I’ve experienced a varied and inconsistent working life, working in many different roles without settling and regularly facing a feeling of being trapped in roles that didn’t align with my ways of working.
The longest I held a role prior to my current job was around fourteen months. I felt as though I was never settled and became bored easily, which led to feeling uneasy, restless and developing a hatred for the job. It’s something that can be disguised quite well prior to being diagnosed; I doubled down on my heightened ambitions and refused to be bogged down in a job that wasn’t ticking all the boxes for me.
My first glimpse into the world of work came when I was sixteen, getting a job in a local McDonalds. I loved it. I was learning so fast, at one point running a kitchen on my own during a busy weeknight for a couple of hours and I enjoyed every moment. I had a good laugh with those who were there which made things much better too.
My usual antics that served me badly throughout school soon took over though as I engaged in shenanigans which caused disruption during shifts. I remember starting a food fight with another colleague which very quickly went out of hand when I decided to attack the colleague with a sauce gun. I was scolded by our shift manager who seen it on the camera but I left my shift an hour later with a huge smile on my face. I think the near-constant need for stimulation can lead to very peculiar transitions depending on what is appealing at the time. It shows my determination to succeed in one sitting, before being a disruptive nuisance in the next.
I was eventually sacked after a string of incidents, with the nail in the coffin being my willingness to give out free food to someone I knew. Impulsivity and an inability to control emotional responses meant I often over-reacted to things that went wrong whilst partaking in mischief with other colleagues. I could barely stop and acknowledge the consequences to my actions as I received multiple warnings, including a final warning, in quick succession.
I got a job a few months later as a glass collector in a bar. I was seventeen at the time and unfamiliar with the late-night drinking scene and felt quite overwhelmed at first with some sensory overloading in the form of loud music, incoherent speech from customers and sticky glasses. It’s not something I overly enjoyed but there was one thing that kept me intrigued: the DJ.
I had never been overly interested in music growing up, barring the odd song I never bothered to keep up to date with songs or artists. So it was strange to find myself watching the DJ more and more each shift whilst looking at how everybody was reacting to certain songs or tempos. It was an amazing feeling and one I couldn’t stop thinking about. It became a fixation between each shift and throughout the following week whilst at college where I was consumed with thoughts of becoming a DJ and a newfound interest in music.
This period of hyper-fixation took me to approach our resident DJ who invited me to come into the pub during the week to practice. It was a tricky thing to learn and I remember him comparing the skills of crowd-reading, beat-matching and mixing to tying my shoelaces and that it would become second-nature once I had the hang of it. For some reason, beat-matching took months to crack, it was so difficult for me to try and “bend” a song temporarily and understand how it would fit into the song that was already playing. One day, completely unexpectedly, it clicked.
Whitney Houston – Million Dollar Bill – Freemasons Remix
Bringing this song into a mix one night resulted in everything that I had tried to learn falling into place. Without any warning or prompt I engineered a transition that was beautiful to listen to and worth it for the months I had given up my own time to go to the pub and learn, although not worth it for the regulars who – amongst unwavering support – grunted, growled and menaced at the earache I subjected them to on a near-nightly basis.
You might be thinking “What does this have to do with ADHD?”
Well, I gave up so much of my own time and money to try and learn. I finally made that breakthrough and continued practicing before being offered a permanent Friday night a few months later and, soon after, a Saturday night residency. I learnt a new skill and bagged a job I loved. So, when I was sacked six months later for selling drugs behind the DJ stand it symbolised my giving a middle finger to all of the time, money and effort I put into practicing.
There have been so many times when I have taken something good in my life and destroyed it in an instant. Having poor self-awareness, inhibitory control and foresight are markers of ADHD and I have experienced many times where I just did not acknowledge the consequences that were just around the corner and act in mind of them.
Detatching myself from that turbulent period of my life led to new opportunities. I chased college to get into university and ricocheted between jobs that barely lasted two months. One particular job I got in the summer before my second year at a small family entertainment centre. I was doing minor repairs and maintenance on arcade machines and was given keyholding responsibilities outside of my expected duties within a couple of weeks. I loved it and felt appreciated.
After only 4 weeks I lost interest as my second year drifted moodily into the present like a stormy cloud on the horizon. I started skipping shifts and the times I actually worked were often used to somewhat wind down after university. I maintained the same attitude, laughing and joking with customers but ignoring things that I should have been doing. Every task was met with reluctance and I very quickly began to despise being there when my studies became more overwhelming, as well as my mediocre discipline with studying and attending lectures only aggravating things further. I didn’t last long in this role too; I was dismissed a month later due to performance concerns, a sharp fall from the lightning start I had where I no doubt thrived off the novelty and freshness it provided initially.
Before realising I had ADHD, understanding why I would encounter various struggles with finding and sustaining employment was perplexing. The job searching alone was enough to overwhelm me, having to constantly play tug-of-war with my own brain as I sat down to seek out and apply for vacancies whilst trying to resist every distraction around me. Applying for jobs that required significantly more effort (Civil Service and NHS as examples) frustrated me to no end as I couldn’t cope with the monotonous nature of writing out scenarios and demonstrating effective skills over and over again. For four or five years through university and beyond I would say 95% of jobs I applied for were the rapid applications on jobsites such as Indeed as they were so much easier and far less taxing.
Interviews were another topic of stress. Having to research answers and employer information was a big task, and if I didn’t have a system in place it became difficult to find a place to start. Motivation and task initiation issues compounded this further and it became easy to find excuses to delay preparation. I never once explored the interview location beforehand to ensure I knew the route to drive or, beforehand, which public transport to use. It’d all be addressed on the morning of and, whilst it’s never landed me in trouble, is not a healthy strategy to undertake.
On the occasions I’d managed to scrape by those stages and somehow land a role, new issues would challenge me in different scenarios. I was always a big believer that I was lazy, so when given autonomy in some roles it was no surprise that I would often procrastinate and become slow in my work. It worked to a great extent too so long as I could show the output when needed. When you’re delivering results, people don’t see the struggle.
Being an impulsive person, stewing in amongst the consequences of whatever hot-headed behaviour I exhibited was a familiar experience. I’ve mentioned a couple of roles that ended due to impulsive acts when I was a teenager, but even at the age of thirty the instinctive reactions continued to break free regularly. In one role a few years ago I wrote out a letter of resignation to my boss, criticising multiple aspects of their support/attendance during my time in the role after I was flagged for a performance review. I sent this to my boss and a few more senior managers, as well as our programme director.
If you’d like to read more about my experiences with impulsive behaviour throughout my life check out one of my other posts: Impulsivity: Collision with Intention
The duties within each role can highlight particular challenges with how I work, what my preferences are and my own individual traits. Before my diagnosis, my longest role was the above-mentioned which lasted fourteen months. I used to believe that I was simply searching for the role/career that I wanted whilst hiding the real reasons why I left or was dismissed from multiple roles. I started off so enthusiastically in each one too and oozed motivation and ambition. However, it soon fizzled out as I became more disillusioned with each role which led to eventual resentment and, at times, poor performance.
I’ve had roles involving caseloads which spotlighted many executive function difficulties unbeknownst to me at the time. Working memory difficulties led to me double booking clients, forgetting to mark appointments in my diary, even repeating stuff we’d already discussed in previous appointments. ADHD providing the context behind the cause meant it would have been easier to try to find a solution, but to have colleagues and management bewildered at some of my mistakes whilst I’m too dumbstruck to provide an explanation is unpleasant.
Trying to recall the information and progress with each individual client on a caseload of thirty meant I had to maintain an acceptable level of organisation throughout. Whilst note-taking and diaries were somewhat utilised, I’ve always found it difficult to do so effectively. I would note-take in appointments but find it almost impossible to maintain active listening in a role where clients needed to be supported through challenging times. Even without note-taking, having to converse with clients for up to an hour at a time and several times a day was incredibly taxing and I had to try even harder to both listen and actively listen, given that my brain was always searching for an escape from a situation that isn’t stimulating.
With multiple limitations and challenges to navigate, finding and sustaining employment has always been somewhat of a slog. On top of it all, the day-to-day communication, collaboration and maintaining working relationships can be anxiety-inducing. They’re all situations that require a more polished, work-friendly version of my self and masking my real personality/approach is the price I need to pay for this. Masking is one of the fundamental reasons why ADHD is consistently misunderstood as we are too busy trying to align with rigid environments that are shut off to nuance.
Whilst awareness has allowed me to normalise some of the challenges I face, the mask will most likely continue to be in place throughout my working life. It remains to be seen whether I can find a role that fits in with my strengths and weaknesses, or whether the job-hopping, square-peg-in-a-round-hole approach will continue to be the only way I can consistently remain in employment.