"It's Me, Hi, I'm the Problem, It's Me": Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" is the Late-Diagnosed ADHDer's Anthem (but not for long)
It is indeed exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
Recently, I stumbled upon an old cognitive behavioural therapy worksheet of mine — one of many I've completed over the years at the request of therapists trying to save me from my relentless negative self-talk.
The worksheet was dated February 2023 - roughly one year before I received my ADHD diagnosis — and with it, a neurological explanation for literally everything I had struggled with in my life. Looking over the worksheet, I was brutally reminded of the story my mind had created long ago to explain why life was so hard for me:
Living life as your own anti-hero
The human brain is a meaning-making machine. If you were diagnosed with ADHD later in life, chances are, in the absence of a neurological explanation for your struggles, your brain filled in the blanks with its own painful story—one where you are fundamentally flawed, the anti-hero of your own life.
And while it's fun to sing about being an anti-hero, it's less fun to feel like one.
In my last post, ADHD & The Matrix: Rewiring Your Reality, we explored why changing your inner story is crucial since our internal dialogue doesn't just reflect our reality—it actively constructs it. Left unchecked, our inner story—ruled by the ADHD brain’s negativity bias—creates a distorted view of the world where we believe our past struggles dictate our future potential. We look ahead at our lives and think the writing is on the wall...but here's the thing: it isn’t.
A late-in-life ADHD diagnosis means that the stories our brain created to explain our past are no longer valid and they have no business being in our present. This means that when it comes to our future, the rest is still unwritten.
The bad news
Rewiring our brains to embrace this idea will take some work.
The good news
Thanks to neuroplasticity, we can rewire our brains (using tools like the ones we explored in the Matrix post) to embed new, more helpful thought patterns—ones that don't cast us as our own anti-heroes.
The bad news
Thanks to the ADHD brain’s differences in working memory, self-regulation and its heightened negativity bias—traditional methods for neural rewiring need some serious tweaking
Even the source material for these new thought patterns needs to be strategic because of the ADHD brain’s differences in cognitive flexibility. If you just grab a list of generic affirmations and start reciting "I am calm, I am focused, I am effortlessly productive," your brain is going to look at you like…
The good news
I’ve got you.
I know first-hand how hard it is to shift these narratives with an ADHD brain. That’s why I’ve developed an ADHD-friendly system designed to help you source, shape, and embed a new story—one that isn’t just wishful thinking, but true and believable.
You’ll find the three-step process explained in detail below. But if you are like me and require a bit of sparkle (and the least amount of friction possible), I've created a downloadable ADHD-friendly guided journal that walks you through this transformation process step-by-step. It includes fillable worksheets, tracking templates, and detailed examples to make implementation easy.
Eventually, this journal will be part of a larger collection of ADHD tools and resources available for purchase in my Etsy shop. But today, I’m sharing it here—completely free :)
Now, let’s dive in!
The ADHD Rewrite Method: 3 Steps to a New Narrative
Step 1: Identify Your ADHD Shadow
Before we can rewrite the story, we have to know what story we’re working with. That means identifying the beliefs we’ve internalized—the ones that have shaped how we see ourselves. I call this the ADHD Shadow—the part of us that absorbed years of misunderstanding, blame, and self-doubt.
Below, I'm sharing photos of the therapy worksheet I recently rediscovered—a raw glimpse at an ADHD Shadow in the wild. These pages show the explanations my mind created to make sense of why, at 30, I was broke, unemployed, and living in my sister's basement:
Step Two: Flip the Narrative—The ADHD-Friendly Affirmation
Difficulty Shifting Gears
At the core of neural rewiring is cognitive flexibility—our brain's ability to shift attention and adapt thinking when goals or environments change. Research shows that people with ADHD struggle with this mental shifting, making us more likely to get stuck in one way of thinking—which is especially problematic when that thinking is casting us as the villain in our own life story.
This means we can’t just slap an affirmation on the mirror and call it a day. Instead, our new narrative must be two things:
Based on our current reality. Going from “I’m lazy” to “I am a productivity machine” will backfire. Instead, frame it as a truth you can grow into —while we want to shape a narrative that supports a desirable future, it must make space for the past and meet us where we currently are (see below for examples).
Authentic to you. People with ADHD are primarily motivated by internal drivers rather than external ones, so your new narrative must emerge from your own experiences and values.
Step Three: Build the Case
ADHDers often have the most painful inner narratives (explained in more detail here). And yet, for reasons we’ll explore below, our brains have the hardest time changing our inner narratives to more supportive ones. I know what you’re thinking…
But fear not friends—I bring solutions! We've covered cognitive inflexibility. Read on to find out what we can do about our negativity bias, working memory impairments, and challenges with behavioural regulation.
Our Challenge: The ADHD Negativity Bias
A pattern of negative attention bias in the ADHD brain means we are more likely to notice, store, and recall negative experiences while bypassing the positive ones—even if you did complete a task or make a good decision today, your brain might not register it.
Our Solution: Manual Overriding
We need to actively guide our brain to shift its spotlight. This means deliberately gathering evidence that challenges the old negative story, gradually weakening it while strengthening the new one—until this positive narrative becomes your brain's path of least resistance.
How though? Instead of vaguely trying to "think positively," we need to track specific evidence that directly supports your new affirmations. If your story is “I never follow through”, make note of even the tiniest thing you completed. If you think “I’m bad with money”, write down every smart financial decision—no matter how small.
Our Challenge: Impaired Working Memory
ADHD particularly hampers the executive aspect of memory – holding and updating goal-oriented information. You can see why this would be a problem for us when introducing a new goal, say more positive self-talk. We might start the morning telling ourselves "I will pay attention to the three things I did well yesterday," but by midday, that intention has completely vanished from our memory.
Our Solution: Bypass Working Memory
Over time, as this new narrative becomes the path of least resistance, your brain will automatically resort to this story. But at first, we need to set up some scaffolding - external cues (visual, digital, or social reminders) that remind us to return to this practice. You need to deliberately create moments to reconnect with this intention (think morning ritual).
The Problem: Self-regulation
Self-regulation challenges are at the core of ADHD. Simply put, the ADHD brain does what it wants to do, and it doesn’t do what it doesn’t want to do. I spent years fighting this until one day I decided to try something different.
The Solution: Embrace this reality and leverage it to your advantage
As I’m sure you know, if an ADHD brain wants to do something, it really wants to do it (and good luck stopping it). All we have to do is find a way to align what you want to do (rewire your brain) with what your brain wants to do (usually this will involve some form of dopamine)
Ask yourself three questions:
What would make me want to do this? → Example: Can I make this fun? Rewarding?
How can I make it easy for me to do this? → Example: Can I set up a one-click digital tracker?
How can I remember to do this? → Example: Can I tie it to a habit I already do?
For me, this meant creating a fun digital template and pairing it with my morning coffee ritual. Now, it’s a habit I look forward to every day.
That’s it, folks! You can download a copy of The ADHD Shadow Guided Journal below to guide you through this process.
Download The ADHD Shadow Guided Journal:
If you feel called to share your journey from ADHD Shadow to a new empowering script in the comments below, I'd be deeply honoured to witness that transformation. And if you try out this reframing process, I'd love to hear how it goes for you. Or you can also just comment a quiet ‘❤️’ if you resonated with any part of this post.
Thank you for the insights, and for sharing this resource, Laura.
This was unbelievably helpful. I had not heard of this way of dealing with adhd mind. I was diagnosed about 10 months ago and I’m 52. I have much ingrained negative self talk and this makes me feel so hopeful about the potential of rejigging my mind. I am so glad you got to the end of your video before the limit or whatever, I was rooting for you ☺️