how an adhd diagnosis helped change journo matilda boseley’s worldview
Her book, The Year I Met My Brain, is out now.
Matilda Boseley has a pretty rich set of skills under her belt. She’s an award-winning social media reporter and has even won a Quill Award for Innovation in Journalism, not to mention a healthy heaping of other fancy awards and nominations, too.
At 23, she began to realise she had ADHD from a pretty unexpected source: TikTok. Following a formal diagnosis, Matilda used her reporting instincts to figure out what this meant for her now, and how it may have played a part in her childhood and soon put together a book, The Year I Met My Brain, for help on how to navigate the complex world of adult ADHD. We had a chat with Matilda to talk about everything that she’s learned, which you can read through below.
Hi there Matilda! Tell us a bit about yourself. Yeah, so, I'm mostly a reporter for The Guardian. I’ve just released a book that talks about adults, such as myself, discovering they have ADHD.
What drew you to journalism as a career, and what is your relationship with it? This is a bit of a weird thing to say, but I just like telling people the summaries of things; stories, films, the news and pretty much anything else. But in high school, I convinced myself that I was going to be a lawyer because it felt like that was the quote-on-quote impressive thing to do. Luckily, I had a panic attack just before a law exam because I was nervous and I had just watched a super-traumatic episode of Grey's Anatomy right before. I’m glad I did because it landed me where I am now!
You are mostly known for your reporting on TikTok. What is it like navigating the news in this digital space? When I first started reporting on TikTok, it was very much being in uncharted waters. I knew that it would be something that was useful because while I was of course seeing a lot of dancing and cute animals, there was also a fair number of nuanced discussions of politics, social issues and current affairs, and it reminded me of when I was fourteen on Tumblr back in the day and learning about social justice for the first time. There wasn’t a lot of fact-checking or reliable sources though, which is what inspired me to start reporting on the Guardian’s TikTok page. Young people are very hungry for news content, it's just there are not a lot of people speaking directly to them or using social media in the same way they do. I hope that I’ve helped people become more aware of what’s going on in the world.
What inspired you to write How I Met My Brain? I originally just pitched the topic as an article and was like, “Oh, by the way, it's about me”. It was a bit of a backdoor way into doing it, but I got into so many conversations about ADHD that I realised that there’s so much more I can talk about that I wasn’t sure that only an article could include. We are seeing a massive change in the number of people who are recognising the symptoms within themselves as well as the number of people who are taking it seriously. There’s been such a cultural shift with the topic of ADHD, and I truly believe that being diagnosed was probably one of the single best things that ever happened to me. You know, it was one of those life-changing moments in terms of just really understanding who I was in the past and helped me recontextualise my entire life. You know, I had the ability as a reporter to verify information and explain it in an understandable way, while still including a certain amount of my own personal life to it.
What are the pros and cons of discovering new things about yourself via social media? It’s a really interesting dichotomy because, on one hand, social media can make you aware of things you might not have ever thought of before, but there’s also a severe lack of fact-checking. I remember everyone talking about having OCD back in the day because they liked to be clean and organised (like pretty much all humans) and they read a list of symptoms on Tumblr without proper nuance, which really affected how other people viewed the illness to this day. I do understand the fear of these things becoming widespread because they can be misused, but I also think that when we're talking about getting diagnosed with ADHD, we're talking about a situation where women especially have been ignored by medical professionals and there's a lot of people who have been trapped out of this diagnosis. So, there is a huge amount of benefit with this information now becoming widespread.
Why do you think girls and women are so underdiagnosed with ADHD? In terms of why girls aren't diagnosed, there's a lot of different elements. It seems like it's more common for girls to have an image of the inattentive presentation of ADHD rather than the hyperactive or combined, even if then they are much more internalized symptoms. Even before we get to school, little girls are told off for being loud and interrupting and boisterous in a way that little boys aren't. Women and girls are a lot more self-aware of what behaviours are acceptable and which behaviours aren't. I want to emphasise that this is not a scientifically proven statement, it's just something that people do theorise, because it's pretty hard to research that. Because we usually view ADHD as sort of a behavioural classroom issue that we often associate with doing poorly in school, failing classes and being loud in class, so if you're quiet, shy and good with schoolwork then people aren’t necessarily going to see the obvious signs when it comes to ADHD.
What advice can you give to other adults discovering they have ADHD? When we talk about ADHD treatment, I think a lot of the time the focus is really on, you know, how to make sure you're not forgetting appointments, how to focus on work and chores, which is wonderful, amazing advice. But if you discover you have ADHD later in life, it will probably be the most life-changing and impactful thing that basically helps to rewrite all these other moments in your life. It’s a lot of learning about yourself and recontextualising so many parts of your life, which is incredibly rewarding but also very difficult. It’s all a journey.