drove back home to Bristol with whatever mystery my brain possessed unfathomed.

This poem has added poignancy for me now, as fifteen years later I’m waiting for an ADHD assessment. I see now that a diagnosis back then could have been really helpful, not just for me but also for my two other children, who, like me, didn’t tick any of the boxes when it came to the Triad of Impairments – which was how autism was diagnosed back in December 1993, when my autists were two and four years old respectively – but who could well be interestingly wired themselves and would have benefitted significantly from support and understanding, had their (possible) neurodiversity been recognised.

I feel frustrated by this, but at the same time, I have to acknowledge that's where medical science was thirty years ago, and maybe our participation in all those studies helped to bring society's understanding about neurodiversity to the point it's at today. I'm sad too, though, because if these divergencies had been picked up, the dynamics between me and my children might have played out differently, and we might all still be in each other's lives.