It was a relief to finally give it a name. For as long as they could remember, their brains had felt like “a pinball machine”; “a Wall Street trading floor in the 1980s”; “a constant CNN news ticker”; a department store at the end of the day, “when everything’s a little disheveled”; “15 computer tabs all open at the same time”; “a complicated intersection” without a traffic light. They had been good girls, smart girls, who coped with the nonstop motor of their minds by twirling their hair and picking their cuticles. By the time they grew up, they were perfectionists, neurotics, type A.
They had managed to get through college, graduate school, nursing school, law school. People praised their fastidiousness and how much they took on. They were constantly late, so they set timers. They scribbled notes and kept calendars; if they didn’t write it down, it was gone. They developed systems to elicit focus — spreadsheets, schedules, repetition — and once on task, they could do nothing else for hours or days. People praised how dogged they could be, their ability to go full throttle. Then suddenly, in their 30s, 40s, or 50s, the systems failed. They searched for the fault point and found an answer on TikTok, in a friend’s newsletter, through a co-worker. It came up during couples therapy or after their child was diagnosed or on the day they first sat across from a psychiatrist because they thought they were losing their mind. They asked themselves variations of the same question: If it had been there all along, why hadn’t anyone noticed?
