In December I decided to gift my husband Sergio with a “Duo” subscription to Spotify. For the unaware, this means me paying a few extra bucks for the equivalent of Sergio having his own “profile” à la Netflix. As we have very different tastes in music, this was important to me. God forbid someone threaten Fiona Apple’s reign from the top of my Wrapped list for the third year in a row.
When you sign up for a Duo plan, you are asked to type in your address, then prompted to send a link to your Duo partner where ostensibly they type in their address and if said addresses are the same, viola, you’ve got linked accounts and the ability to make nightmare playlists where one of you will hate 50% of the songs.
Despite both typing in the same address, I was continuously met with a warning message that we had to live in the same country in order to have a Duo account. Knowing we both typed in the exact same address, I suspected the problem was that the card on the account was an American debit card linked to an American address in, you know, America.
I really did not want to change the card on my account. At the time I declared it an unnecessary inconvenience - why bother asking for our addresses if you’re really just lifting the one from my payment information? I spent a whole adulthood in the United States making accounts for things and I never imagined the absolute hellscape it would be having to constantly weasel my way back into said accounts when I no longer had an American phone number for two-step verification. Please, for the love of God, give me this.
I hopped into their help chat box. Surely, there must be a work-around on their end. Couldn’t they just look at my IP address, see that I’m in Spain, and give me this one? I’ve been a dedicated customer since 2012, and I know I only listen to the same 3 playlists of music from my high school and college years, but money is money, right? Just take my money and let me have a cross-continental Duo plan!
An hour of back-and-forth with two robots and two humans from the customer service team and the answer was still no. The only way I could make this Christmas present work was if I changed the card on the account to one that was from Spain.
I started crying. I cry a lot, but this was a bit beyond even for me. Was I PMS-ing? Have the newly prescribed anti-depressants not yet kicked in? Am I a big giant baby lunatic? Naturally, I took it to my therapist in our next session.
It didn’t take long before her line of questioning helped me articulate what deep down I already knew. I didn’t care about the inconvenience of having to change the card on my account. I cared about the fact that I felt like one more string that tied me to home was being severed.
Are you allowed to complain about living abroad when you made the choice to do it in sound mind and healthy body? When you still think it’s the right choice? When moving back home doesn’t feel like an option you want to take? Have I ever felt truly home?
I’ve always seen frayed seams where I wanted to see a perfectly quilted patchwork. I’m simultaneously envious and terribly suspicious of those who appear to be truly content. My thinking brain knows perfection is impossible, but my lizard brain is like a magnet pulling me towards the shrapnel of “could be better.” This feeling is not location-specific. It followed me up the east coast from Florida to Baltimore to New York and now across the Atlantic to Spain.
I’ve spent the better part of my adult years in therapy asking other adults to help me feel better. Sometimes they do. Sometimes I feel better. But eventually I sink back to the baseline. Something is not right.
I’ve been trying to pursue a diagnosis of ADHD. I haven’t been very open about it because I know that people will not believe me. In Spanish, the acronym for ADHD is TDAH which looks a bit like “ta-dah!” I tell myself that this means my brain is magical. The process has been anything but magic.
ADHD first came on my radar in my early twenties when I was agonizing through graduate school and full-time work as a middle school teacher. I explained to my then-therapist that I just couldn’t sit and focus and get things done the way I observed my peers do. The simple act of getting started was a massive feat of willpower and only possible after checking a litany of social media and blogs (and maybe cleaning my entire room if the mood struck me).
Once I did get started, any obstacle or question over what to do next sent me back into some other rabbit hole of distraction. Conversely, other times I would spend hours and hours looking for the perfect text to read with my students - something that was both interesting and appropriate to their below-average reading levels. Meanwhile, I was averaging about four hours of nightmare-plagued sleep at night. I had always had issues with procrastination and perfectionism, but the sheer amount of work I had to balance was pushing me beyond my limits.
We talked about ADHD. I told her my dad was diagnosed when I was in university and he found treatment to be life-changing. She told me it was hereditary and it sounded like I was suffering the same. I was sent to a psychiatrist who prescribed me anti-depressants and Adderall. I had one incredible night when I took the Adderall and proceeded to write a paper so good my professor asked to keep it for future classes as a model. Otherwise, I mainly abused the Adderall on weekends at the clerb.
I wasn’t ready for the kind of treatment I needed. I felt massive amounts of shame about being medicated. I reasoned that if these problems were things in my head, then I should be able to think my way out of them. I could get to the bottom of the origin stories in therapy, and once I understood them, they would go away.
That was 2010.
By 2016 I was ready and willing for whatever pill would help lift me out of the depression I had fallen in. Years before I had decided the ADHD thing was just me making excuses for myself. The real problem is the depression. The real problem is the anxiety. Surely if I get those under control I’ll be fine.
Then I moved abroad. Then my aunt died by suicide. Then the world was upturned in a global pandemic. Then I applied for grad school and was rejected. Then I sent my writing to various publications and was rejected. Then I basically gave up writing. And now here I am. Back at square one.
I felt my latest depression sneaking up on me in September. I thought I was just having a hard time with transitioning back to real life and a job I don’t like after a month of being on holiday back in the United States seeing some of my favorite people and being an auntie to my nephews. In October I sought out a new therapist. I also read a book about women with ADHD and theorized it could be the key that unlocked this long history of feeling so frustrated and sad. In November I saw a psychiatrist through our private insurance who gave me the creeps, and his referral to a different therapist was where I learned our insurance didn’t actually cover this sort of thing. Two days before Christmas I was crying in my GP’s office about having no “ganas” (desire/motivation). I started taking anti-depressants on Christmas Eve. I felt more alive within weeks.
I also felt angry. All these years of therapists and no one caught on to the ADHD thing? I’ve been absolutely suffering through every major transition, I’ve been battling depression because my life literally depends on it, and this whole time there was this massive distraction monster snacking in the corner watching the circus unfold while scrolling fucking TikTok?
Socialized medicine being what is it, I had to wait 2 months before my first appointment with the mental health division at the hospital. I had an hour long intake appointment with a nurse. I stumbled through Spanish trying to recount family trees, bulimia, depression, anxiety and the fact that I am quite certain I have ADHD. She told me it wasn’t possible for me to have achieved the things I had if I have ADHD. She said that was something diagnosed in children. She told me the priority was “bienestar” (wellness) and that they can’t possibly treat everything that everyone suspects they have when they have to serve the whole city.
I started crying. How is this not wellness? I’m tired of melting down. I’m tired of life feeling impossibly hard all the time. I can objectively see that my life here is not very hard, and yet I feel like a teenager who struggles to manage it.
I reasoned the nurse didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. There is 30 years of research at this point that ADHD presents differently in girls, which is why they are severely under-diagnosed, and probably the psychiatrist I was going to see in two weeks would be more aware and therefore more amenable to my pleas.
She wasn’t.
Before the appointment I screenshot 4 pages in the book I read that detailed symptoms in adult women (most of which I had checked off). The night before I stayed up until 1am trying to read an article from a bonafide medical journal my neuropsychologist best friend sent me that was a consensus on “females with ADHD.” That article also led me to a diagnostic assessment tool for medical professionals of which I ticked most of the boxes. Of course, I couldn’t physically tick the boxes as I don’t have a printer, so I planned to run to a printshop (and the pharmacy!) before heading to my 11 am appointment.
I would like to say this to my past self who thought I was going to do all that the morning before said appointment: hahahahhahahhahahahhahahahahhahahahahaha.
I ran out of time as I also had to make sure my lesson plans were up to date (I was missing the bi-weekly teachers meeting) and I had to wash and dry my hair.
Nevertheless, I am a fast walker and Google is a helpful tool so I ran to a print shop a few blocks from the hospital when I arrived ten minutes early for my appointment. I sat in the waiting room (aka the hallway) with freshly printed sheets and a new pink pen that was an impulse buy.
Near the start of the appointment the doctor asked me why I thought I had ADHD. I was so nervous about defending my case in my broken Spanish I did not think to unleash my 30ish pages of materials and instead blustered something about hating planning and organizing and not managing my time well.
Soon the conversation took a hard right toward other topics and before I knew it, we were towards the end of the session and she was telling me ADHD wasn’t a priority, she didn’t think I had it, and she needed to increase my anti-depressant dosage because it was so low as to basically be nothing. She printed out my next appointment time (never bothering to ask me if I could make it) and essentially said, “See ya in April, bitch!” (She did not at any time curse at me, just to be clear. ADHDers love exaggeration).
I was quite literally stunned. What was going to happen in April? Is this the end of the ADHD road? I tried to advocate for myself. I tried to show her the checklist for doctors. She told me to save it for later. She told me I couldn’t control everything and she couldn’t possibly diagnose me with anything after one session (never mind that she had already told me she didn’t think I have ADHD). I went to the bathroom and cried in the stall for 5 minutes before walking home.
When I first started this journey, my therapist asked me why now? What is it about this diagnosis at this juncture of my life that I am hoping for? Similarly, Sergio asked if I was open to the idea that I didn’t actually have it.
I imagine myself as a test subject. What if they strapped me up and took pictures of my brain and put me through every assessment criteria ever created and observed me in a cage for days and in the end Maury Povich comes out with a yellow envelope and declares, “Brittany, you do NOT have ADHD!” Amaya the psychiatrist and her rude nurse are there and they run around the crowd whooping in victory as I fall to my knees in defeat. The audience is out of their seats absolutely high on the drama of it all. The camera zooms in as I ugly cry and snot drips down my chin.
What would it mean?
Would I have to put the idea that I am “fixable” to bed? Have I still not learned to accept myself as a just fine lovable being? I think that I have learned to love myself, but could obsessing over my next perceived psychosis be a hint that I maybe have not?
My pride is certainly not keen on the idea of having to admit if I am wrong. I don’t often wear humility well. Would it mean I am the source of my own suffering? It sounds Buddhist enough, but how do you love someone who has been literally driving you mad all these years? Am I hoping the diagnosis would free me of the responsibility of my failures and unfulfilled dreams? Can I look at myself and see the patchwork quilt and not the frayed seams?
I don’t know.
A month after I sorted the Spotify duo account, Neil Young made his announcement that he was pulling his music from the platform in an act of protest over their multi-million dollar deal with the massive centipede in a human body from Men in Black, Joe Rogan. The internet was alight in think-pieces and claims that to support Spotify was to support the funding of misinformation.
I wondered if I was a bad person for keeping my account. One of my worries when switching the payment information was that my app would suddenly be in Spanish and all my recommendations would be things from Spain and I would lose just another connection to creature comforts. Twice a week I walk to my Spanish class at 8 in the morning and find myself smiling and laughing aloud as I listen to my favorite podcast, Maintenance Phase. I feel like I am back in New York with really smart people I have a hard time believing think of me as a friend.
In one of their episodes (completely unrelated to the Joe Rogan debate) host Aubrey Gordon quoted what I think is a Marxist tenet about how “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” This made me feel a bit better. I suppose it’s a bit of a band-aid.
Amaya the psychiatrist told me that America and Spain have different approaches to ADHD and unfortunately I did not understand her well enough to even know if that is exactly what she said. As if it’s not hard enough laboring towards better mental health, it’s ten times harder when doing it in a language I don’t feel is even strong enough to call my second.
Is it possible that my real problem is I am a distracted, work-obsessed American living abroad in a country where there is little on offer for me career-wise? Could I be content to work for piddly hourly wages and put my focus on a life lived for something other than productivity? Is the pill I really need simply that of chill?
I do not feel like I have any answers for myself or for you if you’ve made it this far. The pandemic made it so very clear that the way industrialized nations live is not working, and yet we’re bullishly trying to keep things going as if our world is not literally wasting away (and now there’s a whole war happening on top of it all). Maybe this hyper focus on the possibility of neurodivergence is just a way to feel like there is something I can try to fix in this very broken world. Maybe if I can feel a bit better about myself, I can muster up some semblance of hope for a future that doesn’t feel so bleak.
I know that my hyper-active brain feels a bit better when it gets to slow down and create something out of nothing. Nearly 3,000 words out of this formerly blank page. Colorful stitches on a fresh piece of textile. A new theory about a beloved series. Beneath all of this mess, I believe deeply there is a possibility for change. I just can’t seem to find my keys so I can lead the way towards it.