The Diagnosis that was Never Meant to Be

It started with a fight. Not the first, not the last, but sharp enough to pierce through the blur.

I don’t remember what exactly triggered it. Something about forgetting to reply. Or maybe I said I’d call and didn’t. Or I zoned out mid-sentence while she was telling me something important. (It’s always something important.) The details blur together, but the feeling stays: the quiet, suffocating guilt of letting someone down—not because you don’t care, but because your mind simply didn’t show up in the moment you were needed.

That’s what nudged me to meet my clinical psychologist. Not the lectures. Not the textbook criteria. Not the self-diagnosis spiral that every med student tumbles into. No, it was my partner’s voice, trembling with frustration, asking why I wasn’t there. Why I was always somewhere else. Why my presence felt partial.

I wasn’t looking for a label. Honestly, I was hoping it was just a character flaw I could rebrand with a catchy nickname.

But I needed an answer.

And so I sat across from the one person who felt safe enough to hold the question. My psychiatry lecturer. My mentor. We were right in the thick of psych posting in Year 4, which meant every slide on ADHD was a mirror I didn’t want to look into. I joked about it with friends. We all did. “Maybe I have this too.” Ha-ha. Move on. But inside, a quiet realization started to build. Like a background tab that kept refreshing itself.

When I finally spoke to her, I didn’t need to say much. She looked at me, paused, and said something like, “You’ve been coping well. That’s why you’re still standing.”

No formal diagnosis. No testing. No paperwork. I almost went for it, got recommended to a student budget psychologist but then the price tag still made me decide not to. Call it laziness, call it budgeting, call it denial. Either way, I didn’t go. And weirdly, I don’t think it matters. What more can a piece of paper offer me that I haven’t already learned by living in this brain every day?

And weirdly, that was enough.

ADHD isn’t a new chapter. It’s the watermark that’s been printed across all the pages. The forgotten keys. The hundreds of tabs open. The sudden urges to clean the kitchen when exams loom. The struggle to read a single paragraph without my mind sprinting into twenty directions. The decades of compensating with charm, or grit, or caffeine.

I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me I’ve been orbiting outside the standard tempo. I’ve felt it. In every group project where I was either doing everything at once or nothing at all. In every friendship I accidentally ghosted, not because I didn’t care, but because I got lost in my own mental fog.

I’ve always functioned. That’s the word. "Functioning." Like a half-dead iPhone on 1% that somehow makes it through the day. I limped through school powered by caffeine, panic, and questionable life choices. I overcompensated with humour and occasional bursts of competence. If you laughed, maybe you wouldn't notice I forgot your name five times. Like an old machine that hasn’t broken down but definitely shouldn’t be pushed too hard. I adapted. I survived school by cramming chaos into bursts of intensity. I made friends by becoming the funny, distracted one who could still somehow pull off decent grades. I learned to over-explain my forgetfulness before anyone else could call it out.

And now I’m here. Final year. Almost a doctor.

Still trying to study without falling into a YouTube rabbit hole of productivity gurus telling me to wake up at 5AM and journal my way into enlightenment. (Spoiler: none of them mention the three-hour nap I take to recover from trying.)

I used to think studying meant discipline. Rigid schedules. Bullet-pointed to-do lists. Textbook pages methodically ticked off. But those systems always collapsed. I’d spend more time designing my study plans than actually executing them. And when I failed to follow through, I blamed myself. Lazy. Undisciplined. Weak.

But it wasn’t laziness. It was friction. It was the mental equivalent of walking through waist-deep water.

I can't hold attention when the words are static. But if you ask me something, if you nudge the mess in my brain with a question, things start moving. Conversations light up pathways that textbooks leave in the dark. That’s why ChatGPT has weirdly become my study partner. It lets me ask, wander, backtrack. It meets me where I am—mid-spiral, mid-confusion—and builds from there. It lets me externalize the chaos and turn it into something tangible.

This wasn’t some grand revelation. It was the academic equivalent of screaming into a pillow while rewriting a study schedule for the seventh time, only to end up reorganizing my sock drawer like it held the secret to passing finals. Nothing else was working. And this… kind of did.

Now, I study by flailing out loud. I ask dumb questions, misinterpret the answers, spiral into three unrelated tangents, then eventually circle back to the right idea like a drunk pigeon navigating home. It’s ugly. It’s inefficient. But hey, it beats crying over my highlighter collection.. It’s not neat. It’s not pretty. But it works—in a way that honors how my brain moves.

I’m not trying to fix myself anymore. I’m trying to work with myself.

My girlfriend still gets frustrated. We still argue. I still forget things. I still drift off mid-conversation and have to ask her to repeat herself. I still lose track of time and text her back three hours later thinking it’s been ten minutes.

But now, I try to catch myself. Not perfectly. Not always. But there’s an awareness that wasn’t there before.

ADHD didn’t make me selfish. It made me misaligned. Out of sync with the rhythms of others. My partner was the first person to make me see the cost of that misalignment. She saw the full version of me, the scattered and well-meaning me and said, “You have to try.”

So I am. I’m trying.

Not for a diagnosis. Not for validation.

But for connection.

I still don’t think I’ll ever get formally diagnosed. Not because I’m afraid, but because I don’t need it. The label won’t change how I’ve lived. It won’t refund the years of frustration or rewire my default settings. It won’t make the world more accommodating, or my brain less prone to tangents.

But it will remind me that I’m not broken.

That surviving this far, this well, is its own kind of miracle.

And that maybe… just maybe… this mind, with all its noise and sparks and detours, was never meant to walk the straight path anyway.

Maybe it was always meant to find its own rhythm. However late. However loud. However imperfect.

And maybe that’s enough.