If you feel lonely, you are not alone.

Yesterday, I hit 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. And I spent the entire day crying.

As this number has creeped up over the last couple of years, so has my loneliness.

Having ADHD is a very lonely experience in and of itself, because you can't trust yourself. You are constantly second guessing yourself, wondering whether you have made a mistake, what problems you have forgotten to worry about, who you've upset, what's going to go wrong next, and how to stop self-sabotaging.

We can be our own worst bullies, with a narrative that simply does not shut up about how everybody hates us, and what terrible failures of human beings we are.

Earlier this week, I cooked a proper meal for myself for the first time since I can remember. That was the proudest I'd felt of myself in a very long time, despite spending the week prior constantly on BBC radio shows, doing corporate talks to hundreds of people, and selling out our 5th cohort of the 'Become an ADHD Coach' course.

This is because the prison my ADHD traps me in is invisible. I have a brain that simply will not stop, that acts before thinking, and is constantly whizzing with ideas. Running my own company is the utopia and hell of actually being able to make these ideas happen, to a degree.

At first, this was exhilarating. I felt so excited about the prospect of being able to connect with and help other people who felt like me, creating courses and books and coaching frameworks. The dopamine was non-stop, and I'd work 7 days a week, all day, every day. A very unhealthy way for anyone to live, but the growth is addictive. Not because of money or pride, but because it felt like an antidote to the loneliness I had felt throughout my life.

William Dodson said 'people with ADHD are the 'the last picked and first picked on.” Most grow up with the feeling that they are less than, uncool, unwanted, defective, incompetent, and “damaged goods.”'

Admitting that you feel this pervading sense of loneliness feels very shameful, so many people don't. It feels embarrassing to say that I spend so much of my time not working feeling lonely, and as though I have no purpose or personality outside of this. It's embarrassing to have 50,000 followers but not a single person that I feel able to talk to about the mundanities of my day.

My brain still associates loneliness with being the child constantly checking if their friends still liked them, the 'uncool' person who nobody wanted to be friends with. The person being ignored and trying their best to fit in. This is who greets me at the end of a long day staring into screens - the person who feels like they need to literally earn their worth for others to like them.

The loneliness is so frustrating because it accompanies ADHD itself, and it's very difficult to shake off with 'neurotypical' solutions. Being around people reminds me of how I am different. Asking people to hang out fires up RSD and challenges in actually figuring out what to 'do'. The thought of telling someone how I actually am would make me assume all future communications would be out with me out of pity, which reinforces this entire cycle.

Annoyingly, the only way I feel I can 'relax' around people in a social setting is if we are doing 'nothing', such as watching television together (which is something I am incapable of doing by myself, and why I work non-stop as someone who lives alone).

'I don’t want someone to do something with, I want someone to do nothing with' - Cosmo Landesman

The 30% developmental delay in executive functioning skills linked with ADHD includes self-awareness, which means we may struggle with understanding our own feelings, needs and experiences - essentially, a stranger to ourselves. It means that asking for help can feel impossible, because we don't even know what the problem is - just that we're struggling.

It also means that we have 'creative' problem solving skills. Unfortunately for me, this is work, which ironically reinforce that loneliness by spinning so many plates that I can't stop to breathe, let alone simply exist as a human being connecting with other human beings. A lot of the time, it feels like there's someone standing on my chest. (I think they call this 'anxiety').

The more 'successful' I have become, the more I have isolated myself. My Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria tells me I am incapable of 'real' relationships, that I will self-sabotage any healthy connections, and it's doing other people a favour to stay away from them. It reminds me of this with a long list of the many people who are no longer in my life, who it argues, 'could see the real me'.

Every time I go on my phone I feel guilty at how many messages I've forgotten to reply to, and they stack up even further. When I try to leave the house, I get so overwhelmed with simple decisions about what to wear and how much time to leave for this, that I often arrive late, stressed out and overwhelmed. On the rare occasions that I go to parties, I end up hiding in the bathroom before leaving 5 minutes later, overcome with anxiety about what to talk about that's not ADHD related.

I end up people pleasing, and can't trust myself to not end up accidentally offering someone something they don't want or saying yes to something I don't want to do. So I try to control my interactions with people as much as possible, which is exhausting, and sees me withdraw from the 'real world'.

I preferred work because being running my own company is like being able to create my own environment, where everything works in its own haphazard way. It felt like a place where I can be 'the real' me in a controlled way, without having to show up in the vulnerability of me being a real human being, with no agenda or clearly defined purpose.

However, the more 'successful' this business has become, the more pressure I feel, and the less it feels like a safe place to try out my wild ideas and chase my own creativity and curiosity.

Just over a year ago, I set up the ADHD Coaching course out of curiosity, because I didn't think anyone would actually do it. When I first self-published ADHD: an A to Z, I didn't think anyone would read it. When I first said yes to talking to a company, I did so largely because I didn't believe it would actually happen.

The 'no dignity left to lose' approach works very well when you have nothing to lose, but now there's lots of other people involved. Running a company when you have ADHD can feel like running a gigantic people pleasing operation on a mass scale. You wonder why everyone else seems so happy but you, but can't stop to figure out the answer.

Getting hundreds of comments on LinkedIn posts has out-performed any real life support, because the dopamine hit from 1 person vs 100 is literally impossible to compare. Writing on here a lot of the time feels like writing in Tom Riddle's diary in Harry Potter. We don't 'announce' our daily updates to the people in our real life, who may be unsure how to best engage with someone who lives mostly in a virtual world.

I feel deeply grateful for every person on here, but I've also had some experiences lately that reminded me that LinkedIn is not necessarily as safe, supportive, or healthy as I'd like to think. I find myself spending most of my life on here, living on auto-pilot and reacting emotionally to content that is deliberately designed to provoke these reactions and keep me scrolling.

The words that keep hammering into my head when I log off and feel the loneliness are: you are so ungrateful. You should be happy. No wonder nobody likes you.

This invalidation of our own feelings and experiences is what leads us to experience Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, because it's the cycle of bullying ourselves. Right now, my brain is strongly recommending I do not post this, because it's imagining the things people will think, and the 'real problems' that they are suffering with compared to my problems of privilege. (Sorry).

There isn't really a happy ending to this post, but by sharing it, I hope that it will push me back into the place of feeling able to show up authentically as myself in this virtual world, at least. I hope that it will prove the voice of self-doubt wrong, and get me back to where I started - ignoring it.

I hope that by reading it (if you've made it this far), you will remember how just because people look 'successful' or 'happy' on the outside, they are often struggling very much so on the inside, and to be kind. That there's no 'magic fix' to these problems, but often just hanging out and doing nothing, together.

Most of all, I hope that it's helped you to feel a little bit less alone.

These experiences are not unique to being self-employed, having ADHD, or lots of followers on the internet. As an ADHD Coach, I speak to people every day who tell me their 'shameful' secrets of how they feel lonely in a crowded room, how they feel nobody really understands or knows them, and how they don't feel heard, seen, or validated as they are.

How they feel overwhelmed by weekends with no plans, or weekends where they've said yes to too many things, none of which they want to do. How they feel like a bad friend, partner, family member, person, parent and so on, because they cannot keep up with the endless notifications and messages and demands that this hybrid world puts on us.

I just wanted to say: you are not alone, no matter how much it feels like you are.

I know how excruciatingly painful it can feel to talk to someone about this, but I promise you that shame only exists in the darkness. Everybody does not hate you. You deserve to be here, and to feel like you matter regardless of what you 'do'. Try telling someone you feel lonely, and see how they most likely feel exactly the same way.

When we start talking about it and see how 'normal' we really are, we stop beating ourselves up in silence, and start becoming our own friend. That's a good place to start, if nowhere else.

(Ok, so there was a slightly cheesy ending. :)