October is ADHD Awareness Month, and the awareness color is orange. So if you see me wearing a lot of orange this month, now you know why.
I don’t usually make things about me. On my podcast, Grandma Has ADHD, I’m the one asking the questions. But this month I want to tell you my own ADHD story, because it explains why I’ve become so passionate about getting this message out, especially to older adults and the families who love them.
“I couldn’t possibly have ADHD”
Long before I was diagnosed, my ex-husband made an offhand comment that I had ADHD. I told him that was impossible. My half-brother had ADHD. I remembered him in the classroom back in the 1980s, the kid who couldn’t sit still, the one the principal had to come and get. That was ADHD. Not me.
Years later, when my oldest child was about 14, they asked to be evaluated. I said the same thing: “You can’t possibly have ADHD. You’ve been reading since you were three.” (I, on the other hand, couldn’t sit still long enough to learn to read until second grade.)
During that evaluation, the psychiatrist walked through a long list of questions. Somewhere in the middle, I looked up and said, “I’m answering more yeses for me. Do I have ADHD?”
Two of us walked out of that office with a diagnosis.
I was 45. I was going through a divorce, raising three young kids, and starting a business. And because I’d graduated college with highest honors, I assumed ADHD was only about school. Clearly I’d figured that part out. So I put the diagnosis on a shelf and did nothing with it for about eight years.
Why so many girls were missed
Here’s something I’ve since learned: ADHD doesn’t look the same in everyone.
My child has the inattentive presentation. That’s the body that can sit still attached to a brain that never stops moving. It’s creative, intuitive, full of great ideas, and often catastrophizing every possible scenario. It frequently comes with social anxiety. This is the presentation a lot of little girls had, and it’s exactly why so many of them were missed.
I have the combined presentation, which includes hyperactivity. But girls tend to turn their struggles inward. Instead of being the “behavior problem,” we were anxious, depressed, having trouble with friends, or masking: white-knuckling our way through life so nobody would see how hard it was.
And ADHD morphs over time. The little boy who couldn’t sit still may grow into the 50-year-old entrepreneur racing from appointment to appointment, starting a new business every few years. You’d never recognize him as “that kid,” but it’s the same wiring.
What I saw in my clients’ homes (and my mom’s)
At Silver Linings Transitions, we help older adults downsize, rightsize, declutter, and move. And over the years, I noticed something. Clients would apologize before I even walked in the door. Some hadn’t let their own families into their homes in years. One of my favorite clients would fly out to visit her daughters rather than have them visit her. Nobody saw her home until a fall forced decisions to be made.
I was being invited into homes that other people weren’t seeing. And a lot of them looked like my mom’s.
My mom’s clutter had been a source of tension between us for years. It grew after her divorce, and then her life got hit with loss after loss. The weekend she closed on her new townhouse, my grandfather passed away. She never fully unpacked. Nine months later, my grandmother passed, and my mom inherited a houseful of belongings she wasn’t ready to make decisions about. Add in a lot of “someday I’ll use this” purchases, and the piles kept growing.
For years, when I gave my downsizing presentation, Do You Own Your Stuff or Does Your Stuff Own You?, I told audiences that my mother had hoarding disorder.
Then I started training with the Institute for Challenging Disorganization, which offers an ADHD specialty. I went all the way down the rabbit hole (very ADHD of me). And one day, listening to a podcast about how common fibromyalgia and migraines are in people with ADHD, the pieces clicked. I picked up the phone.
“Mom, I don’t think you have hoarding disorder. I think you might have ADHD.”
She was about to turn 77. She’d seen a psychiatrist for most of her life for anxiety and depression. She’d seen doctors and therapists. Nobody had caught it. (I’m not a clinician, and I can’t diagnose anyone, but the professionals who have since evaluated her agree.)
That’s when I realized we have whole generations of women, and some men, who were never diagnosed.
When women tend to get diagnosed
Women are most often diagnosed at two points in life. The first is perimenopause and menopause, when dropping estrogen (which supports cognition) makes lifelong struggles suddenly unmanageable. Plenty of women get brain fog in menopause. The difference with ADHD is that you’ve always been this way; menopause just turns up the volume.
The second is when a child gets diagnosed, and a mother starts recognizing herself in the checklist. That was me.
My mom’s generation didn’t have either door open to them. Nobody was talking about ADHD in women, and nobody was diagnosing her kids’ generation either.
“Why does it matter now?”
This is the question I hear most, and it’s the reason my podcast exists: “I’ve lived this many years. Who cares if I have ADHD?”
Here’s why it matters.
It turns judgment into compassion. My mom and I had a strained relationship for most of my life. Understanding ADHD, including her rejection sensitivity and social anxiety, helped me move from judging her to feeling compassion for her. It’s also helped her stop beating herself up. She’s very bright, but she couldn’t focus, and she didn’t finish college. Now she can look back and understand that, with the right support, her life might have looked very different. (You can hear her tell her own story on episode 101. I call her the OG, the original grandma.)
It gives your later years a new lens. As a Certified Senior Advisor, I learned about the idea of gerotranscendence: the late-life stage when we reflect on our choices, make peace with our relationships, and think about the legacy we want to leave. Understanding ADHD can be a powerful part of that reflection. It’s the difference between “What was wrong with me?” and “Oh. This explains so much.”
It changes how you handle clutter and decisions. ADHD brains struggle with decision fatigue, second-guessing, and short-term memory. (I’ve hidden things “somewhere safe” and never found them again.) When families understand that, downsizing stops being a battle of willpower and becomes a process we can design around.
It helps you catch what’s hiding alongside it. ADHD often travels with other conditions, including anxiety, depression, OCD, and autism, and one can mask another. Social anxiety is especially common. Getting the full picture matters for getting the right support.
It opens the door to treatment. Some people say you don’t need a formal diagnosis. But you can’t be prescribed ADHD medication without one. And diagnosis is still hard to get as an adult, because the diagnostic criteria weren’t written with adults, let alone older adults, in mind, and many healthcare providers have little ADHD training.
Ferrari brain, bicycle brakes
On every episode, I ask my guests: if you could push a button and not have ADHD, would you? Out of roughly 90 people I’ve asked, only one said yes.
I wouldn’t push it either. I agree with Dr. Ned Hallowell, my 100th-episode guest, who describes ADHD as having a Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes. We’ve got an incredible engine. We just have to learn to use the brakes: to pause before we say the thing, before we buy the thing, before we take on one more project.
For me, that’s meant learning to do life on easy mode. I’m getting married in a few months, and I had this dream of sending fabric squares to the important people in my life, having them decorate them, and sewing them into our chuppah (the canopy for a Jewish wedding). I still love the idea. But I’ve made peace with letting it go, because it’s not easy mode, and my energy belongs elsewhere.
It’s also meant building scaffolding. The smartwatch I swore I’d never wear now sets my timers. When I start the laundry, I move the hamper somewhere I’ll see it, because out of sight really is out of mind. And after once realizing on the runway that I’d never booked my hotel, I now book everything for a trip at once and put every detail in my calendar.
That’s what ADHD coaching is about. Therapy helps us process what’s happened to us. Coaching helps us work with the brain we have, putting the supports in place that make life easier.
Different, not broken
I’d love for us to stop thinking of ADHD as a disorder and start seeing it as different wiring. Give someone with ADHD a task that interests them, and everything else falls away. The idea that we “can’t focus” isn’t true. We can focus intensely on what interests us. It’s everything else that’s hard.
Older generations were taught to hide anything that didn’t look “normal.” Younger generations are thankfully more open about who they are. I’d love to see that openness reach our parents and grandparents too.
A rabbi once said that music wouldn’t be so beautiful if every instrument were the same. I think that sums up why we need to embrace neurodiversity at every age.
If this sounds familiar
If you’re reading this and seeing yourself, or your mom, or your dad, here are a few places to start:
- Look for a qualified professional. Search for a therapist or clinician who specializes in adult ADHD. Many can evaluate you and refer you to a psychiatrist if needed.
- Find an ADHD coach. ADDCA (the ADD Coach Academy) and CHADD, the largest nonprofit for people with ADHD, are good starting points.
- Keep learning. My book, This Explains So Much, is available on Amazon in print and audio (for those of you who, like me, would rather listen while doing something else).
- Talk to me. I offer a free 15-minute discovery call for ADHD and clutter coaching.
If you do nothing else this month but understand yourself a little better, or look at someone you love with a little more compassion, then I’ve done my job.
Happy ADHD Awareness Month. And remember: it really is never too late to make the rest of your life the best of your life.
— Jami Shapiro, CSMM, CSA, Founder of Silver Linings Transitions, ADHD Coach, and host of the Grandma Has ADHD podcast