My Brain Turned Into the Devil at Age 12 | Severe ADHD & Alcoholism

All your favorite CBC podcasts are now available on YouTube. The best in award-winning true crime investigations, hilarious comedies, vibrant pop culture conversations, and even more audio series are all available on CBC Podcast's YouTube channel. You'll also find exclusive video first episodes, YouTube shorts, and behind-the-scenes content

from our hosts and producers that you can't find anywhere else. So if YouTube is your go-to source for podcasts, just search CBC Podcasts and hit subscribe, and you'll never miss the latest update. This is a CBC Podcast.

Here we go. Welcome to Sick Boy, a podcast where we talk about what it's like to be sick. L- oh, fuck, shit.

God, damn. Okay, I got it. Fix it in post. Yeah.

Welcome to Sick Boy, a podcast where we talk about what it's like to be sick. Coming to you live from downtown Hellafacts with the campus trust.

Oh my God! Let's get into it. Thank you all so much. All 1,383 of you.

We are so excited to be joined by all of you. Our guest today is an absolute badass. She is currently in her fourth term serving as the student president for the Students Association of Northwestern Polytechnic.

She's out here using her schooling in HR to build community, advocate for students' needs and absolutely crush her goals. I'm making an assumption there. I mean, it seems like you're crushing them.

But we are not just here to talk about student politics. We are here to talk about brains, specifically her brain. At 43 years old, she's got a late diagnosis of ADHD, which completely flipped her world upside down in the most incredible way.

We're going to get into all the messy, sometimes hilarious, and wild details, and what it's like when your brain narrates your life so loudly that you can't even hear the person who is talking right in front of you. We're also going to find out why eating exactly two oranges a day somehow brought

the mean little voice in her head back from the dead. And how working on service rigs and running off to Malaysia to teach scuba diving was the only way she could get her brain to finally shut the hell up.

Hello facts, please make some noise and welcome to the stage, Melly. Yeah! Hi guys.

Love you, Melly. Thank you. I love you too. So excited to meet you in person, Melly. We've had a couple of chats on the phone.

Yeah, that's awesome. And you're, I gotta say, you know, sometimes when we are going into a live show where we haven't like had a chance to meet you

and we're like, you know, we're like, you know, where we haven't had a chance to actually meet the person that we're sitting down with.

There's a little bit of a, ooh, fingers crossed, this goes well. When I had the chat with you on the phone, I immediately was like, I think I love this person.

And I- I'm not the same way. I'm like, did we just become best friends? Yeah, I was like-

Do you want to go do karate in the garage? Yeah, I was a step brother, step sister situation. Step siblings. Yeah, yeah.

Step siblings. So let's dive right into it. I mean, I'm really excited to talk to you about neurodiversity.

I had mentioned in the intro there that you are one of. The many people I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is just like my TikTok algorithm, but the many people who have received

a late diagnosis of ADHD. I'm in that same camp. Brian's in that same camp. Taylor?

Not yet, but let's just wait. I've been thinking about it. of the parameters change. So we think it's something else with Taylor though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Psychopathy. So for yourself, walk us through what I'm really curious to start with is your early days, right?

And when I say early days, I mean like you as a child, was the writing on the wall for the 40 years leading up to your 43rd birthday when you get this diagnosis, Was it sort of obvious to your parents or teachers or anything like that?

No, I was like the good kid. I was the smart kid. I was quiet in class, especially like really little. I mean, my bedroom was messy.

If you looked under my bed, it looked like a waste of land of nothing. Like there was so much stuff under there. How I outfit under there, I have no idea. But no, absolutely not.

And even when I went in for the diagnosis, I went on the advice of my therapist. And I was like, maybe I have a touch, I like that touch, I'm sure.

And it was when she said severe, I was like, oh, okay. And so, but yeah, no idea of the parents, I had no idea, nobody around me, I masked really, really well.

Many of you guys knew me before I got diagnosed, and you probably would have had no idea about some of the stuff we're gonna talk about today. I feel like I know, well, I'm thinking

of one person in particular in my life, but I feel like I know this type of person many times over my life, where they're not diagnosed with ADHD,

they're probably thinking that maybe they have ADHD and they've had it for a very long time, but they're like, very high functioning. It's never had like a material difference

to the way that they've moved through their life, but internally it's affected them a lot, like the way that they experienced the world, but not the way in which they're able to achieve goals.

Or the way the world experiences them. That's where the big difference was. what was going on inside, I described it yesterday as my internal misery that nobody had ever.

And they say, they'll say things like, you're high functioning or like people, I think when they talk about ADHD like this, they sort of talk about it in a way where it's like,

oh, it doesn't really affect you, but they also can't feel your experience in the way that you experience the world. Because personally, I did well in junior high school

junior high school and high school, but after that, like the way that it affected me in my life and ways that I didn't even understand, like it was profound.

Yeah, mine was going into junior high, about the age of 12. I can remember the exact moment where that voice kicked in and that's when my grades dropped, my social skills dropped.

I just assumed everyone hated me. And so the voice that kicked in, described that voice, what was that voice?