Spring 2016, I was in my fourth semester at UMass Amherst. Technically, I could have just said I was a sophomore, but notice how I didn’t? That’s because I actually don’t remember what class I was in by then. I came to UMass as a transfer student after spending a year at another university, so my fourth semester at UMass was technically my sixth semester of college and...I’m getting off track. None of this actually matters.
Ahem. Back to our regularly scheduled personal essay.
While my exact classification that spring adds absolutely nothing useful to this story, the semester itself would become a major turning point in my life.
Long story short: your girl failed every. single. one. of her classes.
Now, I’m obviously not the first person to tank a semester of college, so why is this such a major revelation?
That’s where the power of context comes in.
To understand why that semester mattered so much, we have to go all the way back to my childhood. Sit tight, and if we’re lucky, I’ll eventually land this plane.
By pretty much every conventional measure, I was an excellent student. I was a school spelling bee champion. I was a regular on the Student of the Month board. I earned a silver Cum Laude medal for my performance on the National Latin Exam. I was just generally considered a bright kid. The only reason I rarely brought home straight As was because I often made a B in math. That is, until high school, when I got my first...
You know what? We don’t have to talk about that here.
At parent-teacher conferences, my teachers sang my praises. My mother was showered with compliments for raising such an intelligent, well-behaved child. There was really only one consistent “but”: they wished I would participate more in class.
And that tiny “but” was probably telling a much bigger story than anyone realized.
Because I wasn’t disruptive and generally excelled in my classes, no one really knew how much I was struggling internally.
I mean, how could they, right? My teachers were far too occupied managing students with more overt behavioral issues to even begin to suspect that their star student—the quiet one who caused no trouble—might be struggling too. In many ways, my reserved nature probably made their jobs easier.
But perhaps the most important piece of context is how little ADHD research at the time centered women and girls. We’ve made some progress by 2026, but two decades ago, ADHD in women and girls was hugely under-researched and poorly understood. The signs they had been taught to look for simply didn’t look like me.
So, in many ways, they had very little reason, or very few tools, to interpret what they were seeing as ADHD.
At home, it was pretty much more of the same. My mother had no reason to suspect I was struggling, especially when I was bringing home those glowing report cards.
It also didn’t help that many behaviors consistent with ADHD are the exact same behaviors often interpreted as signs of a poorly raised child. mal élevé—literally, “poorly raised”—is a very common phrase in Haitian Creole, used to describe children whose behavior falls outside of cultural expectations and social norms. So a child might be labeled mal élevé long before anyone would ever stop to consider whether there could be a neurological explanation for what they were seeing.
Mental illness and neurodivergence are also widely stigmatized and misunderstood within the Haitian community, with symptoms sometimes attributed to spiritual or supernatural causes rather than recognized as mental health or neurological concerns. That cultural context only further complicated the likelihood that anyone would have considered ADHD.
All this to say: as a good student, a girl, a Haitian, and not even a mal élevé? There was simply zero chance I was ever getting evaluated for ADHD.
I genuinely believe pigs would have flown first.
Unfortunately, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, the tree still fell.
So, although no one in my world seemed to notice, I had a few, umm…quirks. I dealt with overwhelming social anxiety. In class, I lived in constant fear of being singled out—whether that meant being called on to answer a question, asked to read aloud, or expected to participate in a class discussion.
I almost never raised my hand. And on the rare occasions that I did, it was usually to give the shortest answer possible. Even then, those moments were accompanied by that familiar tingling heat crawling up my back before settling across my face.
I also rarely felt like I actually learned anything in the classroom. I would sit there, apparently paying attention, while my mind was somewhere several zip codes away. Later on—usually the night before an exam—I would spend a few hours completely locked in on the subject and become an expert, quite literally overnight.
That National Latin Exam medal? Nobody knew I had crammed the night before to memorize a few semesters’ worth of a dead language.
And that spelling bee championship? I was such a shy kid that when I reached the final round, I purposely misspelled “balcony” because winning meant advancing to a more public competition.
I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that.
Actually, while we’re confessing things, let me tell you about Jordan.
No, I don't mean one of the very famous Michaels. I'm referring to Queen Rania's country.
I was in sixth grade, and we had been assigned a month-long country research project. I chose the West Asian country of Jordan. Somewhere along the way, I became enamored with Jordan’s beautiful queen, which made the research genuinely fun and much easier to focus on. I finished gathering the information within the first week or so.
Then came the poster board.
For reasons I could not have explained at the time, I simply could not start it.
The next thing I knew, it was Sunday evening, the project was due the following morning, and I STILL hadn’t told my mother that I needed a poster board. I remember how nervous I was as she sat down on my bed for our usual Sunday-night routine of doing my hair for the week. By then, I had no choice but to build up the courage to ask her to take me out to buy one. She was, understandably, annoyed.
We must have gone to two or three stores that night. Not one had a poster board in stock. Apparently, every child in the area had also been assigned a poster project—except their parents presumably knew about it before Sunday night.
Ever the problem solver, I decided to recycle an old poster board. I covered the remnants of the previous project with construction paper and created a clean slate for Jordan.
I worked well into the morning, which was a pretty stressful experience for a sixth grader with a reputation to maintain.
Monday morning, despite living literally across the street from my school, I walked into class late with an impressive poster board in hand. It was quickly declared the best one in the class.
The fact that several of my classmates didn’t even do the assignment only added to the almost ridiculous amount of hype surrounding my project. I remember sitting there, squirming in my seat as my teacher lectured my classmates about how they needed to be “more like Jenny.”
She was convinced the quality of my project was evidence of my excellent time-management skills. She clearly didn't notice that I was fighting sleep, exhausted from my all-nighter.
That was the story of my young life.
I was constantly praised for the outcome while privately knowing that the process looked nothing like what everyone imagined. Effective study habits and excellent time management were not responsible for my academic performance. Fear of failure could trigger an almost frightening ability to hyperfocus and absorb huge amounts of information at the last minute. My creativity was real, but some of my best problem-solving skills were being developed because I was constantly solving problems I had created for myself.
I didn’t have language for any of that then.
Years later, during undergrad, I would break down in my supervisor's office and admit that I felt like I was wearing a mask all the time (we'll revisit this later). Public-facing Jenny and private Jenny did not feel like the same person.
Looking back, I think that feeling had been with me for much longer than I realized.
When the system stopped working
I started undergrad in the fall of 2013. Issues in my home life had reached a boiling point, so I was relieved to be able to live on campus. That first year started strong. I made the Dean’s List my first semester.
By the second semester, things were beginning to unravel.
Years later, I would read research and writing about girls and women with ADHD that described a pattern I knew intimately: bright girls whose difficulties can be obscured by good grades, perfectionism, compensatory strategies, or environments structured enough to keep everything from falling apart.
Reading about that in my mid-20s shook me to my core. Honestly, even now, information about girls and ADHD can make me emotional because so much of it feels like someone describing parts of my childhood that nobody, including me, knew how to interpret at the time.
But basically, the “systems” I had used to coast through primary school—and I use that word veryyy loosely—were no match for college.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t have the language to describe what was happening, so I invented my own explanation. In my mind, the revelation unfolded like an old Western showdown:
Saloon doors swinging open, dust curling across the floor, an imaginary version of myself stepping into the sunlight with one hand over her holster. She was there to expose the fear I couldn’t name: that I had spent years pretending to be smarter, more capable, and more prepared than I really was, and that college had finally given everyone a reason to see through me.
“Well, well, well," she’d say. “Your luck’s gone, fraudster. Drop the act. You’re exposed.”
Poor Western metaphor aside, that belief truly fed my anxiety, and I started shrinking.
I withdrew. I avoided friends. I spent entirely too much time alone in my dorm room.
And then there was THAT Public Speaking class.
Here’s another story I’ve never personally told anyone. I’m specifying that I haven’t told it because it happened in front of an entire class, so perhaps one of those people has been out there telling this story for years.
So boom.
Public Speaking was a required course during the first year of my program. I’ve already established that I was a shy kid, and unfortunately that was not something I magically grew out of. A public speaking course was quite literally the stuff of my wildest nightmares.
Somehow, I managed to get through most of the course unscathed.
But the end of the semester rolled around, and it was time for the final presentation.
I believe we had to recite a speech? I genuinely don’t remember. In fact, most of my memories from my 20s are either fragmented or nonexistent. Depression is a bi...female dog. (Not my pup, though. She’s perfect.)
What I do remember is panicking in front of about 30 classmates and my professor.
To say I bombed the presentation would be an understatement. I vaguely remember sprinting back to my seat. Or out of the classroom. Honestly, your guess is almost as good as mine.
I meant it when I said my memory of this particular traumatic event is fragmented. My brain effectively blocked out most of that experience.
It did preserve the humiliation, though. More than a decade later, I can still feel it as if it happened yesterday.
By the end of that year, I was ready to transfer schools. My mental health was in shambles, and I thought changing environments might fix it.
There’s just one tiny problem with escaping an external environment when the issue is internal.
Wherever you go, there you are.
The semester everything fell apart
And now, finally, we’re back at UMass Amherst.
Spring 2016. Fourth semester.
See? We landed the plane eventually. Bumpy ride and all.
My mental health had not improved because, well, I wasn’t actually doing anything to address it. I just kept pushing through.
As far as I was concerned, asking for help was out of the question. The idea that I needed help felt like a direct assault on my competence. Nobody else in my circle needed disability accommodations to get through school, so what did it say about me if I did?
Mind you, I had absolutely no idea whether that was true. I was just assuming.
And you know what they say about assuming.
By that semester, depression had overtaken my life. I don’t think I attended any of my classes more than two or three times.
I have a clear memory of heading to campus one day, making it all the way to my classroom, only to sprint right back out and spend the next few minutes bawling my eyes out in the nearest restroom. And then I just went home.
So yes, since you generally have to attend class to pass class, I failed all of them.
What I remember most about that period is the bizarre combination of panic and apathy. It almost felt like an out-of-body experience. I was a bystander watching my own life crash around me, fully aware of what was happening but somehow unable to intervene.
The semester ended. My professors recorded their Fs. I quietly moved on to the summer.
That summer, I stayed in my college town and worked my campus job. When fall came around, my supervisor pulled me aside for a meeting. She had noticed a sharp decline in the quality of my work. She wanted to know what was going on.
Up until then, I thought I was masking well enough to fly under the radar. I was wrong.
Sitting in my supervisor's office under questioning, I realized I was exhausted from pretending.
Pretending I wasn’t walking around with a dark cloud following me.
Pretending I was a happy-go-lucky college student.
Pretending I hadn’t just bombed an entire semester and gotten an academic warning stamped onto my record. Not to mention losing a scholarship that was covering my tuition.
For the first time in my life, I was simply too tired to keep the mask on.
I burst into tears.
Everything came out. The depression. The masking. The failed semester. Everything.
Because this was a campus job, my supervisor was connected to university staff and resources. She connected me with counseling services and a dean who helped me access the interventions I desperately needed.
I was formally diagnosed with depression, and with the support of my counselor and dean, I was able to retroactively withdraw from the courses I had failed. I didn’t even know that was a thing! I was also granted disability accommodations. Although I hate to admit this (but I will because I can't lie to my internet besties), I was often too embarrassed to actually use them.
I still don’t have the words to express how much gratitude I have for the people who rallied around me during that period. At a time when I was quietly drowning, they moved mountains for me.
There is so much more I could say about that chapter of my life, but this isn't my memoir, and we don't have all day.
So, postscript: Somehow, after everything, I graduated with a 3.043 GPA, with a degree in Public Health, minors in Sociology and Education, and two additional certificates. Before graduating, I studied abroad in Ghana—an experience that eventually inspired me to return after college as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Those experiences changed the trajectory of my life and pushed the limits of what I believed was possible for me.
Sometimes I sit with that entire story and genuinely cannot understand how everything worked out in the end.
I have no choice but to believe a higher power was watching out for me.
Depression explained a lot. But did it explain everything?
I wish I could tell you that I learned a profound lesson from undergrad, entered graduate school armed with all my new self-knowledge, and never struggled like that again.
That would make for a lovely narrative.
It would also be a lie. And I would never lie to my friends, remember?
I needed a leave of absence from graduate school...and from my job at the time, too. Maybe in a future piece, I’ll tell the story of how I tried to resign from that job at 4 a.m.
UGHH, I hate suspense too. Okay, so boom: it’s 2021, and I’m in grad school. I’m also working full-time. That’s a tough setup for anyone, but especially for someone whose mental health had the structural integrity of a folding chair at a family cookout. And then insomnia entered the chat. I was physically and mentally exhausted. One sleepless night, I found myself dreading the next day, and for whatever reason, my brain decided there was only one solution: quit my job. Not take a day off. Not call out sick. Quit. My. Job.
Sometime around 3 or 4 a.m., I found myself drafting a resignation email. Did I feel relieved after clicking send? I don’t remember.
Thankfully, I had a supervisor who genuinely cared about me. (It’s actually pretty amazing how often this has happened.) The next morning, she called and basically refused to accept my resignation. She reminded me that I had other options, like FMLA, and I decided to take that route instead. The end.
The good news is that, around that time, something had shifted. Instead of just trying to survive my struggles, I had started becoming curious about where they were coming from.
I knew depression was part of the problem. Anxiety was part of it too. But when I started looking back over my life, I began to wonder whether those diagnoses explained everything.
That was around the time I started learning about how ADHD can present in girls.
Suddenly, I was thinking about the little girl who sat quietly in class, looking at the teacher while her mind was worlds away.
I thought about how often I had said, “I can’t learn in class. I’ll just teach myself later.” I thought about the childhood bedroom that was only neat for about three hours every Saturday after I cleaned it.
I thought about the random test my class took in fifth grade, where I technically got all the answers right but still failed the exercise because I ignored my teacher’s now-suspiciously-continuous verbal prompting to “read the directions”—along with the written directions explicitly telling us to skip certain questions. What was that even about???
I thought about the chronic procrastination. The ability to hyperfocus when I was interested in something or sufficiently terrified by an approaching deadline. The masking. The excessive rumination. The time blindness. I'M ALWAYS RUNNING LATE! The poor executive functioning. The constant misplacing of things; pretty creatively too, I might add (i.e., that time I somehow managed to leave the TV remote in the fridge). And of course, my ever-declining mental health.
Listen. The clues were cluing, and I couldn't keep pretending it was business as usual.
I became determined to find a psychiatrist who could formally evaluate me for ADHD.
By the time I first raised the possibility with a psychiatrist, I was already in my late 20s.
She asked me one question.
“Did you do well in school as a child?”
Yes.
And that was effectively the end of the assessment.
According to her, because I had done well in school, I could not have ADHD.
That was it.
When knowing better still isn’t enough to speak up
I often regret not advocating for myself in that moment.
I should have pushed back. I should have added context. I had read the medical literature. I’m not a doctor, but I knew what she was telling me did not align with what I had learned.
Still, something about the certainty with which she dismissed me shut me down.
By then, I was also aware of the growing conversation around ADHD self-diagnosis. I worried that she saw me as another graduate of WebMD University who had read a few things online and decided she knew more than the professionals.
And to be clear, I don’t have some sweeping gripe with people who self-diagnose. There are legitimate reasons people do it. Barriers to healthcare are real. Sometimes people desperately need language for what they are experiencing long before they can access someone willing or able to formally evaluate them.
But, as a lover of nuance, I can hold multiple ideas in my head at the same time.
I can understand why people self-diagnose while also understanding why clinicians may approach self-diagnosis cautiously.
There was another layer to my silence too.
My psychiatrist was a Black woman.
As another Black woman, I was acutely aware of what professional Black women can face in their fields: being undermined, second-guessed, and treated as though their expertise is perpetually up for debate.
So I started second-guessing myself.
Would I want to push back if she were a white male provider? Was I undermining a Black woman professional by questioning her clinical judgment? Was I just determined to get the answer I had already decided I wanted?
All of those thoughts ran through my head.
So I retreated.
And I accepted an alternative diagnosis.
Looking back, I think that moment taught me something I didn’t fully understand yet: having information is not the same thing as feeling empowered to use it. Context matters in self-advocacy too.
Finally, an actual evaluation
A couple of years passed before I brought my suspicions to another psychiatrist.
I remember reading her bio and seeing that ADHD evaluations were conducted over multiple sessions. She also made it clear that her evaluation might not necessarily reach the same conclusion as previous treatment providers.
I felt relieved.
Not because I thought she was going to diagnose me with ADHD. In fact, the subtext of that phrase in her bio suggested that she might not confirm an ADHD diagnosis, even if a previous provider had. What relieved me was that she sounded like someone who took the process seriously and would be willing to actually evaluate the question.
That distinction mattered to me.
I was never looking for someone to simply confirm an ADHD diagnosis. I was looking for an explanation that made sense of the struggles I had spent years trying to understand.
Long story short, I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in my early 30s.
And then came a completely different journey.
The part after the answer
There is an interesting mixture of emotions that comes with receiving a diagnosis in adulthood.
I went through stages.
There was the what if stage.
What if somebody had noticed when I was a child?
What if I had known in college?
What if I had understood what was happening before things got so bad?
Then came anger.
Then grief.
And eventually, I landed somewhere closer to: everything happens for a reason.
I know that phrase can sound painfully cliché, but I genuinely believe that things have a way of working out for me. I believe the good, the bad, and the straight-up ugly experiences of my life are somehow working together to lead me toward the person I am supposed to become.
And no, receiving an ADHD diagnosis did not magically make every problem disappear. It did something that mattered just as much.
It gave me context.
Suddenly, experiences I had spent years filing under lazy, careless, undisciplined, too sensitive, fraud, or why on earth did you put the remote in the refrigerator? could be reconsidered with better information.
Not excused, but understood. There is a difference.
Maybe without those struggles, I wouldn’t have the same fire in me to spread awareness about neurodivergence among Black and brown women and girls. Maybe I wouldn’t care quite so much about context, or about the girls who are doing “too well” for anyone to wonder whether they are struggling. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so strongly about creating resources that give children and adults language for experiences they might otherwise spend years blaming themselves for.
I cannot go back and hand younger Jenny that language.
But I can do something with it now.
And if something I create here helps even one person understand herself, her child, or somebody she loves a little earlier, a little more clearly, or with a little more grace, then all of this will have been worth it.