My doctor wore the expression of someone with a problem to solve. He was looking at me. I froze. Prior to seeing his furrowed brow, I had no more than mild curiosity about the outcome of the questionnaires I’d completed, designed to determine whether or not I had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. I was 60 years old, held multiple graduate degrees, and had a successful career working with people with special needs no less. Kids get diagnosed with ADHD, usually after driving parents and teachers completely bonkers for years. I only agreed to be tested to make my doctor drop the subject. “Your tests are very clear, but let me ask you some questions,� he said. Did I get in trouble for talking in class as a kid? Did I have frequent angry outbursts in elementary school? Did I struggle with promiscuity or addiction as a teen? Do I start but not finish things? Do I have a history of interrupting people? Do I get anxious in social groups? “Does anyone answer ‘No’ to these?� I asked. I left the office that day with a prescription for Adderall, which I didn’t take right away. I still didn’t believe I had ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder people are born with. How could I go sixty years without the diagnosis? I spent hours considering the questions my doctor had asked. As I did, memories surfaced. “You have such a big mouth!� Mrs. Phillips, my fifth-grade teacher, said loud enough for the whole class to hear. (It was a different time back then. Teachers didn’t have to even pretend to be nice.) “We do not slap our friends!� Mrs. Garcia yelled that summer after my friend, Chrissie, ran home with my handprint on her cheek. “Do you know why you’ve been sent to see me,� the principal asked, when I got summoned in sixth grade. (I had a pretty good idea, but shook my head “no� because I wasn’t stupid.) “Ray said you hit him in the head with your lunch box. Is that true?� It was. As stories vied for my attention, I tried to convince myself that these were simply the behaviors of a strong-willed kid. After all, I haven’t slapped anyone in a long time. Then memories from my many marriages (another sign of ADHD, I would later learn) began streaming across my mental screen like a series of B-movies. Shattering a phone against the wall, breaking a stack of vinyl records in the middle of the street, jumping out of a moving car during an argument—yes, I did all of these things and so much more. I took my first Adderall at eight o’clock in the morning, two days after the doctor’s visit. And the world slowed down. Or at least my brain did. Adderall is an amphetamine, an upper, speed, but it calmed the chaos in my head. Truth be told, I’ve always loved speed, every kind of it. Who knew I actually needed it? THE NEED FOR DOPAMINE In the seventies, I took black beauties and dexies, both amphetamines. In the eighties, I did my share of cocaine but stopped using it because it put me to sleep. (That should have been a hint, but no one knew about adult ADHD back then). I craved other kinds of speed, too. I gunned my car like a drag racer (at least as much as a Ford Pinto would allow) and dated boys who drove motorcycles so fast they had to lay them almost flat to take turns. I talk fast and walk fast, and my plate is always empty before everyone else’s. Given all this, it’s probably no surprise that since high school people have called me things like “wild� and “crazy.� Eventually, I embraced the labels, thinking of myself as crazy in that free-spirited way. Now I have a new label—neurodivergent. There are times when I’d prefer to go back to crazy. The truth is my brain is different from typical brains. And since my diagnosis, I’ve learned that so many of my pre-prescription behaviors were signs that I needed a dopamine hit. People with ADHD don’t have enough of this feel-good hormone, and speed is one of the many options for boosting it. In addition to being impulsive, moving fast, and taking amphetamines as a younger person, the need to score dopamine led to many other troubling and dangerous behaviors. For example, I’ve struggled with disordered eating for most of my life. In general, I lack an off-switch. I’ll eat until food stacks up into my esophagus forcing me to vomit. And woe to the person who tries to get between me and sugar. I’ve made full meals of chocolate cake, Nutter Butters, and ice cream. I’ve yo-yo balanced my weight over the years with the help of diet pills and credit cards. Once I see the scale tipping my upper limit, I put myself on a starvation diet and head for the mall. Both eating and shopping provide the fix of dopamine I’m craving. And both have done serious damage to my life. I declared bankruptcy when I was in my twenties and have paid so much interest to credit card companies that I could have bought a house or two if I’d saved it. A LIFETIME OF NEGATIVE MESSAGES Scoring dopamine in self-destructive ways isn’t the only downside of untreated ADHD. Some researchers have estimated that by the ripe old age of ten, children with ADHD receive 20,000 more negative messages than their neurotypical peers. This might seem impossible, but think back to elementary school. Every person remembers that kid, usually a boy but certainly not always, who couldn’t sit still, wouldn’t shut up, never completed work, blurted out while others were speaking, got into fights. Remember him? Now picture the teacher’s face. (I see you Mrs. Phillips.) Unfortunately, the displeased expressions, reprimands and punishments don’t come only from teachers. The face of disapproval followed that kid home and to church, to the grocery store, out with his friends, to the dentist’s office, the library, the hair salon, and everywhere else. I know. I was that kid. All kinds of things happen when that much negativity stalks you. One of the most common responses to a lifetime of being wrong is to develop a deep fear of other people (now known as social phobia). For me, years of eye rolls and worse created such a deep fear of the inevitable social alienation that I drank. And drank. A lot. It didn’t stop the negative judgments from others, but it gave me the courage to show up. Thinking back to the time of self-medicating conjures some of my most painful memories. I drank way too much to remember full plot lines, but I have a head full of nightmare fragments. The work party where I fell over the back of a sofa, red stilettos sticking straight up in the air. The dance party where I drank so much in the parking lot that when my first partner led me into a spin, I puked on his chest. The images go on and on. Every drunken experience confirmed to me that I was a loser, and each time I humiliated myself or hurt someone else, I would swear off alcohol. But I couldn’t go into groups without it. A couple of shots of vodka provided the fuck-it buzz I needed to face those critical expressions. I quit drinking long before the Adderall prescription. It wasn’t difficult. I had never been addicted to the booze, I just needed it to numb the fear. I replaced vodka with loneliness, opting out of group events almost completely. I even made excuses to get out of most one-on-one visits with friends. I was tired of trying to fit in. And I was sad.