Here’s why my mind churns like the stormy sea...

IHAVE woken up to a red alert warning for Storm Emma. Niall just got a text saying all schools are closed. Looking out my window, the ‘Wild Atlantic’ is just that.

Except the storm is not in full force. The sea looks as if it does not know if it is coming or going. The waster is dark grey with brown undertones, sucking sludge up from the sea floor. Short lines of foam struggle at its surface, sprouting randomly as early storm winds clash with the tidal pull.

The small waves are vaguely headed towards the land, but they spit and flick uncertainly at the surface, not quite sure what direction they should be going in.

Simmering with agitation the sea is waiting for this massive storm to travel across the world and hit our corner in Killala Bay. It’s restless — all churned up. A bit like me.

I have just discovered I have ADHD and realise that I feel just like the sea looks. My brain is constantly bubbling over with ideas. My thoughts run in messy packs like a street gang of warring dogs, clashing and colliding with each other. I have little control over them.

Then, from the centre of the chaos, a fascinating idea will emerge and hold my attention. Then I can hyper focus – have an engaged conversation, watch a TV programme, write a book. Ordinary day-to-day focus is beyond me. I rely on lists for survival.

‘You have that,’ my husband said when we came out of a meeting, having received Tom’s ADHD diagnosis, a month ago. I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t.

Twenty years of following me around with my handbag, cancelling lost credit cards only to find them again, retrieving keys, phones. I once rang him from an airport on the way to a press trip and asked him to find a bit of paper with the word ‘Jamaica’ on it so I would know who I was meeting. When the ‘amusing’ anecdotes are strung together, they amount to a lifetime of worrying chaos.

Niall has long believed I wasn’t simply an eejit. He knew there was something amiss, he just didn’t want to think about what that might be. For me, there was always an excuse. ‘Too much to do!’ ‘The menopause!’

But the truth is, my inability to sit still and my everyday scattiness has been a persistent and disruptive element in my marriage since Day One. I can write a book a year — like clockwork. But I can’t be relied upon to remember to pick the kids up from school.

Phone alerts ten minutes before an event don’t work. Ten minutes is a lifetime when your brain can’t focus on what life needs you to.

For years, we have been working around it. We called it ‘creativity’. Mammy’s brain is ‘elsewhere’. In actual fact, Mammy’s brain is all there. It just hasn’t got the chemicals it needs to fire on all cylinders.

The diagnosis has been a relief. ‘Won’t’ now means ‘can’t’ — and a bit of moral high ground is always nice. But it’s also a shock. I am having to redefine myself at 54. Who would I be now if I had known at eight, like Tom? I might have finished school. Gone to university?

I finish my tea and make my list for the day. Tom needs a list too. He is off school and every half hour must be accounted for to keep him off the X-Box.

I hope I’ll get some writing done, but I won’t. I’ll be wandering around the house, like I always do on days off, starting jobs and not finishing them.

The tide is in. I look out at the seemingly endless, bottomless mass of water and notice the vastness of the horizon. The vast Atlantic reminds me that, no matter how overwhelmed I feel, my problems are never that big.

I am just a speck on the horizon. I can tackle each problem one small step at a time, one day at a time. In the end — it doesn’t matter.

The sea will always be here. I won’t, so there is no point in ruing the past or fearing the future. The sea is an all-powerful force but, like me, it still gets agitated when there is a storm coming. For both of us, that’s OK.

Tomorrow will come anyway — and the storm will pass.

In the meantime, there are lists and tea.