Making Jewelry With ADHD: Part One

I got an ADHD Diagnosis for my 40th Birthday
(And it Changed My Whole F@&$ing Life)

I was nearly forty when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD. Looking back, the signs had been there for most of my life. I’d just spent a very long time wondering why I could concentrate for hours on something that interested me, yet struggle spectacularly with something I actually needed to do. 

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a long time, but what finally got me here was a lovely Google review from one of our newest Metalsmith Academy members. She'd spent a whole year watching me on YouTube, trying to decide whether to join, and she admitted she had endless questions. One of them stopped me in my tracks:

"Would you explain things clearly enough for someone with ADHD to understand?"

Oh, my friend. If only you knew.

If you've ever spent an entire Saturday sorting your gemstone collection after just going to find a stone for a ring you're making… hello. I suspect our brains might be related. 

I spent years thinking I just needed to try harder… but I really just needed to be taught things in a way that kept me engaged. Getting diagnosed didn't fix my brain, but it finally explained it. It's changed how I work at the bench and how I build every single class inside the Metalsmith Academy (with zero waffle, because for me, the waffle is where I would switch off). 

So if you're a jeweler with ADHD (diagnosed, or just nodding along a bit too hard right now), this one's for you. In this blog, I’ll introduce you to young Lucy, and share my wobbly journey to diagnosis and beyond. 

And then in Part 2, I'll share the things that actually help me get stuff made. The hacks I’ve learnt to work with my brain (instead of constantly feeling like it’s working against me.)

First things first, let me introduce you to young Lucy.

The Girl Coloring in Her Math Book

Little Lucy was never short of energy. Until I was about eleven,  I trained in gymnastics six days a week. Somehow, I still had enough energy to cycle into the woods, build rope swings, then come home and start a craft project…

I suspect my mum had worked out that the best way to keep me relatively un-bouncy was simply to exhaust me. 

When it came to school, there were definitely clues that my brain worked differently too. 

I could sit quietly at my desk and look like I was paying attention while my brain was miles away. Usually, I was staring out of the window or coloring in the little squares in my math book. From the teacher’s point of view, I probably looked wonderfully low-maintenance.

Then they’d ask me a question. Hearing my name would snap me back into the room, and I’d realize I’d missed the entire explanation. Cue the instant lump in my throat and glassy eyes that I hoped didn’t start rolling out as tears. I’d quickly scramble together an answer (made entirely of waffle), desperately trying to avoid any follow-up questions. 

On the other side of this pure embarrassment, I’d tell myself to lock-in. Listen. Pay attention. Don’t… get… distracted… and then I’d be right back where I was, decorating my school books and paying absolutely zero attention to the teacher.

Scraping Through at the Last Minute Was My Style

Big school projects followed a familiar pattern. If your brain works like mine, you’ll probably know the one…

Give me six weeks, and I’d do virtually nothing for five weeks and five days. Then the deadline would get close enough and suddenly my brain would switch on.

Right. NOW we can work.

When I went back to university at 28 to study jewelry, the same arrangement continued. Assignments were usually completed a couple of nights before they were due. The deadline was my rocket fuel to stop procrastinating and get down to business. 

That worked at school and university… but in the real world? This superpower of mine was getting in the way. 

If something interested me, I could disappear into it for hours. If it didn’t, making myself concentrate could feel almost impossible.

But Apparently, I’d Left It “Too Late to Have ADHD”

In my late 20’s, I started wondering seriously whether I might have ADHD. So I asked my doctor in England about getting assessed.

His name was Dr Butler and, completely irrelevant to this story, he was rather hot.

Unfortunately, his response was essentially that if I’d reached 28 without ADHD being picked up, I couldn’t have it.

I didn’t push for a second opinion. This was the NHS afterall, so getting referred was always a long shot. I just thought, Meh. Worth a try. Guess everyone is like this.

And that was that for another decade.  

When Caring About the Work Isn't Enough to Start It

For years, I’d naturally gravitated toward work that interested me. Jewelry could hold my attention for hours. Give me a problem to solve at the bench and I could disappear into it completely.

Running a business doesn’t give you that luxury. Some things simply have to get done, whether your brain finds them interesting or not 😅

One of the biggest struggles for me was writing scripts for my classes. Producing a long teaching video requires a huge amount of focused writing, sometimes sitting at a laptop for days (or even weeks) on end. 

The annoying part was, I knew exactly what I needed to write and I understood why it mattered.

But my brain would still respond with a firm, Nope.

It was maddening. I cared enormously about the classes, but caring didn’t reliably translate into being able to sit down and write them. Instead, I’d sit at my laptop getting increasingly irritated with myself, thinking, God damn it, just WORK, brain!

By my late thirties, several people had commented that I probably had ADHD. Then my friend Laura, who was living in Malaysia and had recently been diagnosed herself, told me I should definitely get checked.

This time I was in Malaysia rather than England. I could pay privately and go straight to a specialist, so I did. 

After two decades of wondering, I spent about 50 minutes talking to a psychologist and her conclusion was essentially, “Oh yep, definitely ADHD.” 

Well, there we go then.

The First Time the Trees Stopped Rustling

Not long afterward, I was prescribed Ritalin.

I still remember writing down the time in my Notes app on my laptop, and popping that first tablet. I wanted to know exactly when this stuff kicked in. 

5 minutes passed and… nothing happened. Then 10 minutes. Then 15. I was getting a bit impatient. I’d gone through the ringer to try and get this diagnosis, only for the mother-freeeking medication to NOT work. 

Until all of a sudden… about 20 minutes after taking the medication, something changed. 

It was like standing in the middle of a forest where the trees had been rustling your entire life, and suddenly they stopped. 

It’s the only way I can describe it. My head cleared. The fog lifted. My brain felt… light. I just sat there thinking, Holy shit. What the hell just happened? 

Until then, I hadn’t understood how much background noise I’d been carrying around. I’d never known anything different. You can’t recognise your forest is noisy when you’ve never heard it quiet. 

Ritalin still helps me enormously when I need it. Do I reliably remember to take the medication prescribed to help me manage the condition that makes me forget things? 

Of course I don’t. 

Usually, I’ll be sitting at my laptop getting increasingly irritated with myself, thinking, God damn it, just WORK, brain.

And then I’ll remember. Oh yeah. I have pills for that now.

The Strange Thing Is, I Don’t Particularly Wish I Had a Different Brain

There are parts of ADHD that frustrate the living shit out of me. But I also appreciate how quickly I can connect ideas, change direction and become completely absorbed in a problem that interests me.

Running a small business gives that brain plenty of variety. I might be designing a class in the morning, helping a student later on, then discussing a ridiculous Instagram reel idea before the day is out. There’s usually something to catch my attention and keep me energized in my work… it’s just getting back to the script afterwards that can get a bit sticky! 

Sometimes I think about that little girl staring out of the classroom window while the teacher disappeared into the background, and wonder how things might have gone if only I’d known then what I know now…

Getting diagnosed didn’t suddenly fix everything. I still procrastinate. I still disappear down rabbit holes, and occasionally I have to remind my own brain that we’re supposed to be working.

But understanding why has helped me work with my brain, rather than constantly feeling like my brain is working against me. And over the years, I’ve learnt so many tips and tricks (outside of taking Ritalin) to harness my brain in useful ways. 

I’ve loaded up some of those tips into a second blog post, which you can read via the link below. If your brain works like mine (diagnosed or not), these tips might just make your experience at the bench a little easier:

ADHD BLOG PART 2 HERE - Making Jewelry With ADHD? 5 Tips to Spend Less Time Overthinking and More Time Creating

The Review That Started All This

Remember that review I mentioned right at the start? Here's a bigger slice of it, because she says it better than I ever could:

“…I have to admit, at first I was very skeptical about enrolling in your school. I had so many thoughts running through my head. Would there be closeups? Would you explain things clearly enough for someone with ADHD to understand? I had endless questions...

I finally decided to follow my gut instincts. I chose you, and I am so glad I did!

It is the best online class I have ever taken. You are an excellent instructor. 

The fact that you actually reply to me and to the rest of your students speaks volumes to me. The other members have been so nice so far, and thankfully, there are no egos.

Me too, my friend. Me too. (For Sseday’s full Google review, skip to the end of the post). 

If any of this sounded a bit too familiar (the staring out the window, the deadline panic, the working hard on the least important tasks), hello, my fellow rustling-forest friend. You're in good company here.

If you've been going back and forth, wondering whether you could actually learn this metalsmithing malarkey with a brain that wanders off mid-sentence... you can. You don't need a perfectly behaved brain or a whole free weekend to start making jewelry. You just need somewhere to begin, and someone who'll answer when you ask why.

So come make something with us inside the Metalsmith Academy. There's a clear place to start, explanations that make sense, and room to follow your own ideas when they inevitably show up. I'll have the project ready... even if writing the bloody script took a little longer than planned.

Lucy xx