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When Everything Everywhere All at Once came out in 2022, I did not get it. The film felt chaotic, scattered and overstimulating.
Still, I was intrigued when feminist activist Mona Eltahawy called it the “menopause multiverse”. My best friend, meanwhile, said it perfectly captured her ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) brain, which, she said, feels like a busy mall on weekends.
I understood neither comparison. I was 46 that year, not yet perimenopausal, and most likely neurotypical. Maybe I was simply not the intended audience.
Two years later, the film would take on a different meaning, after a diagnosis that reframed not just that year, but every difficult year before it.
But back then, I was too deep in my own chaos to make sense of anyone else’s metaphors. My ex-husband had died suddenly, and in the aftermath I found myself solo parenting in a foreign country while trying to keep up with my studies and manage the financial turmoil that followed. I had to return to Jakarta earlier than planned and finish my master’s thesis and the required internship thousands of miles from campus.
Back home, while I was trying to hold everything together, my body was giving out. Every morning I woke up already exhausted, too drained even for the simple exercise I used to rely on. My finger joints felt stiff; the stiffness crept up into my left shoulder. Brain fog blurred the days, and sleep, which I needed most, became elusive.
Yet life does not pause for one crisis at a time. It doesn’t excuse you from the demands that predate your grief and outlast your exhaustion.
This is why so many women receive their ADHD diagnosis in their 40s. Perimenopause doesn’t cause it; it unmasks it.
Caregiving duties continued for my aging parents. My son, meanwhile, struggled to find his footing when he returned to school. And then came the news that his struggles had a name: ADHD.
With all of this, I could barely muster sentences for the 10,000-word thesis requirement. Sometimes even the sight of my laptop screen made me nauseous. Other times, I ended up just staring blankly at it or rereading the same notes.
When I consulted my psychiatrist, his question caught me off guard. “Have you ever been tested for ADHD? It’s usually genetic. Since your son has it, it may have been passed down from your side.”
The diagnosis I didn’t see coming
Hold up. Another plot twist. Somewhere, Michelle Yeoh was laughing at me.
“Do you often procrastinate, or find yourself only starting things close to a deadline?” my doctor asked.
Well, I’m a journalist. That’s what we do.
“Do you have difficulty organizing things, decluttering, tidying up?”
I have a tiger mom. She wouldn’t let me get away with that.
“Are you often late to appointments?”
Again, tiger mom. And I’m quite punctual.
He noticed task paralysis: the way someone with ADHD can be fully capable of doing something, yet find themselves frozen before they even begin. It isn’t laziness or avoidance. The brain struggles to regulate dopamine, which affects motivation and the ability to simply “activate” and start. As tasks feel overwhelming or high-stakes, the person freezes instead. For years, I had mistaken this for procrastination, or pressure, or just how journalists operate.
It took a few more sessions and months of trialing medication before the confirmation came: My son and I share the same wiring. The same brain that had carried me through deadlines and crises and grief, restless, nonlinear, never quite at rest, was also the one that had been quietly working against me all along.
The diagnosis had me reeling. I had known ADHD was genetic, but I was so sure my son’s had come from his late dad’s side. I should have taken the clue from his classroom teacher’s words, “he often daydreams and is highly distracted,” or from the knowing stare of his psychologist during the pre-diagnosis interview. Those descriptions felt familiar. They fit me too.
What perimenopause unmasks
The problem is that our general understanding of ADHD is built around the H-word: hyperactivity. It’s well-documented that ADHD research and diagnostic criteria were developed almost entirely around hyperactive young boys, the classic image of a kid who can’t sit still in class. That’s partly why my initial test scored low. I’m not a young boy. And even my 10-year-old son didn’t fit that classic type.
For girls and women, ADHD tends to present differently. Instead of external hyperactivity, the restlessness lives in our minds. Most of us are more inattentive than disruptive, which means we don’t raise alarm bells as long as we’re performing well enough. We’re also better at masking, hiding the scramble behind competence. So we get labeled anxious, emotional or perfectionist. Sometimes all three.
So women like me spend decades building coping mechanisms that work just well enough to keep us under the radar.
Until perimenopause arrives and strips them away.
The estrogen drop worsens everything: focus, memory, fatigue, emotional regulation. The system I had quietly constructed over a lifetime, the lists, the urgency, the over-preparing, the sheer force of pushing through, suddenly stopped working. And when that collapse arrived alongside personal turbulence and graduate school, it opened the door to something uglier: a spiral of self-blame, shame and fear.
This is why so many women receive their ADHD diagnosis in their 40s. Perimenopause doesn’t cause it; it unmasks it. And yet this link remains severely under-researched. The medical system still knows too little about women’s bodies, and ADHD in women is part of that same long blind spot.
The name that changed the light
I am fortunate to have had the resources to get diagnosed at all. The diagnosis doesn’t solve the chaos, but it changes the lighting. Hundreds of small memories begin to rearrange themselves, and the rearranging is not painless.
What I once called laziness, inconsistency, or personal failure now reads differently: masking, overcompensation, invisible labor. My father’s voice still echoes: “She is the brightest among my children, but the laziest.” He wasn’t wrong about the brightness. He just couldn’t see what was underneath it. Neither could my bosses, who read my paralysis as indifference. Neither could the friends who drifted away, quietly tired of something they couldn’t name, and neither could I.
They weren’t entirely wrong, any of them. They were just working with incomplete information. So was I.
And so, part of what comes with a diagnosis is grief. Grief for the child who was bright enough to be held to a standard she was neurologically wired to struggle with. For the young woman who internalized every piece of criticism as rejection and truth. For all the years spent building a self out of apology.
With the right medication, therapy and strategies from my doctor, such as breaking tasks into smaller steps and working with my brain instead of against it, I finally completed my thesis. I graduated.
But I’m still in it. Still navigating hormones, attention, care work, and the daily unpredictability of a mind in transition. The grief doesn’t disappear with the diagnosis; it just becomes easier to hold. What shifts is the story you tell yourself about it. Less punishment, more curiosity. Less shame, more room.
Like Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang, I finally have the third eye. And for the first time, I’m using it to see myself, all my chaos, all my multiverses, with tenderness.
