The ‘H’ in ADHD stands for hyperactivity and it’s what most people associate with the brain disorder particularly in kids. This hyperactivity was almost a bipolar-like mania for me when I was a kid. My memories arent’ the greatest, but I’m sure I mustt have exhausted the patience of every teacher I ever had and I didn’t have a great reputation by the time I left primary school at the age of 10.

In my last year at that primary school I would constantly muck about in class, giggling like an idiot at any word that had any possible connotations with sex and generally dragging the whole class down with my constant interruptions. It got so much for Mr Sharp, my year 7 teacher, that he would regularly relocate my desk around the corner next to the class toilets. Whenever this happened I missed out on all of the classwork from that point on and to be honest, I couldn’t have been happier about it.

I was just as bad during my teenage years at secondary school. By the time I was 16 I think I hit peak-hyperactivity. Those years studying for my advanced level exams are a bit of a blur because I did nothing except piss about. On one occasion I ran into the sixth form common room (a reserved area for students aged 16–18), noticed that a load of my peers were playing a kind of round-the-clock version of table tennis, ran into the room screaming “pitch invasion!”, jumped into the middle of the table and had the whole thing close up around me like a sandwich, breaking the table in the process. Obviously I was well-liked by my peers.

Over the years the physical hyperactivity mellowed somewhat, but inside I am just as restless. It manifests itself as more of a fidget these days, a tapping foot, a wobbling knee or drumming a pen on the table.

I like to think I’m a pretty good driver. I’ve been at it for 40 years now and for some of that time I’ve even had a driving licence. But actually I’m probably not a good driver. Oh sure I understand the physics of driving, how to corner properly and all that stuff, but the technicalities are not the issue here.

I like to speed. I’m not as bad now, but when I was in my teens and early 20s I was an absolute nightmare on the roads. I loved driving fast and fortunately for me (but not so much for literally every other road-user), my mum used to own a 5.3litre Jaguar XJ12. That car weighed about 50 tonnes but sweet jesus could it move. I can’t remember what the top speed was that I hit in that car, but I do recall taking it to 130mph once on the A1(M) motorway in the UK and that massive engine still had more to give. On one occasion I was driving it down the motorway and the hydraulic failure lights all came on — that meant I had no brakes. I was still going 100mph at the top of the slip-road that was my exit. So I hurtled down that short stretch of road and straight out onto the roundabout and fortunately there was nothing coming the other way or it would have been a catastrophe. Mind you, the Jag went round that roundabout at about 90mph like it was on rails — what a car.

Up until about 10 years ago I never had to commute anywhere by car. This meant that my opportunity to speed was limited to day trips and visits to the supermarket and I therefore had a relatively unblemished driving record. Then I got a job two hours away in Sydney and had to commute several times a week. Long story short, I lost all my points and was put on a 12-month good-behaviour licence that meant that any further infringements would result in a six month ban and a $1500 fine. Through sheer force of will I managed to escape a ban but I had a nervous breakdown at work not long afterwards, thanks to a total nazi of a boss, so it was all a bit of a moot point. Another job gone.

ADHD as you may or may not know is hereditary. I am certain that my mother had it and, once I told the family about my diagnosis, my younger brother decided to get checked out too. Bad driving (by which I mean, reckless driving) runs in the family. On one occasion, after a Christmas Day lunch at relatives, we had a family race home down the motorway (my mum, dad and youngest brother in one car, me in another, my brother and sister in their own cars) which resulted in my mum crashing her car on the slip-road off the motorway. I’ve had many accidents over the years, the most recent of which was a 12 car pile-up in which I was the last car in the chain. We flew back to the UK to visit family about five years ago and got leant a Porsche Cayenne Turbo for the duration of our stay. Within a couple of hours of getting that car I was racing a Mercedes with diplomatic plates down the M4 near Heathrow at about 30mph over the limit.

That said I am genuinely not as bad as I used to be. When I think back on the way I drove during my teens and twenties I am honestly amazed that I am still here and that I wasn’t responsible for harm to others. Dumb luck meant I didn’t kill myself or other people, but I have no doubt that there are people with ADHD in prison right now who weren’t so lucky.

Of all the crappy ways that ADHD fucks up the lives of people who have it, this is the one that flies lowest under the radar. To quote Dr Barkley again, this particular symptom of our brain disorder is the “impaired capacity to delay gratification.” Or as I like to call it — ‘yes I want the doughnut’.

I’m incapable of putting anything off, particularly if it meets my brain’s fucked up need for the stimulus it’s not getting from my dopamine deficiency. Today for instance I pulled into the 7-Eleven to get some petrol, bought myself four Krispy Kreme doughnuts and had eaten them all by the time I was a couple of kilometres away from the petrol station. Yes I’m overweight. No I shouldn’t have eaten them. Did I suffer from pangs of guilt as I wiped the crumbs of sugar off my t-shirt? No I did not.

This particular symptom also manifests itself as poor impulse control. I’m that guy you see in the supermarket constantly switching queues in the hope of getting my groceries bagged quicker. I’m the guy you see switching lanes to try and ‘beat’ the traffic. I’m the dude that will walk away completely from long lines in the post office. And heaven help you if you try and queue-jump on my watch, motherfucker!

While I can laugh at most of my ADHD symptoms, the one that troubles me the most is anger. We ADHDers (what is the collective noun for a group of people with ADHD?) suffer from ‘emotional dysregulation’ which is the inability to regulate negative emotions. And since we also have hair-triggers and respond quickly to situations and stimuli, it can be a toxic mixture.

My anger most often manifests itself when I’m driving. I haven’t got out of the car and punched someone yet, but I’ve come close a few times. My constant anger at the relative driving abilities of the motorists I encounter out on the road is a source of some distress for my wife Catherine who hates the outbursts.

Fortunately for me my bursts of anger don’t usually involve anything other than me getting red in the face and shouting. Occasionally I throw or break something. I shout often at family members. I have got better, but it still happens and I always feel shitty about it afterwards. What’s weird is just how quickly everything can just flip, in a nano-second, from ‘normal silly Andy’ to ‘shouty arsehole Andy’. Catherine’s even caught it on video a couple of times and it’s so weird to watch it back — it’s like Mr Hyde emerging instantaneously from within Mr Jekyl.

Many people with ADHD also suffer from Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and, yep, I can tick this one off the checklist too. I’ve lost jobs and destroyed relationships because of this one. I have a huge problem with anyone in authority telling me to do something, whether it’s a teacher, an employer or a policeman. I will simply tell them to fuck off.

Those of us with ADHD are used to losing our jobs. We get fired, made redundant, not called back, removed from the roster and ‘let go’ on a disturbingly regular basis. And the annoying thing about it is that for the most part we can fully understand why.

We get fired for pretty obvious reasons that manifest themselves when you’re being paid money for your labour and when the person footing the bill has certain expectations of you. We cannot plan ahead, we lack the willpower to get things done, we are accident prone, we lack a social filter, we are impulsive and we are prone to anger. If any employer knew that we were saddled with that bogus shit-show of a shopping list of negative characteristics they wouldn’t even entertain the thought of employing us. So what actually happens is that we shine at the interview, get the job and then we fuck things up — sometimes slowly over a period of months or even years and sometimes really quickly. I’ve been fired within the first hour of a job on no less than three occasions.

Boring or repetitive jobs are usually an absolute disaster for people with ADHD. And since most of us will never have dream jobs centred around something that intensely interests us, pretty much all of the jobs we do will be boring and repetitive.

Every job I’ve ever had has ended badly. I was either fired, made redundant or (in the case of freelance or casual work) simply never contacted again. We (that’s Catherine and me) have come to the conclusion that I’m basically unemployable. Like most people with ADHD I’ve been self-employed for most of my life as a result and, since we’re being honest here, I’ve actually been straight-up financially supported by Catherine for about 75% of our married lives. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Catherine in their lives though and things get shitty pretty fucking quickly if they don’t.

This is one of my demons, for sure. If someone comes up to me and asks me to do something, unless I instantaneously drop what I am doing right there and then, the chances of said task getting done are virtually zero. This has nothing to do with the aforementioned willpower, this is a memory issue.

When I found out I had ADHD I made all sorts of discoveries about coping mechanisms I had put in place over the course of my 53 years. These coping mechanisms enable me to fudge my way through life and my non-existent working memory was one that I had tried with varying degrees of success to work around.

I realised that when I was asked to do something, and I was not able to instantaneously drop whatever I was doing at the time, I would repeat the task in my head over and over again. So for instance, if I am standing in the shower and an advert comes on the radio for a car dealership and I suddenly remember that I have to book my car in to be serviced, I have to repeatedly say in my head, “Get the car serviced … get the car serviced … get the car serviced …” Until such time as I am physically dialling the phone number to the garage to book it in for said service. Sometimes I realise I’m even mouthing the words as I repeat them in my head which, frankly, makes me look a bit weird.

This lack of working memory manifests itself particularly badly when I am being given instruction in completing some task or other. Unless I repeat, in my head, the steps prior to the one I am being told about, I will have forgotten them all by the time we get to the end.

When I was a kid my mum used to despair of me and, when trying to tell me something, she’d say, “It goes in one ear, and out the other.” Turns out she was absolutely right — it literally goes in and out unprocessed. There again my mum also used to say that if you swallowed chewing gum it would tie your guts up in knots and kill you, so let’s not start relying on her as a credible source of wisdom.

There’s something almost intangible about this particular symptom of ADHD. Dr Russell Barkley, the noted ADHD expert refers to this as “poor persistence of effort to tasks,” and I call it “never getting shit done.”

Never getting shit done seems to be one of the most pervasive symptoms, suffered by pretty much all people with the disorder. It really doesn’t matter how important the task is, how big a bearing at has on your life or who’s asking you to do it — you are simply incapable of getting on with the job. When first hearing about this, people often say something like, “Oh I must have ADHD too because I’m forever putting off doing the vacuuming in the house.” And while unenjoyable or boring tasks definitely top the list of most-likely-to-go-unfinished tasks for ADHD sufferers, people who have the brain disorder put off everything, all of the time and they will continue to do so even when it costs them their job or their marriage.

The weird thing about this is that we are not emotionless drones and we fully understand how frustrating it must be for other people who just want to see the thing done. We can do the task and most of the time we want to do the task, but we are incapable of internalising the willpower necessary to make a start on it. It won’t be until about five minutes before the deadline that we’ll finally summon up the willpower to get on with it and then it will of course be rushed, slap-dash, incomplete and otherwise crap.

When my wife asks me to do something and I say, “No problem!” I mean it. But I am then incapable of sitting down and getting on with it. It’s like some invisible force that pushes back on my self-control with an equal and opposite amount of the force I’m expending on getting it done. No matter how much I’d like to do it — I just can’t.

Procrastination is a way of life for people with ADHD and we become masters in busying ourselves doing anything but whatever the fuck we’re supposed to be doing. My favourite ‘pretending to hustle’ activities are tidying up my desk, tweaking the air conditioner so that it is blowing in precisely the right direction at precisely the right temperature, agonising over the perfect Spotify playlist to accompany this task, researching ways to speed up the task or automate it in some way, ensuring all of my software is fully up-to-date to better assist me in doing the task, browsing Reddit (seriously, fuck you Reddit — yours sincerely everyone with ADHD), and making a coffee to sip while I do the task I’m never going to do.

For the first 53 years of my life, I did not know I had ADHD.

I’ve had my struggles with mental health since an early age, but, being born in the mid-60s I was one of many kids who never got checked out. Nobody out in the real world knew about autism, nobody knew about ADHD, nobody (let’s be honest) gave two fucks about the mental health issues of us Gen-X kids. I was just odd, a trouble-maker, destined to amount to nothing, saddled with authority issues, impulsive, rude and a bit of a day-dreamer. Your original underachiever. How terribly original of me.

It never occurred to me to question why I was the way I was, until much later in life because, in all seriousness, I just thought I was a bit of an arsehole. Worse still I had come to terms with my arseholeness and just accepted it because I figured nothing was ever likely to change. Turned out that low self-esteem is another classic trait of the adult ADHD sufferer. And when I did get officially diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed with medication to help me cope better with its shitty symptoms, my life changed.

Prior to being diagnosed with ADHD I thought that this neurodevelopmental disorder was something that affected only kids and which had fairly sketchy origins. As part of the journey of self discovery that all recently diagnosed ADHDers go through, I discovered that my knowledge on the subject was woefully ignorant. I simply had no idea whatsoever just how debilitating this brain disorder is and how enormous an effect it had on my entire life. Like all of us, I also discovered that the ignorance surrounding the disorder is nearly as damaging as the disorder itself.

How many people have you spoken to, since your diagnosis, who say things like - "Oh I'm always forgetting my keys too - I must have ADHD!" or "I was a super active little kid - I must have ADHD too!" It's a bit like speaking to someone who has only one leg and saying, "Oh I have trouble running and jumping too - I must have only one leg!"

I don't think any of us who were diagnosed later in life had any idea that there was such a suffocating cloud of bullshit around ADHD and that it's one of the most misunderstood mental disorders on the planet.

So what does all this have to do with ADHD Army. Many years ago when I was a rookie journalist at a publishing company, a colleague came into work wearing a t-shirt that said, "This is what a lesbian looks like." She was taking back control of the dialogue and confronting the sub-text of the conversation that went on around here. I liked her t-shirt and I liked the way she wore it and I was reminded of it when I was trying to explain what ADHD is to an acquaintance. So simply, this site is an attempt to 'take back' ADHD and to own it.

We are the ones who have to deal with this neurodevelopmental disorder on a daily basis. We have to cope with the fall-out from having a chronic lack of will-power, an inability to focus, terrible working memory, hyperactivity, recklessness and all the side-orders of shortcomings that define ADHD. And you know what, I'm proud of myself and the fact that I'm still here, despite having been unknowingly crippled by this thing my entire life. I'm proud of the things I've accomplished despite having been dealt such a lousy hand of cards. I'm proud to have ADHD and I'm a willing conscript in the ADHD Army. I hope you are too.