“The pink elephant barged into the room and trumpeted so loud she thought the ceiling might collapse. Memories erupted from its trunk. She snatched them up helplessly, holding them up to the light, studying their colors and pixels of pain.”
ANGELA PANAYOTOPOULOS
It was the first day of May. Ten days before my neuropsychological evaluation. (And, incidentally, my 45th birthday.) After two decades of stints in “talk therapy” and numerous other psychological and self-help modalities, I figured I must be going about it all wrong.
Because I was still a mystery to myself. And because I was driving me nuts.
It’s not that those things hadn’t helped. They had, a bit. Usually they’d point me in the direction of the next right thing. Nudge me down a path of useful self-inquiry. Help me rule things out. (When we don’t know exactly what we want or need, it can still be good to identify, “not this.”) Sometimes it was just validation, seeing how far I’d come to better know and care for myself. But still…
Underneath these fits and spurts of growth was always a familiar, nagging knowing. I couldn’t shake the feeling of dancing around the real issue. No matter how close I felt I was to the core of things, countless times, there was something—a thick veil, or cloudy water—between me and the next level of awareness. Some vital understanding of myself that I couldn’t yet—wasn’t ready to yet?—perceive.
It was a “big pink elephant in the room” kind of a thing. A shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic, multi-problematic elephant. Hulking there before me; I sensed it, but hard as I stared there was always a maddening white smudge in the center of my vision obscuring what “it” was. Or darting about in my periphery (more nimbly than an elephant has a right to, if you ask me) only to vanish the moment I caught a glimpse.
There had to be a logical explanation for why I remained stubbornly, persistently perplexed by myself. Perhaps some condition or disorder was at the heart of my issues? Something more clinical and definite. Something less mercurial and subjective than I was used to considering. Something Western medicine could sign off on. Something “real” (?)
This idea felt new, but was likely percolating in my subconscious for some time.
The revelations began with my children.
Out of respect for my kids, I won’t get too nitty gritty. I’ll simply say they struggle with extreme emotional dysregulation and intractable behaviors. Challenges that cause incredible stress and hardship, for them personally and for us as parents. Stuff well outside the bounds of your typical parenting problems. To say that “it’s a lot” doesn’t quite do it justice.
We’ve certainly done the work trying to figure it out. We’ve learned and practiced and reflected and consulted and (tried to) give ourselves and each other grace. About parenting and discipline and emotional intelligence and mindfulness and structure and consistency and patience and tolerance. All the things.
And we’ve seen incremental improvements with some of it, but nothing really seemed to move the needle. The context would change with their ages and developmental stages, and the difficulties would morph in tandem. We just couldn’t seem to identify the root problems. We were mystified. More pink elephants.
Now, by all accounts my kids are kind (usually), respectful (mostly), healthy (physically, anyway), straight-A (without exception), fun and funny (in their own weird ways). To the casual observer—and even to most people who actually know them in any sense—they appear well-adjusted, well-behaved, happy, and otherwise pretty “normal” (whatever the hell that means). And in certain ways, yes, it’s all true. But it’s complex.
While some of the issues sometimes present at school or other public places, the lion’s share of what’s hard seems only to roar within our home and around our immediate family. This may seem like a blessing, and it is. But it’s a double-edged sword, and the sharper side etches a superficial, distorted portrait of our family for the outside world. This can be a very lonely place from which to parent. And live.
Even those closest to us have never witnessed the full scope or intensity of these challenges; only heard about it second-hand, and not often at that. On the rare occasions that we, as parents, feel like rehashing it with others… or choose to devote otherwise light-hearted social time to something that feels so heavy for us… if the opportunities even present to talk about it out of earshot of the kids… or when we feel bullish enough to risk being met with well-intentioned-but-disheartening advice or veiled judgements about our parenting.
When we have talked about it, people mostly seem to think we’re overdramatizing the situation (“Kids can be a lot. Parenting is hard!”). And when people have caught a hint of things firsthand, they mostly seem to think we’re just underestimating and/or poorly implementing good old-fashioned discipline (“They need more consistent punishments or they’ll never learn!”).
I knew in my heart there was more to it, but just couldn’t point to why or what. As a parent, I felt that we were failing, and failing them.1 And whatever it may have looked like from the outside, we were—all of us, parents and children alike—often overwhelmed, frustrated, and exhausted.
But I digress.
Point is: I knew we were missing, or misunderstanding, something. We couldn’t see the whole picture. We needed insight from the outside. And I wasn’t about to crowd-source it. We needed objective, expert perspectives to get real answers and practical help.
To be clear, I’m not just talking about help to “fix” behavior issues, or get my kids to do as they’re told, or prevent tantrums or aggression or whatever other difficult thing. Those things are part of it. (Okay, big parts of it.) But they’re just symptoms. My real goal has always been to help my kids better understand themselves from the inside-out, so that together we can figure out how to manage whatever is causing those symptoms.
Solve for that, and we set the kids up to be self-aware, self-compassionate, and self-reliant adults in the long-run. Solve for that, and we also nix the symptoms, or at least minimize them, in the NOW.
(This is my working theory anyway. Talk to me in ten years and we’ll see how it all panned out.)
One of my firmest convictions as a parent is that my primary, personal job—aside from keeping my children alive long enough to teach them how to keep themselves alive—is to help them cultivate awareness and skills for their internal worlds.
There’s already so much built into our child-rearing infrastructure about developing them for the external things. Between school, play, chores, sports, extracurriculars, college and vocational preparation and the like, we have elaborate plans and even back-up plans for keeping them on-track to become adults who can competently “do things.”
By comparison, relatively little thought, planning, or action goes into how we grow them on the inside. For all of the messy, confusing, intangible stuff we say things like, “They’ve just got to figure it out on their own,” or “That’s life!” or “Some things you have to learn the hard way;” and we trust that somehow it’ll all work out as they grow up.
There’s a lot of truth in those adages. But two things can be true at the same time. So, while it’s true that kids (and people of all ages) do need to roll around in the muck and flounder through plenty of life’s lessons in order for growth to occur, at the same time we can better support that growth if we proactively teach the skills and vocabulary they need to manage their internal worlds—thoughts, emotions, sensory (and extra-sensory) perception, mind-body connections, and the delicate interplay between them all.
These things are harder to teach because, well, the vast majority of adults don’t know how to do it in the first place. We were never intentionally taught either. Most of us lack skills, capacity, and confidence in how to manage our own internal worlds—never mind teaching our kids how to do it! There’s no standardized curriculum. It’s not something most people realize the importance of or even talk about. And since “that’s the way it’s always been” and “we turned out okay” without it, it’s easy to see why most children get a pretty sorry education on these subjects.
As before, check in with my future self and we’ll do a cost-benefit analysis of my parenting experiment.
(It should come as no surprise that this is the kind of inspiration I like to hang around.)
But again, I digress.
I determined that my children needed a better education about their inner lives. We were doing our best, yet it wasn’t enough. They were suffering and so were we. And I knew there were experts who could help us all to do better. To be better.
It takes a lot of heart and persistence to challenge a paradigm. I have many deficiencies, but these two are in my wheelhouse.
So even though I faced considerable resistance about how it may stigmatize my kids, make the problems worse by focusing on them too much, cause too much hassle, etcetera—I determined that they needed professional neuropsychological evaluation if we were going to figure this out.
And I was right.
A lifetime of being gas-lit, from within and without, urges me to shine a spotlight on that point.
Betwixt and between them, my children received an array of eye-opening diagnoses. Again out of respect for their privacy, I won’t share specifics. Suffice it to say that: (1) it sure started to help make sense of things; and (2) it was a lot to take in.
The process revealed fascinating information. Some of it felt obvious right away. Other bits, we had never remotely considered. The psychologist’s findings began to illuminate the remarkable neurodiversity of our beautiful brood.2
Armed with all this great insight, my first step was to get educated. I leaned on the immediate recommendations for the kids and got those wheels in motion too—but I needed to understand what we were dealing with and make meaning of it for myself.
The learning curve was steep. Taking stock of my knowledge, or lack thereof, felt epic. Especially because I’m a rabbit-hole fiend by nature. Sifting through resources, gathering data, examining my biases… I really enjoy these things, but as I said, it was a lot.
I quickly discovered that my personal understanding of neurodiversity was embarrassingly subpar. Just scratching the surface of the many fantastic websites, foundations, medical institutes, research studies, advocacy groups, books, podcasts, blogs and such, unearthed an astonishing trove of information—and previously hidden worlds and subcultures of neurodiverse people (Living among us! Just getting on with the day-to-day!).
Today it seems silly that I’d never properly learned much about this, but I suppose that’s how life works. There is so much we never seek to better understand until waves of necessity start lapping at our shores.
Soon I was swimming in a sea of helpful information… and swirled round in whirlpools of competing schools of thought, controversial theories, disparate approaches to parenting and mental health guidance, even polarizing political angles on everything. I was learning a lot, for sure—but trying to figure out what to believe? How to make practical choices for support? How to navigate next steps with the healthcare and public school systems?
It was like that moment at the pool when the whistle announces the end of adult swim: the orderly lane dividers peel away as all the civilized swimmers scramble to the safety of their sunny lounge chairs, and a stampede of unruly children cannonball the water in raucous succession. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know by now that I’m a lousy swimmer. But fortunately I have stamina and persistence on my side, even when disoriented.
(Me swimming badly but with determination. Me as a child. And a witch. A swimming witch-child? Okay, you get the idea.)
In order to properly tell my story, I do have to get specific about one diagnosis. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, factors into the mix of things with my kids. I had a vague sense this might be the biggest contributing factor to some of the challenges we’d been facing. Or at least might yield the lowest hanging fruit if we tackled it first.
Many people I know had been diagnosed with ADHD, so it didn’t feel like such a big deal. It seemed to me the stigma in mainstream culture was dissolving too, which lent the disorder an aura of approachability. ADHD also somehow captured the zeitgeist of parenting challenges in the late 90’s/early aughts, so I imagined “they” (everyone with expertise) must have solidly figured out how to deal with it by now.
And “they” may well have done, but all of that was no help to me at all when things got personal.
As I started to research, it was quickly apparent that the psychologist got it right. ADHD fit. We had found a missing piece of the puzzle for my kids. Huzzah! But then—(because the Universe works in mysterious ways, and evidently enjoys a good plot twist)—I was blindsided by the sudden emergence of a whole nother puzzle.
Leaping headfirst into the psychoeducation black hole, it didn’t take long to start connecting the dots. A starry image took shape, and the constellation bore a strange resemblance to me. These stars were raw and fiery, not sparkly or sparkling, but smoldering. They flashed primordial truths about my own nature, my own hidden struggles. They ignited a flame of recognition I could not ignore.
A quick web search of ADHD symptoms in women will provide a punch list of challenges, behaviors, and otherwise mostly undesirable qualities that describe my personal experience with frightening accuracy:
…Has difficulty sustaining attention. Struggles to follow through with instructions. Loses things easily. Is easily distracted. Is forgetful in daily activities. Talks excessively. Fidgets and often needs to get up and walk around. Acts impulsively or speaks before thinking. Easily makes friends but has difficulty sustaining friendships…
Uh-huh. Go on.
…Self-harming activities, or activities that require extreme and unhealthy self-discipline. Adopts compensatory strategies, leading to working two to three times as hard as her peers in order to be equally successful. May remain in unhealthy relationships. Appears to daydream but will explain that her thoughts feel like they are “going a million miles a minute” and she has trouble keeping her mind on one topic…
Mm-hmm <Sigh>
The more I researched, the more glaringly obvious it became. This was me. But unlike the clarity and relief that came from receiving diagnoses for my children, the dawning realization that I too may have ADHD was not comforting.
Instead, I felt hoodwinked by life. Incompetent and ashamed. How had I gone so long without recognizing this? Why had no one else noticed? Or worse: noticed, but not said anything? And I don’t just mean realizing that I may “have” ADHD. I also mean realizing that I even have some of the challenges associated with the disorder. Until faced with considering them all together—as a constellation of symptoms—a few of these things weren’t even on my radar.
How had I managed to overlook a whole host of—(not at all subtle, I might add)—difficulties and behaviors in myself? As a person who constantly self-reflects, values a growth mindset, prides herself on adaptability, and should probably just go ahead and add Self-Improvement & Transformation Specialist as a tertiary career path on her resume… it didn’t seem possible that I could have missed so much.
(All of these wonderings foreshadowed the next epiphany, when the light bulbs would really start popping. Wait for it! It’s truly extraordinary how much we can hide, from others and from ourselves, in a lifetime of unconscious masking3.)
In the mental spiral that followed, I began to wonder just how much of who I was—my skills, strengths, problems, preferences, habits, aversions, idiosyncrasies—hinged on how I had developed as a person in response to the challenges of ADHD; which, by this point I fairly well assumed I had.
In some cases my coping mechanisms had forged successful strategies, so deftly honed that even people I’m very close to don’t have a clue how hard certain things are for me. Or how much energy I expend trying to corral the inner chaos. Hell, even I didn’t see it until I started peeling back the onion.
Other challenges are plainly visible to others if they’re paying attention. Just ask anyone I live with if I know where my phone is at this, or any, moment. Or how many times I run back and forth between my car and house before I’m actually ready to drive away. Or how long I can stay still in one place to do anything before I get up to “just take care of something real quick.” The list goes on.
But hold up. I do believe I’ve digressed again. And this story isn’t really about ADHD.
So there I was, eight-months-on-a-neuropsych-eval-waitlist later. Ten days away from my appointment with a well-respected, long-tenured psychologist, and having already essentially diagnosed myself with ADHD…
There I was, feeling self-congratulatory and relieved to have finally figured out what the hell was going on with me all this time… Thinking all that remained was to have my diagnosis confirmed by an expert so they could, “Help me fix it and get on with things! Start enjoying life and taking it easy and having fun!”…
There I was, just engaging in your standard, run-of-the-mill web research about how to manage this super common, totally treatable condition… Learning more about how symptoms present differently and ADHD is frequently overlooked in girls and women (fascinating)…
There I was.
When out of the clear-blue-definitely-not-fated sky I stumbled upon The Great Algorithm’s divinely placed YouTube video 16 Overlooked Autistic Traits in Women4
Autism. Huh. This was adjacent to my research.
I wasn’t really thinking about it as relevant to me personally, but a curious little wiggle inside urged me to click >Play.
Somewhere in the background, a lightbulb flickered on…
… in the rising glow, I began to discern the faint outline of a big, pink, many-splendored elephant.
And there I was.
NEXT TIME… I’ll share the story of how I came to realize, and grapple with, the possibility that I may be autistic.
(Starting to wonder if I spoke too soon about that funny joke.)
Keep wilding with me! Subscribe to the blog HERE👇🏻
- Important to note that these are my personal beliefs and feelings, not necessarily reflective of their father; who may feel more or less the same on some points, but likely has different and equally valid perspectives. I don’t claim to speak on his behalf 🙂 ↩︎
- “Neurodiversity” is a popular term that’s used to describe differences in the way people’s brains work. The idea is that there’s no “correct” way for the brain to work. Instead, there is a wide range of ways that people perceive and respond to the world, and these differences are to be embraced and encouraged. For more info check out https://childmind.org/article/what-is-neurodiversity/ or, as the kids say, just “search it up.” [Image designed by Freepik] ↩︎
- This is just one helpful overview of autistic, or other neurodivergent, masking. I share it because many people are unfamiliar with the term used in this context. ↩︎
- Shout out to the full-stop-FABulous Taylor Heaton, without whose mission, energy, creativity, and compassion I would not have journeyed as far or fast toward self-discovery. ↩︎
Till My River Runs Wild 