How grief and ADHD intersect

Welcome to 2020. I mean 2025. As I’ve been checking in with friends and meeting with clients, I’ve been hearing something that I, myself, have experienced as we entered this new year. When people have caught up with me recently and asked me about last year and the beginning of 2025, I’m usually pretty honest with them. 2024 was a rough year for me and truly dragged me at times, personally and professionally. I look at the first weeks of 2025 and have said that 2025 came in swinging like “aht, aht! 2024 is not done yet.” Oof.

Sound familiar? In many ways, the past several years and months may bring up feelings of grief and loss similar to 2020. We’ve seen before our eyes the ways in which history has been repeating itself and the social, political, emotional, and psychological ramifications of what the pandemic unearthed. While the acute phase of the pandemic is over, our work as healers and mental health practitioners is not. We are still helping people process while we ourselves are processing in real time the rippling effects of our country reckoning with overlapping and compounding issues.

For me, I’ve experienced and witnessed that my grief has continued to get increasingly more complicated, and it got even more complex with situations out of my control and as a result of others’ actions. ADHD and grief were colliding in big ways—it felt challenging to complete tasks because focusing was so hard, everything seemed important, and it felt hard to discern and prioritize. Brain fog and confusion felt like it was at an all-time high. 

Then there was the decision of whether I needed to explain to people in life what I was experiencing. Some people would understand the overwhelming impact of grief, but since ADHD is something I’ve managed for a while, there might be less grace for it. However, I had to realize that I was managing ADHD in this new context of complicated grief, which also meant a new experience of navigating how to process both in my professional and personal life. I needed to give myself grace and not expect myself to have the same timelines I would have if I weren’t experiencing both of these things at once. My experience made me even more curious about the intersection of grief and neurodivergence, specifically ADHD, so I developed a Venn Diagram to visualize it:

If you have found yourself at the corner of grief and ADHD, what else would you add to this Venn diagram? Feel free to DM me on Instagram and let me know!

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How to give yourself the space to grieve

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Welcome to Untethered to Rooted