NEURODIVERSITY ORIGIN STORY: PART 4

Welcome back for part four of my neurodiversity origin story. In this post, I will discuss, amongst other things, medication, hospitalization, and mental health. As you read along, please remember that these blog entries are part of my personal journey and are not medical advice of any kind.

Enrolling in a master’s degree in cultural studies felt like the culmination of everything I had been working towards. My B.A. was an amazing experience and my time working in various museums solidified where I hoped to end up after my PhD—working in the heritage sector. I went into my master’s full of hope, optimism, and a sense of purpose. Life, it seemed, had other plans.  

First things first, master’s degrees are not meant to be easy. They are meant to challenge and push you. They are meant to make you a master of a field of study. So, when I say that my master’s degree was difficult, I am speaking beyond the obvious trials and tribulations that such an undertaking entails. The master’s I enrolled in was a course-based, 12-month continual program, which meant that while I didn’t have to complete a thesis, I had a very heavy course load and was in class consecutively for a full year.

Within the first few months of study, I realized something was wrong. While I was able to hold my own in class discussions and course work, I very quickly became aware that the degree of effort it took for me to achieve the same outcome as my peers was astronomically different. I wasn’t the only person who struggled mind you and several people dropped out of our cohort, leaving only four fulltime students in my year. It was that tightknit collective of peers, however, that highlighted my neurological differences. It felt like I was going full tilt to keep up, and it was killing me. That’s when life decided to show me what real struggle was like.       

For almost my entire time in Winnipeg, Elizabeth and I had lived together in an amazing historical apartment in St. Boniface. The location was wonderful, with easy access to bus routes (I had sold my car to go back to school). It had a lovely back yard with a firepit, one of the best landlords we had ever had, and a grand total of four tenants split between three suites. It was perfect. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. As I ventured forth into my master’s, our landlord decided he would sell the building, and the person who purchased it was one of the few people I’ve met that might actually be a sociopath.

Within a few months of my master’s degree commencing, our beautiful backyard was a gaping hole, construction workers were working morning and night—beyond legal hours—our water and electricity were routinely shut off without warning, and when a tenant in the top floor suite with fibromyalgia complained that the handrails had been mysteriously taken down, the landlord nailed unfinished 2 x 4s to the wall. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t even shower some days. To make matters worse, when we reported him to the tenancy board and said we would leave, he threatened to take us to court. After a decade of building a home, in the middle of my first semester in a master’s program, we sublet our apartment and moved.

The landlord was furious and, having not done apartment walkthroughs when he purchased the building, claimed that the wear and tear of our ten years of living in the space (under three different owners) meant that he would keep our damage deposit. Elizabeth would eventually put together a 2-inch-thick binder detailing what amounted to months of harassment that the tenancy board claimed was the most organized and detailed account of landlord maltreatment they had ever seen.

Thankfully, we had wonderful friends in the city and were able to rent an adorable house, from a lovely acquaintance, only a few blocks away from our apartment. As you can imagine though, packing, moving, and unpacking a decade of existence, while trying to stay on top of a master’s degree, was exhausting. After months of stress, and a pending tenancy board hearing, I was all but broken. I had slipped into a horrible depression, was falling asleep on my feet, and struggled to get out of bed most days. On one particularly lovely day, the hot water tank in the house went and when I said I would have to miss a single class in the entire semester, I received a scathing email regarding my unprofessionalism from a prof who taught my favourite class. For the second time in my life, I was ready to drop out of university. Instead, I went to my doctor.       

When I saw my doctor, I laid bare everything that had been going on. I told him that I was exhausted, that I couldn’t keep up with course readings, and that I struggled with anxiety so badly that I couldn’t leave the house some days. He recommended a change in anti-depressants and said that I should try something with a stimulant in it. I did and, as life settled after our move, I felt like I was able to keep myself from drowning, but only just. Then a conversation with a classmate changed everything.

One of my classmates was an openly awesome, animation loving, neurodivergent. They often talked freely about their experiences with ADHD and had been proudly medicated for years. One afternoon, over a study session, I breached the topic of my own struggles in the master’s program. My friend listened intently to my concerns, and then matter-of-factly suggested that my hardships were likely due to my own ADHD. Wait…what? Turns out they assumed I already knew. Reeling, I approached one of my dear friends and co-workers, who also had ADHD, and asked if they too thought I might be neurodivergent. They laughed and said, “uh yeah, of course you do.” BOOM!

Over the next few weeks, I reached out to other neurodiverse friends (neurodiverse people tend to attract one another), and it was recommended that I take a dozen or so online ADHD self-examinations to see how the results averaged out. I scored in the very high percentile of people with ADHD on every single test. Things were beginning to come together.

Meanwhile, as I was discovering that there was a legitimate reason for my eternal struggles, life in our new home continued to settle. We built a garden oasis in our backyard, and I was able to work from home most days as a teaching assistant for a first-year English class. I was still struggling with some depression and found it tough to go outside though, so after one of our young cats suddenly died of kidney failure (yep, that happened), Elizabeth and I decided to get a puppy to help me be more active and offer some companionship. He was an adorable Frenchton that we named Huckleberry, and he was the best boy. Seasons changed, life went on, and I completed my second semester without much more ado. My third semester was a different story. Worse than an awful landlord, moving out of the blue, and the loss of a pet? You betcha!

So, remember cute little Huckleberry from a few sentences ago? Turns out he was REALLY sick. He ended up having allergies, ear growths and giardia, a parasite that is more commonly called beaver fever. It causes awful gastric upset and is very difficult for puppies to kick, especially immuno-compromised ones. How difficult? For 12 weeks, we had to boil his toys, wash the floors and his bedding, sanitize his crate, and spray a bleach solution when he went to the bathroom. Every. Single. Day. And while this was all happening, I had an emergency appendectomy. You read that right.

As everything else had been going on during my first semester, I was also not feeling well. After months of testing, my doctor finally discovered the culprit: chronic appendicitis. I ended up being rushed to hospital for emergency surgery and spent weeks on the couch in recovery. There were also complications with my surgery which led to internal bleeding, so I was taken back to the hospital for a week-long stay. I ended up missing a total of six weeks of the third semester of my master’s degree.

When I finally returned to class, blood that had pooled in my abdominal cavity was pressing on my organs, causing extreme pain—so much pain that my spine curved like an ‘S’, and I had to walk with a cane. A special master’s project I had pitched, a comics exhibition, was cancelled, and I had to drop out of my curatorial studies placement. I had received permission from the university to take a curatorial studies practicum course because I hoped to work in the heritage sector once I graduated. Liz and I also dropped the case against our previous landlord because I just couldn’t handle the stress of going to speak in front of the tenancy board.

The university was “understanding” though and gave me an extension until the end of the next semester to finish all outstanding assignments. And the curatorial practicum? The prof didn’t give me any extensions at all! So, while I finished an entire semester of new courses, I also had to finish all course work from my missed time. Unbelievable. But that was okay, I had a plan.

My plan revolved around getting a proper ADHD diagnosis and taking the right medication to support my passage through the remainder of my master’s. I turned to another neurodivergent friend of mine, and perhaps one of the sweetest human beings on the planet, who had found help through the Learning Disability Association of Manitoba. I went to the centre and, sure enough, was given funding for an official diagnosis. I began attending an ADHD support group and went back to my doctor to get the ball rolling on potential medication. My doctor said that he didn’t need to wait for an official diagnosis given the overwhelming evidence I had to support my claim, and I started stimulant medication for ADHD. But wait, wasn’t I already on stimulant meds? Yep…

With the help of my additional prescription, the world seemed brand new. My mind was relatively quiet for the first time ever and my drive to get work done was phenomenal. There was a point during my last semester that I was working four jobs, completing two semesters worth of work, and going to regular diagnostic testing for ADHD. Then the cracks began to form.

The testing for ADHD wasn’t intended for adults…like at all. I was a master’s student in my thirties, who had spent his entire life learning coping mechanisms. The tests I took were meant for 10-year-old me, not adult me. After several sessions of testing that ranged from creating complex shapes, solving math equations, and playing memory games, I discovered several things. One, I had a learning disability regarding mathematics. Two, I was in the top percentile on the adult intelligence test. Three, I had borderline dyslexia, and four, I did not have ADHD. Huh? Of course, I had ADHD; I was taking meds for it and everything. I should also preface this next bit with the fact that when I was told I most likely had ADHD, I put all of the research prowess that I was using to complete a master’s degree towards understanding the intricacies of ADHD and, while I wasn’t a doctor, I was pretty damn sure that I had ADHD. The diagnosing doctor disagreed. He said that because I was able to pay attention to a dot that appeared on a little screen, I had no indication of a wandering mind and therefore no ADHD. He was an idiot.

Back in reality, my courses were chugging along, and I was enjoying myself much more now that I had fully recovered from my appendectomy. I was also regularly going to my doctor to have my ADHD medication upped, at his request, because it didn’t seem to be working as well a few months in. Before I knew it, I was carrying around handkerchiefs because I couldn’t stop sweating, my muscles were so tense that I had constant headaches, and when the meds would wear off at the end of the day I WOULD RAGE. Like, uncontrollable fits of yelling and screaming and freaking out about the stupidest things. I found out later that the nickname for Adderall is MADderall, and I was livid every day.

Then, one day, out of the blue it snapped. My mind that is. I began having manic episodes daily to the point that Elizabeth needed to call a crisis line. Based on the nurse’s recommendation, I was taken to a crisis centre where I was informed that the two stimulant meds I was taking was a cocktail equivalent to street-level speed. I was urged to stop the ADHD medication immediately. I was also told that my brain would most likely never fully recover and was given an additional diagnosis of serotonin withdrawal syndrome. Only time would tell if the manic episodes would subside, and if my brain would be able to naturally regulate serotonin on its own again.  

Over the next few months, I put together a team that consisted of a psychologist, a mindfulness coach, and a psychiatrist and began the long journey to wean off my medication cocktail. The corresponding drug withdrawal was the hardest thing I have ever been through. Shortly after the crisis centre, I also discovered that the antidepressant I had been placed on had several class action lawsuits against it in the U.S. and that it was so difficult to come off that some people would open capsules and taper their dose by a single granule every sixth months for years. I didn’t have that kind of time.

The withdrawal symptoms form both drugs were so bad that Elizabeth would routinely find me crying in our closet because lights and sounds were too overwhelming. The experience almost ended our marriage. That is not to say that Elizabeth gave up on me, but that her own life experiences over the last few years had also added up—she lost her father to a sudden heart attack, was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, hit her head and ended up in months of rehab for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, worked under a bi-polar boss who was unmedicated, and was undergoing routine medical procedures to eventually discover that she had endometriosis. Life for both of us had been unrelenting.

Despite everything I was going through, I did finish my master’s on time, my marriage endured, and Liz and I celebrated with a trip to Vancouver Island to visit a friend. In hindsight, I was to end my antidepressants halfway through the trip and should have perhaps chosen a less socially demanding trip, but we desperately needed a break and hopped on a plane.

When we returned to our lives in Manitoba, everything had changed. We were both broken and exhausted and found ourselves paying off over $60,000 of combined student debt. With the high cost of living in an urban centre making debt repayment tenuous, we decided that we needed a dramatic change if we were to ever gain financial freedom and personal fulfillment.

Over the next year, we once again turned to thoughts of the one thing we knew made us both undeniably happy: travel. We announced to our families that we were going to aggressively pay off our debt, place all our belongings in storage, and move overseas. My mother-in-law, now a widow, suggested that we move into her addition to save money faster and, in the dead of winter, the day before Christmas, we moved back to our hometown to begin our life anew. We planned to live with my mother-in-law for six months and then move to Europe. It’s been six years.

Well, it’s sad but true, we are nearing the end of my Neurodiversity Origin Story series. Check back next week for the fifth and FINAL entry followed by an interview with an artist and ADHD coach that I cannot wait to share with you.

As always, you can find my photography on Facebook and Instagram!