I’ve learned a lot about women who have ADHD in the past several months. Apparently, I am one of them. At the ripe old age of 40-ahem-ahem I peeled back another layer of life’s onion and got diagnosed with ADHD. It’s a bit of a mental lighting bolt when you’re middle-aged and you feel like you have a pretty good handle on yourself and the things that make you tick and it turns out… nah… not totally.

A former coworker of mine had a favorite phrase that springs to mind. I waited tables at a fishing resort when I was in college. She would yell from the kitchen, “Don’t get your butt in front of the wagon.” The visuals of that were always confusing, but it stuck in the spiderwebs of my mind. It meant don’t get ahead of yourself. Calm down. Probably stop talking to her. What does this have to do with ADHD? I’ll get there. But I’d also like to point out that I’ve gone from ADHD, to middle age, to fishing resorts, to butts and wagons in two short paragraphs. And that, ladies and gentlemen and human-kind, is how ADHD works.

The most surprising part of this journey is finding that girls and women are vastly understudied when it comes to ADHD, which is why they are overwhelmingly underdiagnosed compared to men. ADHD in women doesn’t always look the same. Oftentimes we are over-organized, over-achieving, over-people-pleasing, over-stressed, and over-onioned because every single thought has 20 layers and sub-thoughts.

But also, ADHD can be fun. For example, my brain can leap frog from ADHD to wagons in the blink of an eye. I will probably challenge myself to write more paragraphs that span unrelated topics, like growing sunflowers and Alexander the Great’s “buried alive” debacle. Maybe I can tie together the Oak Ridge Boy’s groundbreaking hit “Elvira” with organic coconut cooking spray. I can connect my coworkers wagon idiom to its historical root, which is probably a hillbilly variant on a line from King Lear, “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse.” So in the spirit of disparate topics, and ADHD, and wagons and butts, it would seem that my former coworker was quoting Shakespeare.

Knowing ourselves is hard. Finding out we have neuro-different brains after we’ve already lived half of our lives is at best curious, and at its worst, discouraging. Aristotle said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”  And while Aristotle and my former coworker may have had their differences, they would have agreed that knowing yourself is a lifelong process and you should calm down about it. So I’ll keep my butt in my seat, not in front of a wagon (I still can’t visually grasp how such a thing could happen), and learn more about how ADHD is both a superpower and a wild-brain-horse to be wrangled, how it affects me, and how I can peel back another life-onion-layer to figure out how to live a more productive and self aware life.