Justin Baldoni candidly speaks about the effects of his recent ADHD diagnosis and it’s impact on his life and career.
The It Ends With Us director-actor discussed his feelings upon discovering he had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, decades after he had struggled in school, on the December 4th episode of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast.
“I was diagnosed officially at 40, which means this year, I turned 40 early in January,” Baldoni shared.
“This is after probably four years of my therapist telling me it might be a good idea to go and get an actual diagnosis, pushing me in that direction because a common theme in my therapy sessions was this feeling of just not being enough.”
He continued, “… What I realized is that I’ve lived the majority of my life feeling like I had a deficit, that I was behind, that I wasn’t like everybody else.”
The Jane the Virgin star continued by saying that there had been indications of the diagnosis when he was younger because he had previously been told that he was “disruptive, out of control,” and “didn’t pay attention.”
Additionally, he remembered that “parent-teacher conferences were suspended.”
“I don’t really have any positive memories of school,” Baldoni said. “Reading was always very tough.”
“I remember at a very young age, having to reread and reread and reread pages over again, because I would read and then I would forget what I read, and that continued over the course of my life,” he continued.
“There were subjects that I excelled in because I was very interested in them.”
He claimed that this finally made him feel “stupid” and that at the time, he had no one with whom to “talk about it,” not even his parents, whom he thought from conversations had “had it diagnosed.”
He did, however, agree with his parents’ decision to not have him “tested” or medicated at a “young age” because they “didn’t want” him to feel as though he “had a disability.”
“Not wanting me to be doped up on something and ADHD back then wasn’t really understood,” the actor explained.
“It was a deficit. You were broken and I think they didn’t want to raise me feeling broken and ironically, because nobody was there to talk to me about it, nobody held space for me. I felt broken.”
However, Baldoni claimed that after learning that he had ADHD and neurodivergent, his perspective has changed. He now treats himself with a lot more “compassion,” particularly when he thinks back on his early years.
