A new start after 60: I was diagnosed with ADHD – and stopped hating myself
Jean Ward always wondered if there was something wrong with her, and hated herself for it. The feeling started at school, where she could see a stork in a knot of her wooden desk, but the blackboard failed to hold her attention. Her sense of shame and displacement grew until, at 71, she learned she had “severe ADHD”, and finally began to accept herself.
“There’s an empowerment that comes with diagnosis,” she says. “And confidence. Maybe I’m not as awful as I thought I was.”
It was Ward’s partner, Derek, a retired GP, who initially raised the subject. He was reading the Sunday papers. “Look at this,” he said, showing Ward an interview with an author with ADHD. “It could be you.” Ward wrote to her doctor, and, after an assessment, was diagnosed in April 2023.
Ward, 72, describes herself as “all over the place” – “I butt into Derek’s train of thought” – while Derek is “a well-organised person with a superb memory. I get rounded up and pulled back into the world. We dovetail together.” They have been together for 20 years, and the relationship has given Ward a longed-for sense of compatibility and belonging.
As the daughter of teachers, Ward’s school struggles stung. She even missed her art O-level exam because she forgot about it, but after an audition was accepted at Dartington College of Arts in Devon to study music. Within a few years, she had gained qualifications, a husband and a teaching job.
In early adulthood, Ward strived to make life work on the conventional path she had taken. She married twice, each marriage lasting more than a decade, and had three children. “But I didn’t know myself at all,” she says. “I used to have awful bouts of depression. I was married to the wrong person, holding down a job, and raising a family.” She experienced emotions intensely and her “tendency to lose or forget things” meant she lived “with a constantly high level of anxiety”.
“A lot of people [with ADHD] flit around,” she says. Not Ward, who clung to her job as a music teacher at a secondary school, “like a drowning person to a piece of driftwood”.
One evening, in her mid-40s, having filed the department paperwork, Ward arrived at her orchestra rehearsal as usual – she played double bass – but outside the door, she froze. “I couldn’t move. It was almost a relief. Something inside had snapped.” The next day she visited her GP, who diagnosed severe depression.
“I thought everything I did was bound to fail. It didn’t matter how hard I was working. I couldn’t trust myself. I wanted to appear normal. I didn’t, somehow. In the end, you hate yourself. Yet at the same time, you know you’re not as dreadful a person as you assume other people think you are.”
She recovered and took a part-time teaching job, but the sense of being somehow flawed didn’t leave her. After her second marriage ended, she started an art foundation course at the local college in Shrewsbury. She was 52 and some of her fellow students were people she had taught at school. Walking to the studio one day, she passed a group of lads. “Hello, Miss,” one said. Then, to his friends: “That’s Miss Ward. She went mental.”
At the time, she laughed, but the stigma “was shocking … The more people share their experiences, the better.”
A degree in fine art followed, then a master’s – and Derek, whom she met through a friend. She worked part-time as a supply teacher, and sold paintings, based on family photographs, that captured her alienation in childhood, before eventually retiring from teaching at 65.
Since her diagnosis, Ward has had no depression and the anxiety has subsided. Managing her empathy and emotions has changed the way she relates to her adult children. “I love them to bits, but you have to give people space,” she says.
Counselling has helped, as has medication. Strategies such as lists, routines and special places for keys have improved organisation. Crucially, Ward repeats a mantra daily, despite initial resistance to the idea, which begins with the words: “I accept myself.”
“I shouldn’t have hated myself the way I did, just because I couldn’t do what other people were doing. Low self-esteem made me judge myself too harshly,” she says. “Actually, I’ve done pretty damn well.”
