I’m 31. I got “officially” diagnosed with ADHD not that long ago. And my first reaction was not frustration or denial or any of the things you might expect.
It was more like:
Oh. Wow. Okay. That actually makes so much sense.
I’ve always suspected something was different about my brain.
Cue the rabbit hole of research because that’s exactly what an ADHD person does when they get new information that excites them. I read everything. I started connecting dots going all the way back to elementary school. Patterns I hadn’t recognized as patterns suddenly had a name. Things I’d spent years being vaguely frustrated with myself about started making a lot more sense.
It didn’t change who I am. It just explained her a little better.
The stuff that’s hard, real talk
I’m not going to pretend it’s all a superpower and leave it there because that’s not the full picture and I don’t really do partial pictures.
Avoidant in tough conversations and situations… legit I’ll just quietly retreat back into my shell if any perceived danger is in my immediate environment. Working on it, actively, but it’s a thing. My instinct when something feels uncomfortable is to let it sit way longer than I should before addressing it. If I don’t look at it…it’ll go away, right? Getting better at just letting things happen and moving through them instead of around them.
Interrupting people. Oh my god, do I need to learn to just zip it sometimes. I know where you’re going. I can see the end of your sentence from a mile away and everything in me wants to just get there already. I’m working on it. If we ever talk in person and I cut you off mid thought, just know I’m not being rude, my brain is just very enthusiastically ahead of itself.
Tedious repetitive work. It’s Painful. Actually painful. Grit my teeth, clench my jaw, mentally want to explode kind of painful. This is why cleaning 200 candle vessels after a wedding requires an audiobook and a minor dissociative episode to get through. My brain does not do well with tasks that don’t have a creative problem to solve somewhere in them.
And then there’s the hyper fixation. When I’m in it, I am IN it. I have to finish this thing before I lose the window. Before the momentum shifts. Before my brain decides it’s ready to move on to something else. Which is why when a design is clicking I will absolutely stay in the studio way longer than I planned and not notice until I look up and it’s been four hours.
That’s why I’m here writing all my blogs for the next month in one setting because I’m on a friggin role, and once I lose steam, it’s game over.
But here’s where it gets interesting
The same brain that makes tedious tasks feel like actual torture is the brain that lets me walk into a space and immediately start seeing what it could be.
I see solutions and multiple different outcomes at the same time. Like simultaneously. I can take an idea and mentally travel down every road it might lead and arrive at a conclusion before most people have finished processing the original concept. It’s not that I’m smarter, because I’m absolutely not. It’s that my brain is running a lot of tabs at once and some of them are very useful. Some of those tabs are just filing through past experiences and applying to future experiences and correlating the patterns, outcomes, etc. Our brains all do this, mine just goes haywire sometimes.
I read rooms. I read micro expressions. I pick up on things that people don’t realize they’re putting down, the slight hesitation before someone says they love something, the way a person’s energy shifts when a design direction resonates versus when they’re being polite about it. I catch those things and I adjust in real time without making it weird.
I see patterns in colors and shapes and flow that genuinely surprise people sometimes. Like wait, how did you notice that. Honestly I don’t always know how I noticed it. I just did. My brain was already there.
And I can take colors that have no business being in the same arrangement and somehow make them work together. That’s not training. That’s not something I learned from a textbook. That’s just the way my brain processes visual information and finds connections that aren’t obvious until they suddenly are.
What this actually looks like in the work
When I’m designing, especially when I’m in that hyper fixation zone, something shifts. The outside world gets quiet. Everything narrows down to the thing in front of me. The stems, the colors, the negative space, the way one flower is talking to the one next to it.
I get to zone into the work and see where things belong. Not where they’re supposed to go according to a formula. Where that specific stem actually belongs in that specific arrangement for that specific person. That’s a feeling I can’t fully explain and I’ve stopped trying to. It just happens when the conditions are right and I’ve learned to trust it completely.
I also think there might be a little something else going on up there beyond the ADHD. Maybe a touch of something on the spectrum. Haven’t gotten tested but I think ADHD itself lives in that neighborhood anyway. And honestly aren’t we all a little on the spectrum in our own way? The lines feel a lot blurrier the more I learn about how different brains actually work.
What I do know is my brain is not neurotypical and my work is not typical either. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Why I’m even talking about this
Because I spent a long time not understanding why I couldn’t just pick a career and stick with it. Why I’d get so deep into something and then feel completely done with it. Why certain things that seemed easy for other people felt like actual torture for me and certain things that seemed hard for other people came completely naturally.
The diagnosis didn’t fix any of that. But it gave me a framework for understanding myself that made me a lot more patient with the parts that are still a work in progress. And a lot more appreciative of the parts that are genuinely pretty useful.
Building Fleur de Vie the way I built it, home studio, chosen weekends, creative freedom, no boss, no redundant corporate structure, was not an accident. My brain was always going to end up somewhere it could actually breathe. It just took a minute to get here.
And now that I’m here I’m not going anywhere.
If you want to work with someone whose brain never stops looking for the most interesting version of something, let’s talk. I’d love to hear about your event.
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