When I was hired for my last job as editor in chief at HuffPost, it made The New York Times.
My family was thrilled. My old staff rallied around me and sent me off in style. It was a crowning achievement for someone who had fought so hard in their career to get to the next level.
But as I ascended to the C-suite, I had a feeling of dread. I knew myself, and something was wrong.
Working remotely was difficult for me
Not with my job, which I would learn was staffed with bright people who just needed to be supported and empowered. And not with my desire to lead the team to the best of my abilities. The problem was, it was 2021, and the pandemic was still in full swing. All my interviews had been virtual, and I would start the role remotely. My staff, my leadership team, and my bosses were just little boxes on a screen.
The first year was rough, but we managed to make the site profitable. Then, I focused on building trust with my team. Things got better, but I never felt secure.
Of my woes, I thought, “That’s just me.” I’d always needed outside pressure to get work done and had trouble with procrastination. I chalked it up to my bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with in December 2005. However, I also had plenty of coping skills that helped me mask some of these issues. I kept a strict schedule to fix my time-blindness. I wrote everything down to avoid forgetting important dates and meetings. I did most of my work in the mornings to avoid afternoon brain fog.
But other things I couldn’t hide — my inability to focus and lack of attention to detail, for example. My disinterest in things that “bored” me or that were rote and repetitive. If I received a document or email longer than a few paragraphs, my eyes would glaze over, and I’d struggle to get through it.
I also hated interacting with people solely through video chat because I was easily distracted by alerts on my computer — emails, social media pings, Slack notifications all seemed urgent, and I couldn’t differentiate between the importance of the conversation unfolding on Google Meet and the 15 messages flying at me at any given moment.
And while I was struggling, I also felt like I couldn’t ask for help. Work felt stressful and surreal.
I left my job, and the time off made some issues even more apparent
Then, in 2024, after countless advertisers started to stray away from news, disrupting the industry’s revenue models, I knew my company, like so many others, was in trouble. After our parent company announced layoffs in January 2025, I walked away from the team I had led for four years, hoping to save jobs.
With time off for the first time in nearly a decade, I rested. And in that rest, the wheels completely came off.
No more meetings. No more people calling. No more pressure prompting me to act. It was all on me to decide if I would do anything, and my brain, suffering from burnout and depression, wanted to do nothing.
Unable to function, I found myself looking for distractions from how I felt. For months, the only time I felt good was when I was away from home — whether abroad or just at a party — because home was a constant reminder that I was stuck in the same place. I traveled a lot. I went to events and parties. I made and lost friends. I did everything but talk to a doctor. None of this was new; I’d always had brain fog. I’d always struggled with executive dysfunction. This was my “normal,” I reasoned. I saw myself as simply flawed and kept telling myself I just needed to try harder.
And yet, I couldn’t focus on writing and rewriting cover letters for jobs. I couldn’t finish the sample chapters for my memoir that I’d been working on for nearly three years. I wasn’t getting better.
I was mired in sadness until I remembered an old, dusty notion — Do I have ADHD?
Thinking more deeply about ADHD changed things
In my 20s, before I was diagnosed with bipolar, I went in and out of hospitals for years, trying to find a treatment that worked. Then in 2009, after my last hospitalization, I learned a little about how ADHD manifests in women — more hidden, not always as agitated or fidgety, not always as physically disruptive — but rather than dig deeper, I stopped. Though I wondered if I might have ADHD, I had also heard that the medications most commonly prescribed for it could sometimes cause swings into mania for bipolar sufferers.
I couldn’t risk it. So I didn’t ask my doctor about it and, in fact, forgot about ADHD altogether as I focused on building my career.
However, earlier this year, I started seeing more successful women talk online about the same symptoms I had. The brain fog, the memory issues, the lack of focus, and at the end of each post, the women said the same thing — they had ADHD.
So in July, I saw my doctor. After a short test, he confirmed what I believed — I had ADHD. He then prescribed me a low dose of Ritalin. After taking it, it was like someone turned the lights on in my mind.
I felt … normal.
These days, I’m busy writing, running my own digital media consultancy, and relaunching my old news blog as a podcast. I’m no longer burned out, and my stress is manageable. But, ADHD meds aren’t a cure-all. I still sometimes struggle to start things, and I remain very “pressure-prompted.”
Thankfully, I already had years of helpful coping skills in my arsenal.
But I now know that just because I had these skills didn’t mean I didn’t need help. Even with medication, executive dysfunction will sometimes creep in, but I now realize it’s OK to reach out. It’s OK to get help and find a way to thrive, and not just survive.
And there was no need for me to continue to suffer from my own success.
