top of page

"I feel like something's wrong"


How did dancing save me?


Hey guys, welcome to The Disordered Diaries. If you haven't already, please read my ‘about me’ section to get to know me a bit more and have a better understanding of why I created this blog. I'll be touching on topics surrounding mental health, gender, and race but I mainly want to delve into the highs and lows of being undiagnosed, medically diagnosed, or just simply not knowing what's wrong. I hope to highlight to you as a reader that it’s okay to not have order in your life.


So let’s get into it


At the age of 21, I was diagnosed with ADHD. A story you may have heard many times before, grown women being diagnosed with ADHD and changing the view of a condition honed by disruptive little boys. For me, it made me think about the impact it so heavily had on my life and how it constantly left me thinking “I feel like something's wrong”. So today, I want to discuss why I believe dancing is the only way I mentally made it through my condition, and pull back the layers of what is believed to be the best treatment for ADHD for many: physical activity. For you to understand this properly, I want to share with you my story…


From about the age of 5 I was deemed a quiet, mature, and creative child, spending countless playtimes inside painting and drawing. At this age, I was quite obsessive about the unknown; I would pick things up, learn everything about them and then move on to the next. I was considered an over-achiever and had a very high reading age. But I also had a twin brother who was well-liked, bubbly, and disruptive but specifically struggled more in school. In hindsight, he could have been society's depiction of ADHD at that age. My mum briefly thought I had autism but I was extremely friendly and outgoing so this speculation was soon put to bed. Unlike many black families, we were extremely aware of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions. A few years later, my youngest sibling would be diagnosed with severe autism.


If I’m honest, I found primary school a breeze. I would refuse to do homework and frankly found more mental stimulation in my head and thoughts, spending hours at home writing stories. I started dancing at about age 8. My brother and I were scouted to start weekly classes at a ballet company, and we were good, like really good. I then went on to dance at the royal ballet school and my brother still to this day dances professionally. For many years, right through secondary school, I began to find I was both extremely impulsive, constantly having mood swings, and using dance for emotional regularity. So what happened? I didn’t know I had ADHD, towards the end of secondary school I noticed I wasn’t actually revising but was writing down things I liked that I had written before from memory. I then went into sixth form where I mentally fell apart, and in my first year of sixth form, I decided to stop dancing completely. Why you may ask? Because I wanted to be a doctor and had badly injured my knee, I thought dancing was going to be a distraction to my educational success, when really and truly it was the only thing holding me together - I just didn’t realise it at the time. I began to feel low all the time, I couldn’t revise, I couldn’t think, and I constantly felt overwhelmed, leading me to abruptly end my relationship at the time. I went to university, studied psychology, and again thought to myself “I feel like something's wrong”, after watching myself constantly struggle. I started to ask myself why I resonated with other neurotypicals so well and why I was so interested in understanding the mind. I began learning more about ADHD in my studies and found myself resonating with a vast majority of it, but I wasn’t loud or constantly bouncing off the walls, how could it be ADHD?

For so many years, when I was younger, I was coping well but not anymore. After years of speculation, I was diagnosed with combined ADHD. But what struck me is that the doctor had the nerve to say ‘I think you should try and start dancing again’.


Soon after, at a time when I felt quite overwhelmed, - which was most of the time - I decided to dance and did for hours and hours. When I stopped, I finally felt relaxed and it was something I couldn’t fathom. It reminded me of how my mum would say to me that when I danced it was like she was looking at a different person. It took me back to one of the first ADHD papers I read at university from Ng et al.. (2017) in which they concluded that after reviewing 30 studies, exercise could be considered a beneficial intervention for ADHD symptoms in children and teens.


So how did dancing save me? It appeared to be the only thing to slow me down mentally, and it still is, because somehow passion always triumphs over the mind.


So I end my very first blog post with a quote from Eric R.Kandel’s The Disordered Mind:

“Memory is the glue that holds our life together”



Comments


Drop Me a Line, Let Me Know What You Think

Thanks for submitting!

© 2035 by The Disordered Diaries. Powered and secured by Wix

bottom of page