Just saying

Lynn Ruane is an independent senator from Dublin, the mother of two daughters, and the author of ‘People Like Me’, which won the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2018.

I wanted to write my book for a number of reasons. One was I was a bit uncomfortable at the time with some of the headlines. I wanted to try and capture all the different things that got me to where I was, rather than it feeling like it was this leap [in which], I became pregnant at 15 and then I was in the Seanad, or at Trinity. I wanted other people to not feel like there was some sort of deficit in their trajectory because they were struggling. I also wanted to show that I had a network, a really supportive family – not everybody has that. Not everybody has the safety of a place where you know you’re always going to have a roof over your head.

When I look back now I can see I had two parents who were pacifists. Very calm.

Very non-judgmental people. You wouldn’t really hear them pass remarks on other people’s situations. I’m only realising now how much of their characters were so amazing.

I remember my dad once getting annoyed with me, and rightly so – I think I was rolling around the grass outside, fistfighting with one of the kids on the road or something. He was so nonviolent, so he was appalled, and he got annoyed with me. I came back later and I found him in tears; he was really upset that he had got so annoyed with me. He never held anything against me.

My brother was always a lot better at everything than me, and I had this realisation lately. We look after each other, we love each other, we support each other. But my brother was faster than me, better in school than me, was most likely better liked in the community because he wasn’t difficult. People really like my brother. I always thought it was the conditions my parents set that allowed me to achieve certain things. I’m looking now; I was trying to be better than my brother at all the things. He was the marker. I’m so thankful for him.

I’ve always been self-reflective. Just because you become aware of something about yourself, it doesn’t mean that you can straight away unravel an old conditioning or behaviour.

[In January 2023] I was extremely exhausted. I thought I just had to put several different structures and boundaries in place. And I did have to do those things, but I had to do a lot of other things as well. People started emailing my office after that burnout piece [she was interviewed for this paper in January 2023], suggesting I might have ADHD. It’s crazy to me in the last year that I never realised I had ADHD before. All these years I thought I was just a little bit bold, or a little bit rebellious. I had a bit of a strong sense of justice, and that got me into trouble. And that all felt amazing. Now I’m looking, going, ‘or did I just have ADHD?’ I used to think, ‘I’m not afraid of anything’, now I’m like, ‘I just clearly had no impulse control’.

There was a time last year in the Seanad where I broke down crying in the chamber. Something began to be kicked into motion, I now know from the ADHD diagnosis. I cried every day for months last year. The tears kept coming. They weren’t for anything that was happening right then. It’s a sadness. I also realised maybe things could have been a lot different had I understood ADHD years ago. I think untreated, undiagnosed ADHD, and an inability to regulate myself at times, ended up with me often being extremely angry.

It’s hard for me to say this, but during the last year, there were times when I was like, am I at the end of my life? Then I was like, ‘no, maybe it’s just a psychological death, or an identity death. There’s something else happening because you’ve this new information about yourself’. At times last year I was really scared for how dark my thoughts were. The whole of last year, I cried, I negotiated with myself, I started engaging less with people, not out of a fearful depression, more [because I felt] there’s something this sadness is trying to tell me. Maybe all the years of being untreated for ADHD, I just shoved lots of things down that I didn’t realise. It’s hard to talk about because I don’t have the answers.

I think politics is very difficult at the moment. But I kind of go back to [Senator] Alice-Mary [Higgins]. She always says politics is people making decisions about how they can live together. It’s no good if you’re just trying to be in the system. It has to be a completely different way of structuring the world. I’m in a lot of really deep thought about where my role in that is.

It’s crazy to me that I never realised I had ADHD before. All these years I thought I was just a little bit bold