It Wasn't Always This Hard: On ADHD, Midlife, and the Strategies That Stop Working

Do you feel like you're just catching your breath after the marathon of middle adulthood? It doesn't seem like that long ago that you were struggling to reach the next rung on the career ladder, starting a family, navigating sleepless nights and preschool decisions. Then a pandemic happened, your world completely changed, and in the blink of an eye six more years passed. You now you’re wondering, where did I go?

Suddenly your kids have lives of their own. You've earned a place in your career that allows for less regimentation and more room to think. There is a margin of space, perhaps for the first time in a decade or two, to think and do for yourself. But where to even start?

Should you figure out what's going on with your hormones? Start taking exercise seriously and add resistance training? Cut back on alcohol and get better sleep? You have always wanted to do this, that, or the other thing; maybe that should be the priority. But your parents aren't getting any younger, and paying for college is a reality, and you also need a new car. And what is the point of work again? Oh, right. Money. But meanwhile you feel kind of empty inside, and when you do have downtime you spend it scrolling, and when you're bummed out, buying something new is a reliable pick-me-up. But your house is cluttered, you should really do something about that.

And on and on it goes.

Then there are all the maintenance issues: kids' appointments, your own appointments, mammograms, colonoscopies, exercise, diet, getting various appliances serviced, doing that renovation project, getting the fence fixed. You thought you had so much time, but now you realize you don't have as much as you thought.

The more rewarding things, like striving for promotions and being the star of your children's lives, are in the rearview mirror. You're left with a list of responsible but less than thrilling tasks that you've been putting off until you have time, and you don't want to do any of them. You're overdue on a lot of them, and that's been waking you up at 3 a.m. Wasn't I supposed to get my first colonoscopy a few years ago now? That is about the least appealing item that ever went on a to-do list. Meanwhile, you've developed some chronic pain that, unlike aches and pains in the past, isn't going away.

And then there are the things you want to do for yourself. Your “project X.” The one that's just for you, that most people don't even know about. What's going on with that? Not much.

So each day bleeds into the next: avoidance, procrastination, self-recrimination for said avoidance and procrastination, and then mild anxiety as you wonder how big a problem all of this is creating for future you. You distract yourself with the immediate. You live in reactive mode: respond to that text, get the kids from point A to point B, do that load of laundry, make that meal, go visit that family member. You're busy, and it's all important stuff. But meanwhile, the maintenance and self-care and soul-stuff, your true callings and passions, slip through your fingers day after day, month after month, year after year. And one day you wake up and ask: who even am I?

It's the worst.

The ADHD Layer

For some of the women reading this, what I just described isn't simply the texture of midlife. There is something else underneath it that has been there their whole lives, making everything harder.

You heard an ad for mental health support on your favorite podcast and finally booked a therapy appointment for the first time in years. And now you have a name for what you've experienced your whole life: ADHD. You were aware that this is a "thing" on the internet right now, and you always thought you were a little ADHD, but you are now discovering that things really were harder for you for most of your life.

You are remembering the all-nighters to write that paper in college that was supposed to take a whole month. The drought and flood cycles at work, where you went from unmotivated to top performer the moment a deadline created pressure. How it has always felt like you had a million things in your head at once. How you're always running late and constantly losing your keys. How painful it is to receive any kind of feedback, no matter how accurate or well-intentioned.

It turns out you were a rockstar at adapting to environments that didn't fit your neurodiversity. But doing so took a tremendous toll, because now you're a puddle and all of those symptoms are still there. And the worst part is that you're not going to lose your job if you "mess up" anymore, because your job isn't the issue. The issue is the important but non-urgent tasks and your passion projects. There is no taskmaster who is going to swoop in and make you do those things. So they aren’t going to get done. You know what you should do, but you don’t do it.

But, wait a minute, you're a star. You graduated college, heck you went further than that. You climbed that career ladder. You raised those kids. You did it all, and you did it well! So why can't you make a doctor's appointment or spend time doing something you love?

The Willpower Trap

I know what you're going to do. You're going to say: if I was successful at those seemingly harder, more important things, then I can be successful at this, too. I'm here to tell you, with genuine compassion: you cannot. Not the way you think. Not with the same tools.

It's not a matter of willpower. Willpower is something you can summon with big emotions; rage, fear, the pressure of consequences. But you are not in your twenties and thirties anymore. You cannot sustain that kind of emotional tumult as your sole motivator, nor should you want to. And if you look back honestly at the things you conquered, there was significant external pressure involved: bosses, deadlines, family members who needed you, literal babies who depended on you for survival.

Your mammogram is not a crying child. You are not going to get passed over for a promotion if you miss it. You might, however, face serious consequences if you keep skipping it, which is precisely why it wakes you up at 3 a.m., alongside the hundred other equally important items on your mental to-do list. But there is no external structure forcing you to act. No playbook for this stage. No one swooping in to create the urgency your brain requires.

Trying harder, I'm sorry to say, won’t work. It might work for the occasional thing, in the occasional moment of pressure or crisis. But it’s not going to make you a fundamentally different person.

What Actually Helps

It doesn’t matter if you have an ADHD diagnosis, suspect you might, or simply recognize patterns; things like chronic difficulty initiating tasks, inconsistent follow-through, decision fatigue, or a relentless mental load that never seems to quiet down. What you need is self-knowledge. Real, honest-to-goodness, non-judgmental self-knowledge. And that is precisely what most of us with ADHD have been systematically denied.

Because here is what happens when you spend your entire life in environments that require compliance: you come to see your natural way of existing as a liability to be tamed, corrected, and hidden. While we all must adopt a professional persona at work and a caring, responsible demeanor with the people who depend on us, those of us with ADHD can completely lose the thread of who we actually are. Or worse, we turn on ourselves.

Put plainly: we tend to have terrible self-esteem. Research suggests that by the age of twelve, children with ADHD have received approximately 20,000 more negative or corrective messages than their neurotypical peers (Source.) It’s no wonder ADHD goes underground by early adulthood.

It’s painful to receive that much criticism for how your brain naturally works. And the cruelest irony is that the ADHD brain is not deficient. It’s brilliant in ways that conventional environments are not designed to recognize or reward; nonlinear thinking, pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, the ability to hyperfocus on things that truly matter. You have been receiving subtle and not so subtle signals your whole life that your brain is a problem, and you have made every effort to make that problem go away.

But you made yourself go away with it.

What you actually need is to find out what is good about you. Not the carefully curated professional version of you, but the real you. I suspect you know some of it already. I also suspect you downplay it, and that there are strengths you don't even see yet.

What you need is to stop working against your brain and start working with it. To understand how it actually functions, what it needs in order to thrive, and what has been getting in the way. And on this journey of self-discovery, you need to add these questions: What do you value most? Not the things you've been socialized to prioritize, but what do actually care about? And then, with that self-knowledge in hand, to begin building the structures and supports that allow you to live in alignment with who you really are rather than who you've been performing.

If you don’t go through this process, things will not fundamentally change. You will sporadically do the things you need and want to do, especially when they become urgent enough. But for the most part you will continue to limp along, filled with confusion and low-grade regret, and the worst part is that you will blame yourself the entire time.

What's Possible

Here’s the good news. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you’re somewhere in the range of your mid-thirties to mid-fifties, which means you are slowly, naturally losing interest in what other people think. You are beginning the shift from the first half of adulthood to the second.

You still have responsibilities, but there is a growing sense of being on the other side of things. You are post-career striving, post-family-starting. And you feel a genuine readiness for what comes next. This is a profound time to look inward. To ask honestly: what is it that stands between me and the life I want to live? And then to experiment, with curiosity rather than judgment, until you find what actually works for you.

It is entirely possible to do this work on your own. But it can be particularly powerful to do it with a partner. That’s what a coach is: a partner. Someone to walk beside you on this journey. Not to tell you what to think or do, but to help you understand your own brain, challenge the stories you've been telling yourself, and experiment with new ways of being and doing until something finally fits.

I feel comfortable offering this because I am you. I’ve been in exactly that place, and I’ve done approximately six years of work on myself to understand who I am and create a life that fits. It doesn't mean things aren't hard for me anymore. But I'm doing a lot better, and I’m passionate about helping other women on this journey.

If any of this resonated, I'd love to hear from you.