Thirty-Seven
Unsinkable Storyteller: Jen Metzlar
When I was diagnosed with ADHD at 37 years old, it was a relief.
Full-body relief.
The everything-makes-sense-now kind.
The kind where your nervous system exhales before your mind can catch up.
I had already learned, through earlier mental health diagnoses, that accurate language can be stabilizing.
This felt like that again.
Finally, there were words for something I had been living inside of for years.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t disruptive.
But I was well-behaved.
I did well in school. I followed the rules. I met expectations. I tried hard.
Because of that, ADHD was never on anyone’s radar. Including mine.
And that’s not uncommon.
ADHD in women is frequently underdiagnosed, especially in those who achieve, comply, and compensate while building intricate systems behind the scenes just to keep things manageable.
For most of my life, I thought my intensity was something to tame.
I thought my nervous system was simply overactive.
I live with complex PTSD, and I’ve done a lot of healing work around it. I understood hypervigilance. I understood anxiety. I understood why my body might default to being on high alert.
But even with all of that, something still didn’t fully add up.
There was a pattern I couldn’t quite explain.
I just didn’t have language for it yet.
From the outside, I was high functioning.
So I built structure.
Lists. Systems. Routines. Over-preparing. Thinking ahead. Managing variables.
It worked until it didn’t.
What I first called burnout was actually collapse.
The systems stopped holding. Small things felt overwhelming. I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix.
My relationship was suffering. I was tightly wound. Reactive. I could feel that I was no longer able to sustain the level of internal regulation I had maintained for decades, and that scared me.
Out of the blue, someone forwarded me an article about ADHD in adults and wrote, “I thought of you when I read this.”
It was unexpected.
At first, I laughed it off as unlikely.
But I couldn’t shake it.
I brought it up with my psychologist. Initially, she said it didn’t quite track. Part of me felt embarrassed. Part of me felt relieved.
Maybe I was reaching.
Still, I kept reading.
As I read more, I started to see myself in things people were describing on message boards. Experiences I hadn’t realized had names before.
It wasn’t about distraction the way I had imagined.
It was about pacing.
How small things could feel insurmountably urgent.
How difficult it was to start something simple, even when I wanted to.
How I would clean a toilet before doing the thing I knew I actually needed to do.
How I could swing from intense focus to full-body, utter exhaustion.
How my mind treated future possibilities as if they were happening right now.
This was how it showed up in my life.
The diagnostic process was vulnerable. I worried I wouldn’t be believed. I worried it would be dismissed as anxiety again.
When the diagnosis finally came, I didn’t feel boxed in.
I felt understood.
It didn’t erase the trauma or negate the anxiety.
But it gave my experience context.
It allowed me to see my rigidity as a strategy rather than a flaw.
My hyper-control as compensation.
My burnout as nervous system exhaustion.
My urgency as wiring.
Being diagnosed at 37 didn’t change who I am.
It shifted how I understand myself.
There’s grief in that, for the younger version of me who worked so hard to be good, capable, steady.
But there’s also compassion.
And relief.
Not because ADHD explains everything.
But because I finally understood that my brain wasn’t broken.
It was doing exactly what it was wired to do.
And once I understood that, I could begin building a life that works with it.
---
Warmly,
Jennifer Metzlar
Founder, Human Centered
