Being diagnosed with ADHD can be transformative and almost give you a new lease of life. It can also be scary and before where you felt that you were never good enough you might now be wondering how you held it together all this time.
Imposter syndrome is described as the belief that you’ll never be good enough, almost that you’ll get found it in time. I’ve always been driven by a fear of failure rather than excited anticipation of success. Now with the diagnosis of ADHD, I can also see that the sense of not being good enough and down playing any achievements meant that imposter syndrome was given steroids in my case – to the degree that anyone who liked me or accepted me as I was may seem to me in some way defective themselves (Groucho Marx said something along the lines that he wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept him!)
When I was told at the careers office as a civvy that medic was mainly admin with some ‘general ward duties’ I thought that it sounded ok, I could take a temperature and chuck out a bed bath etc. Then on my trade training I started to hear what I would need to be capable of doing in the role and it was 1,000 miles away from what I signed up for. I was given what was close to paramedic-level training with North-East Ambulance Service and came away with a City & Guilds qualification in Immediate and Emergency Care. Ahead of being deployed to Kosovo for four months I went on battlefield resuscitation training including performing chest drain insertions on the ribcages of farmyard animals and cricothyroidotomy procedures on the larynx of a sheep. All the while I was praying that I’d never have to use it as I had no confidence in myself to translate the training into practice.
I always felt like I was playing a role and that I was never 100% committed, just not really in it. Definitely in my 12 years in the RAF I never felt settled or secure and I was doing a role (medic) where the management and admin aspects were fine for me but some of the clinical responsibility I found really daunting. Part of it I now know is that I found it hard to follow verbal instructions involving steps/processes and put it all together e.g. response to a cardiac response and options around CPR, defibrillation and giving emergency drugs. For goodness sake I couldn’t even iron despite getting instructions and demonstration and the staying-up trying badly to master it resulted in insomnia and hallucinations.
If like me you can struggle with working memory, the thought of having to switch on into an emergency response with a series of steps is really stressful. It was just not sticking in my head as it was practical whereas I could deal with theory. The supposed happiest and proudest day of my early working life should have been my passing out parade to mark successful completion of my basic RAF training. On the day I knew I’d mess up on the matching, I found it so hard to remember the sequence of steps and movements It could be embarrassing with everyone looking at me and the others. Also I’d had to have my number one trousers ‘taken out’ due to weight gain during training. Few people undertake basic military training and put on weight as a result I would guess. Binge-eating biscuits was the culprit, i’ve always eaten my feelings.
I left the RAF late in 2005 and partly because i’d applied for a CEO job in a London GP out-of-hours care provider and got it but stayed and turned it down. Mainly because I was moving to the East Midlands with my then girlfriend. Then I was offered a promotion to Sergeant which would have seen me become a medic instructor at the tri-service Medic training establishment in Aldershot (Keogh Barracks). I loved teaching/training people but felt that I would hate to teach something I had little confidence in doing myself. If the teaching was about management and finding solutions and fixes for issues I’d have been fine. In this case I think part of the ‘imposter’ in me was because I was to a degree a square peg in a round hole and never truly believed in my ability to do the job – at least not the clinical side of it .
I don’t always think that imposter syndrome has it wrong, but in so many of us much of that heavy doubt is self-inflicted, unfair and overly-limiting.
Next time you doubt yourself consider whether a belief system is holding you back – and consider that if others trust you to do something, you should too. Plus rejection sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) can convince you that everyone hates you for what you struggle with but the truth is not normally anywhere near the story you tell yourself..
So, tell yourself a different story, after all you’re the writer, editor and publisher all in one. What a powerful creative force you can be. Pretend you’re talking to a friend, you’d never be as negative as you are with yourself.
If you’re prone to self-doubt and low self-esteem as many ADHDers are, you’re giving an open house invitation to imposter syndrome (come in, make yourself comfy and why not have my slippers!)
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