Miss America on Achieving and ADD
Are you working harder than everyone else, just to keep your head above water? Have you ever wondered why?
Emma Broyles is an achiever. The current Miss America is many “firsts”: the first Korean American woman and the first Alaskan to win the title. She’s also been diagnosed with ADD and a type of obsessive compulsive disorder called dermatillomania. She compulsively picks at her acne, until her face bleeds.
Emma wants to go to medical school. She got into pageants as a way to earn money for school. As I heard her story, I was struck by the incredible amount of extra work she put in every day, to achieve those goals. No one ever suggested that she needed help or should get tested. Her tenacity shocked me, but it’s a story I’ve heard from other people who have ADHD, anxiety, or who learn differently. Anxious achievers can be good at slipping under the radar. But the price they pay is dear.
A lifelong straight A student, at 19, Emma began to struggle in school. She did some research and learned that women with ADD tend to get much later diagnoses than boys, but the symptoms felt right to her. And she says, “once I finally got with a doctor and got medicated, it was like the blinds were taken off from my eyes. All of a sudden everything was so easy. I was taking 21 credits and I was taking organic chemistry and some really tough classes, but all of a sudden it was like straight As, easy peasy, way less work than I had to put in before. It was crazy how much it changed my life."
Like many women with ADD, Emma’s symptoms looked much different than we typically associate. She wasn't hyper or all over the place. She was a driven, excellent student who’d developed a labyrinthine coping system to succeed in school.
And that was the thing about Emma- she’s perfect, right? Emma was in all honors programs, always getting straight As, a musician, a passionate volunteer. She notes, “behind the scenes I had to put four times as much effort into everything that I did to make sure that I was at the same level as my peers.”
She explains that “It’s hard for me to get my brain to focus on one thing. And so I'd sit through math class for example, and I wouldn't have absorbed any piece of information from that hour long class. And so I'd have to go back home at the end of the day and reteach myself everything that we learned in that class.”
"I think about how much time I spent in high school having to reteach myself lectures and concepts from classes that I missed during the daytime and how much time that took out of my life. Because after school, you go to swim practice and then I wouldn't get home at 4:30. And then usually I'd have some volunteer sort of thing to do. And then I'd sit down and reteach myself all that I needed to learn that I missed during the day. And of course, I didn't realize that this wasn't normal. I thought that this was what all my friends did. I thought that this was just part of going to school and being in high school."
"And then I would get started on my homework. By that time, after eating dinner, it would be 9:00 PM. And then of course procrastination is a huge part of having ADD or ADHD. And so I put it off, put it off, put it off. And then I'd finally get started at like 11:00 PM, go to bed at like 1:00 AM and then have to be up by 5:30 for school the next day. So it was a nightmare.”
“But I had no idea that wasn't normal. That was normal for me and I assumed that was normal for everybody else.”
I spoke with Laura Key, host of the ADHD Aha! podcast, who herself has ADHD. I asked Laura: what are two questions you can ask yourself if you feel you’re working too hard to keep up and you don’t know how to change things?
First, Laura noted that perfectionist tendencies may lead you to try to cover up what you’re struggling with and work way harder- just to pretend everything is fine.
She suggests asking yourself, “Where is this motivation to work so hard coming from?” Is it, “I cannot be perceived as not being the best at something so I’m just going to get stuck on it for hours and work ‘til 4 in the morning”? Or, is it really that I care so deeply about the work and I really want to get it right.” Shame and fear of being revealed underlies so many of our motivations, and it’s important to tease out what’s really motivating your overwork. High achievers learn to overcompensate, and the stakes feel very high.
Second, Laura asks, “Are you struggling with time management, procrastination, or hyperfocus”? These are tied up into the executive functioning difficulties around ADHD and can take up a lot of time.
Laura suggests you think about a task you were working hard on. How many times did you get distracted? Leave and start something new? If you had more control over focus and time management, would it have been easier?
And then get the help you need to manage your disability! Emma is proof that help is out there