DMV Lines and Laundry Baskets
The morning of my Praxis exam, my driver’s license went missing.
I’d been studying for months, two toddlers in tow, while working full-time as a kindergarten teacher. I felt ready, but I was on a serious time crunch because I’d only been granted a year to make a passing score happen. Long story short - I didn’t take this second Praxis right out of college because the school that hired me didn’t require state certification at the time. It had been roughly ten years since I’d thought about any of the information on that test, let alone taken an exam remotely like it.
And then, the missing license.
The worst part of the story? In a total moment of panic, I called and canceled the exam. I blamed the weather because the universe happened to give me a timely snowstorm that morning. I used my already-scheduled day off to drive to a DMV an hour away, wait in line for ages, and get a replacement. As if the guilt of being untruthful wasn’t enough, I returned home to "rage clean" - only to find my original license sitting at the bottom of my husband’s laundry basket.
If this sounds like a chaotic nightmare, it is actually a very common occurrence for me. If you’ve found my blog, chances are it is a pretty common thing for you, too. It's exacerbated by the fact that way too many things stress me out compared to my more “chill” friends, peers, and colleagues. But there is a biological reason for it.
Research published through the National Institutes of Health suggests that acute stress situations shift brain cognition away from executive control and into automatic processing. In reference to my morning from hell, an ADHD brain releases significantly higher levels of cortisol during a stressful situation than a neurotypical one. Juggling home and work, studying with a massive deadline hanging over my head, and trying to get to a high-stakes test on time created the perfect storm. All that cortisol flooding my prefrontal cortex meant my working memory abilities dropped drastically, essentially blanking out my immediate awareness of where things were. Not that that is NEW.
As educators, we put an immense amount of pressure on ourselves to be darn near perfect. For an ADHD brain, that pressure - combined with the sheer overstimulation of our field - is a recipe for a less than “point A to point B” experience with pretty much everything.
It becomes a vicious cycle: we start with the best intentions, hit a myriad of neurodivergent roadblocks, compare ourselves to the “more organized” educators around us, and end up feeling as though we’ve completely failed. It’s a difficult trap, and it leads to way more burnout than necessary for brilliant teachers who could otherwise be using their unique brains as a superpower.
I can’t say yet that I have been able to make many of the recommended strategies, tools, tips, or tricks work for me or become automatic habits. But practice makes better, right?
