ADHD and High Expectations: Why I Cried in the Office Bathroom

And the cost of maintaining a ruse of perfection

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

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I stood there in the bathroom at work. Tears streaming down my face. Trying not to make any noise. I had just made another mistake, and my manager caught it.

I lived in fear of that every day. That someone was finally going to figure out that I couldn’t keep anything together. That this organization they saw was actually the ruse that it was.

I would excessively manage every aspect of my job. Worked so hard to make sure I didn’t drop anything. Never missed an email. Never had a spelling error. Never missed a detail.

I would pile on the to-dos to make up for what I lacked.

Surely, if I got more done than everyone, I would finally be worth the salary they were paying me.

Here were the expectations I had of myself:

• Never make a mistake
• Never miss an email
• Never miss a detail
• Always be upbeat and smiling
• Always meet the goals
• Deliver perfect work
• Consistency

The list could go on and on.

I had such high, unrealistic expectations of myself that left absolutely no room for error. For fluctuating energy. For life.

And it was costing me. A lot.

That time in the bathroom wasn’t the first (it wasn’t even the 10th). I was routinely sure I would be fired. I worried about whether I missed anything every second of every day. Weekends were spent worrying about what I didn’t get done and how I would make up for it next week.

My standards were so high. Even a well-caffeinated person, just back from the most restful vacation of their life, fully optimized with the best productivity systems, couldn’t live up to the high bar of perfection that I created for myself.

These expectations were all to make up for what I felt like I lacked. What I felt like my ADHD made me incapable of. To keep myself from making the mistakes that I (and literally everyone else on this earth) was bound to make at some point.

I spent so much energy trying to protect myself from a reality that wasn’t true. Every mistake someone caught felt like evidence that I wasn’t doing enough. That I wasn’t enough.

Those criticisms grew in my mind. Amplified. Repeated. Became my truth. The lie that I was led to believe.

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