I Thought I had a PhD in Self Awareness

I feel as though I am relatively hard on myself.

My entire life I have always been angry with my productivity, my progress, my successes. I feel as though I have always given in to the stressors that have inevitably caused me to fail. I would blame myself in various ways;

You’re not focused enough. You haven’t dedicated enough time to goals. You always choose to help others and avoid your own problems. You are not dedicated enough. Try harder. Be better. Don’t act this way. If you quit worrying so much. This is your anxiety. This is your fault. Be better. 

I tried focusing harder, I stopped seeing friends and focused on studying, I let go of hard relationships, I put myself first, I tried. I tried bloody fucking hard. I didn’t drink, I ran every day, I took medication for my anxiety. I did what felt like everything for years. 
But everything was never good enough.

From a very young age, I had been diagnosed with severe anxiety and clinical depression. I had tried many different things to work through it. In 2010 when I decided to stop taking medication, my world turned right-side up. I hadn’t realized that this medication had numbed me to the extent that it had. For the first time in what felt like my entire childhood, I felt happiness. So much of it that I had become overwhelmed with enthusiasm.

Fast forward to today; life is different. The place that I thought I would be is in fact, the opposite of where I am today. I have always been resilient, I have always survived, but this time was different. I had a block, one that I couldn’t pull myself out of. I decided to throw my ego into the trash and actually speak with a health care professional. This time, my world turned upside-down.

Have you ever understood yourself so well that you thought you had a PhD in self-awareness? I did. That is until I was diagnosed with ADD after 26 years of being told that everything that’s wrong with me has always been due to my own personal emotions and actions. Let me tell you, I damned-well spiralled into a self-review of every action, project, high school I’d never attended, every move, or job change. ALL OF IT. Chalked up in one 3 hour psych assessment, reliving every past trauma, personal relationship and feeling, thought, mindset shift… This has been the problem the entire time? Riddle me that.

I wish I could explain just how it feels to be told that your emotions were always the problem, to have such a firm understanding that you were the one that did not work hard enough, that needed to be better… Only to learn that your physical brain chemistry is out of place. This entire time I have struggled, all of these years that I had myself convinced that I was the mess (yes I still am, I validate that so shut it), I could have solved this with one simple assessment???

Today I am spiralling. Yes. I will not continue to do this, I can see that there are solutions to this. To be quite honest with you, I am so relieved. I am ecstatic to see the resolution to come from stepping forward and speaking of my struggles openly to somebody that I had only met minutes before. This will get better because I finally have a way to work with my difficulties. For the first time in years, I have answers.

Good lord, what does the world look like after this if I have already taught myself to work as hard as I already have for the last 26 years? Maybe, just maybe,  I’ll actually remember peoples names.