Autism, ADHD and me

I realised some years ago that I probably have ADHD. The waters had long been muddied by trauma-related dissociation, but even as the years passed and the fallout from my marriage started to fade, my distractibility persisted, familiar from earliest childhood and embedded in a mind with no idea how to stay in the moment and be still.  

Eventually I got my act together and earlier this year, I went to see one of our local surgery's GPs. At the end of our ten-minute appointment, she looked me in the eye and said 'Well, I'm pretty sure you do have ADHD, but I also think you have autism'. 

I was dumbfounded. Two of my four children had been diagnosed with autism at the ages of four and three in the early 1990s, and I thought I knew all about the condition and the diagnostic process. 

'But I don't tick any of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments,' I protested.

She laughed. 'That's very old school!' she said. 'We diagnose it differently these days, and the hyperfocus and sensory overload you just described definitely indicate autism. I'd refer you for assessments for both if I could work out how to do it.'

Intellectually it made sense. I was aware of what's informally known as AuDHD, of course - it's hard to be on social media, in my sort of bubble, and miss it. And I had to agree that a lot of the tricky contradictions a combination of autism and ADHD might throw up (and hurl around your head like roof tiles in a high wind) felt all too familiar.

But emotionally it was another matter altogether. My little family had been considered an anomaly back in the day, with not one, but two small, non-verbal children a considerable way along the autistic spectrum at a time when autism wasn't thought to be hereditary.  As a result, we'd been invited to participate in several medical studies over the years, and I always said yes, thinking the research might help other families in my position. 

But in all that time, not one of the many medical personnel we encountered ever suggested that I too might be autistic. The only finding that was ever remarked upon was my score in the word recognition section of one of the tests we underwent: the highest they'd recorded to date. (I did rather less well on the spatial reasoning test.)

In the event, my GP referred me for just an ADHD assessment, as that seemed to me to be the condition most relevant to my daily experience, but sure enough, when my assessment came around months later, my eventual diagnosis was combined ADHD (hyperactive and attention deficit) with autistic traits.  

Again, there's lots of processing to be done, and it's going to take a long time. In the immediate aftermath, I feel I need to reframe my whole life, to pick through everything that happened to me, and perhaps view myself and the decisions I made a little less harshly than I have up until now. In that respect, this diagnosis will, I think, turn out to be a relief. 

But at the same time, I grieve that it's taken me 64 years to get to the point where I might start to understand myself, and allow myself the same compassion I extend to others. And I grieve for earlier me: for the avid six-year-old reader, who, once her books had fewer pictures and longer blocks of text, found herself reading the same page over and over without taking any of the content in, and convinced herself she'd somehow forgotten how to read, but was too ashamed to tell anyone; for the teen who loved her friends but found their company and the shifting of group dynamics draining (and still does); for the exhausted young mother with no emotional support and no ability to self-care, who gave up any chance of a career to care for her children on a promise from her husband he had no intention of keeping; for the woman entering middle age, who felt she had no choice but to keep her head down and put up with it all and who completely lost what sense of self she had in the process.  I've always known those years were hard, but I never realised quite how hard until now. 

At the same time, I can celebrate the leaps that allow me to write poems that seem to come from nowhere, and an ability to hyperfocus that makes even essay-writing exhilarating and infuses the most mundane of dog walks with an intensity that's addictive. 

I'm grateful to those who have stuck by me regardless - my lovely, long-suffering partner, three of my children, successive dogs who have loved me unconditionally, my longtime friends and wider family, my friends in poetry, and my publishers, who've enabled me to realise the one dream I held onto through all those years not once but seven times. I love them all, with every bit of my distractible, avoidant, oh-look-squirrels being.

Pilgrims, Doppelgängers and the Battle of Royate Hill

It being half term, I decided to visit a couple of places in Bristol I'd never been to before. It's not hard to find such places in South Bristol,where I only really venture for poetry events or to walk the dog at Ashton Court or Arnos Vale cemetery, and Brislington Brook as it meanders through Nightingale Valley and St Anne's Woods on its way to the River Avon had been on my list of local places to visit for years. 

It was a lovely sunny morning and Cwtch was basking in the delight of being somewhere new. 

harlequin ladybird

Brislington brook rises on the northern slope of Maes Knoll, a few miles to the south. It never gets as big as its north Bristol cousins, the Rivers Frome and Trym, all of which eventually decant their waters into the River Avon, but its valley is a lovely spot.

A communication line of tree roots

Where Nightingale Valley assumes the name of St Anne's Woods, I paused on the railway bridge to look at the goods train beneath it. The railway was built in 1840 by Brunel and splits the valley in two. The line ends at Paddington. 

After negotiating Newbridge Road, we entered the woods again. There was earlier traffic here, of a different variety: namely, that of pilgrims, coming to visit the chapel and sacred well dedicated to Anne, the patron saint of sailors. 

Of the chapel, with its thirty-two model ships left as offerings, there's no sign, though it was once important enough to be the subject of a visit by King Henry VII. Ironically, its demise was instigated by his son during the Reformation. 

The well's still there, though, surrounded by railings, though there was only a drop of water in there when we visited, and signs that someone tried to use it as a barbecue pit during the long hot summer. A nearby tree had some faded clouties tied to it. 

On our way back towards the upper stretch of Nightingale Valley, I saw my father on the bridge over the railway. At first, he was looking down at the train beneath it; then he started pacing up and down as if he was waiting for someone - neither activity particularly odd, except that he died nearly eight years ago.

The thought occurred to me that maybe the person he was waiting for was me, so I held back until he disappeared down a side street. Getting close enough to see it wasn’t my father would have been weird; getting close enough to see it was, something else altogether.

a one-legged apple tree

the packhorse bridge

There are several impressive trees in these woods, but none so strange as this London plane, the hollow trunk of which has been bricked up, apparently to stop people lighting fires inside it. 

My second new place to visit was Royate Hill nature reserve in Eastville, which lies north of the River Avon. Our walk, though, started somewhere familiar, namely, Greenbank cemetery in Easton, which was brilliant with foliage despite the overcast weather.

Three headstones, close each other and with angels as security, commemorating children who died between the ages of 12 and 18 in the 1930s and 40s

Just alongside an entrance at the northern edge of the cemetery, there's a flight of steps that leads up to the disused viaduct that's now part of the reserve.

I remember the painful birth of this place thirty-plus years ago. It was saved from redevelopment in 1991 and listed as a Site of Nature Conservation Importance, only for the owner, who wanted to build houses there, to send in the bulldozers at 6am on a Bank Holiday Saturday the following spring. Local protestors arrived within minutes, but it took took hours for the council to get an injunction, by which time a third of the five-acre site had been destroyed.

Ultimately, the developer didn't get his way, and it's now a lovely and very unusual place to wander. 

view of Clifton in the distance

Once down from the viaduct, we wandered up through Clay Bottom, joining Coombe Brook, a tributary of the River Frome, for part of the way.

jelly ear fungi

Much of this section of the walk took us through allotments, bright with foliage, late-blooming flowers and plastic. 

a piece of hoggin in situ

Our return route took us under the viaduct and back into Greenbank cemetery.

I was quite intrigued by this modest stone dating from 1982, propped up against - and partially obscuring - the older, grander one, especially since the surnames are all different. 

It was exhilarating to visit a couple of new places, and I'd like to say I'll try to keep it up once a month through the winter, but the season of mud will be setting in presently, so maybe I'll end up sticking (ha!) to ground I can be sure of. We'll see.