ADHD According to Zoë Quotes

“Research and clinical observation (not to mention people’s personal experiences) show that people with ADHD tend to have hypersensitivities in each of the five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight (Bailey and Haupt 2010, 182). I have no doubt that the tale of the princess and the pea is the portrait of a young woman with ADHD! I’m constantly yanking my shirt tail and skirts down and my socks and leotards up because any bunched fabric drives me nuts. Many women with ADHD (including me) would like to burn their bras, and it’s not (necessarily) because we’re feminists: it’s because of tactile hypersensitivity”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“inattention leads us to bang our legs on desk corners, bump into doorjambs, and generally appear to be more clumsy than others. While this might work for slapstick comediennes, most of us would rather avoid the bruises and other injuries that occur when the mind is in one place and the shin in another. And even on a good day, being inattentive can mean missing crucial details in a conversation or when reading, forgetting important appointments or meetings, or just wearing mismatched socks.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“it’s less about not paying attention than about paying attention to the wrong things and having uneven attention—being unable to sustain our attention. We’re distractible, and our attention is easily diverted from our intended focus to other things that are more interesting, more exciting, or, you know, shinier.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“being inattentive remains unaddressed, it can cause multiple problems. A scattered mind makes us trip over furniture and other people’s feelings, hurting ourselves and others along the way. In fact, the cumulative effects of being inattentive can be so destructive that our inattention eventually gets our attention.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“you’re like me, you’ll feel grief about not being diagnosed earlier. Once you realize what a major impact untreated ADHD has had on your life, it’s understandable that you’d grieve what might have been. It’s also understandable that you may feel angry about not having received the treatment and support you deserved. You might also be angry as you remember insults, unjustified accusations, and unfair assessments of your abilities, intentions, and intelligence. Fair”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“There’s a long history of women’s medical concerns being dismissed, belittled, ignored, or misunderstood and their voices silenced. Be prepared to advocate for yourself, and don’t settle for anything or anyone you’re not comfortable with. Ask friends, relatives, other health care practitioners, or anyone you trust for referrals and move on.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“ADHD is not a measurement of intelligence. And for the record, studies indicate that those with ADHD often have well-above-average intelligence. So there.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“No sooner did I feel relief than grief set in. What would my life have been like if I’d been diagnosed in childhood? What might I have accomplished? Would I have the family I’d always wanted?”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Having no idea where to start, unable to prioritize, I continued to wander through my apartment. By late afternoon, I hadn’t even glanced at my to-do list for the day. (I tried, but I couldn’t find it.) When I realized the day was nearly over, I panicked.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“In one key study (Rucklidge and Kaplan 1997), women who were diagnosed with ADHD between the ages of twenty-six and fifty-nine were compared to women without ADHD. Results indicated that the women with ADHD were more apt to report feeling helpless and as though things were beyond their control. They experienced more stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem. They tended to give up easily when faced with difficult situations, and blamed themselves for their failures. This thinking often led to a vicious cycle in which they were less likely to make an effort to finish tasks, which only reinforced their sense of failure and inability to accomplish their goals. Their feelings of helplessness then led to more anxiety and depression. These women blamed themselves for not knowing what to do or how to act and were less likely to use effective problem-solving strategies. In addition, this study was extremely valuable in pointing out that being diagnosed with ADHD helped these women feel more in control and more forgiving of their past mistakes. Putting a label on what they were experiencing provided a sense of relief for most of them.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“in adulthood become inner restlessness, failure to plan ahead, incomplete projects, and forgetfulness.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“For many decades, ADHD was thought to be a disorder seen only in hyperactive, white, elementary school–aged boys. We now know that that is not the case. However, it was only when we, the experts, changed our focus and began looking at inattentiveness, not just hyperactivity, that we found others with ADHD: the inattentive boy, and sometimes the inattentive girl sitting right beside him in the classroom.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“while the damning statistics are everywhere, the stories behind the stats were missing. There were no faces, no firsthand accounts. I wanted to share what it feels like to live inside those doom-and-gloom statistics. When I was diagnosed, I felt so alone. I knew nothing about ADHD, and I certainly didn’t know any women with it (that I was aware of).”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Research results increasingly indicate how urgent it is to recognize ADHD early in girls and provide support and treatment geared to their needs.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“People with ADHD also have a higher incidence of asthma (Fasmer et al. 2011), eczema (Schmitt et al. 2013), ear infections (Adesman et al. 1990), and allergies (Suwan, Akaramethathip, and Noipayak 2011)—all conditions of hypersensitivity.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Many women with ADHD are already prone to perfectionist tendencies, so it’s important to heed Cameron’s warning not to get fixated on creating the perfect poem, painting, pie, or whatever. The self-esteem issues that so often accompany ADHD, thanks to past criticism, failures, and emotional scars, can result in a tendency to believe that we’ll never be good enough. According to Cameron, that too is a trap of perfectionism.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Let’s face it: life is pretty overwhelming for most people, even those who don’t have ADHD. If, like most people with ADHD, you’re notoriously poor at self-observation, you may not notice when stress is creeping up on you and you’re on the threshold of feeling overwhelmed. Learning to recognize this before the feeling of being overwhelmed sabotages you requires ongoing vigilance and being proactive. The first step is to notice the signs. Tune in to how you’re feeling physically: Does being overwhelmed show up as a nauseous feeling in your stomach? Maybe you feel dizzy or anxious. You might have a headache or tend to sweat. Observe your mental state: Are you worrying? Confused? Anxious? What thoughts do you have before you’re enveloped by the feeling of being overwhelmed?”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“The added stress of dealing with these coexisting conditions can contribute to feeling overwhelmed. Many women with ADHD also have coexisting medical conditions, such as allergies. Finally, some people with ADHD also have the genetic trait of being a highly sensitive person. Experiencing multiple problems or disorders can understandably lead to feeling overwhelmed.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Being chronically overwhelmed as a result of undiagnosed ADHD can not only lead to academic, marital, social, and occupational problems, it can also potentially affect our health. Roberta Waite (2010) cautions that ongoing daily stress can erode health and lead to diseases such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“If you’re prone to blurting out just your conclusions, rather than the rapid thoughts that led to them, you may find medication extremely helpful in keeping this tendency in check. Before I realized how quickly my thoughts raced, I used to become impatient with others in conversation, not realizing that I needed to share more if others were to understand what I was trying to say.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Another verbal trap is impulsively saying yes to make someone else happy. When I’ve done this, it invariably ends up making no one happy. I usually end up doing something I don’t want to do.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“Common ADHD behaviors such as not returning phone calls or e-mails, canceling social dates at the last minute, or arriving late make those you care about feel uncared for, even if that isn’t your intent.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“I quickly discovered how completely inept I was at following group conversations, especially in a noisy room. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t decode the mélange of voices around me. No sooner did I latch onto half a sentence when another would float by, catching my ear and rendering the first one null and void. This would go on until I was so frustrated that I’d leave. Back in my room, I’d feel lonely, but at least the confusing cacophony was silenced.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“He refers to a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study (Shaw et al. 2007) in his explanation that the brains of those with ADHD develop differently than the brains of others. It appears that with ADHD, the primary motor system matures early, while the higher-level brain center (the part that gives self-control) develops late.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“No sooner did I feel relief than grief set in. What would my life have been like if I’d been diagnosed in childhood? What might I have accomplished? Would I have the family I’d always wanted? Would I have a home, a garden—all the normal things others had, but which had eluded me for years? I realized that I’d tried to convince myself I didn’t want these things as a defense against the fear that I was never going to have them. Knowing the truth, I was able to admit that I still had some of these dreams. Unfortunately, it was too late for many of them. I was too old to have my own children or to catch up on my retirement savings. Before my diagnosis, my recurring nightmare was that I’d end up living under a bridge. Given that there’s no cure for ADHD, after my diagnosis I wondered, Will this be as good as it gets?”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys

“For females, symptoms may not affect functioning for years if a girl receives a lot of support at home or at school, has a high IQ, or works hard and utilizes coping strategies. Chief complaints for women with ADHD mainly center on the degree of difficulty they have completing tasks that other women seem to be able to accomplish with little effort and the related sense of being overwhelmed by everyday activities.”
― Zoe Kessler, ADHD According to Zoë: The Real Deal on Relationships, Finding Your Focus, and Finding Your Keys