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For as open as Kristen Einarson is about her ADHD diagnosis now, it took a long time to come to terms with it.
“I was actually very resistant to the idea,” she recalls. “I always knew I was anxious or something. I always knew I was just kind of an intense person. Something weird was going on for sure.”
Fast forward through therapist appointments and TikTok videos describing her symptoms perfectly, and the Winnipeg comedian and improv artist received an official diagnosis at 29 years old. Now, Einarson has turned that experience into a one-woman show called Oversharer, which is running throughout this year’s Winnipeg Fringe Festival.
Einarson is hardly alone in receiving a diagnosis later on in her life. Statistics show that women are far more likely to be misdiagnosed as a child than their male counterparts (the average age for diagnosis in women is 37 years old compared to 7 years old for men), and Einarson adds that women also show a greater ability to mask symptoms depending on their social surroundings.
The impacts of her misdiagnosis are all things that get discussed in Oversharer, from being fired from jobs to time management struggles to being a sensitive person. “If you don’t know what’s going on, it’s really easy to just be really down on yourself and to feel like you can’t get anything right,” Einarson says. “You’re just flaky and kind of a mess, and then it gets morphed into this manic pixie dream girl – you start overcompensating with that kind of thing, like ‘I’m just quirky. I just have a cool personality.’ But there’s actually nothing original about my personality, it’s just a diagnosis.”
That diagnosis has also helped Einarson understand her penchant for comedy. “One of the superpowers that comes with ADHD is pattern recognition,” she says, “and that’s really what a lot of stand comedy is. It’s being able to see a pattern a maybe draw a funny comparison, maybe thing about the world in a different way.”
Einarson's second show an 80's take on modern problems
Another hallmark of ADHD is the ability to juggle many tasks simultaneously. Einarson is showing that in spades at this year’s Fringe Festival as Oversharer is just one of two mainstage productions she appears in, alongside cameos in two others.
The other is An Improvised John Hughes Movie, which Einarson stars alongside her group, Tectonic Improv. “What we’re going to do is we’re going to ask the audience to tell us about something going on that they’re either really looking forward to or that they’re dreading,” she explains, “and then we’re going to use that suggestion for inspiration for a John Hughes-like story.”
This style of story, which emulates classic films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and 16 Candles, dovetails with Oversharer as Einarson reflects on her own teenage years and how they could have been different with the proper diagnosis. “With time comes a layer of empathy,” she elabortes, “but, you know, when we’re improvising these stories very much in the moment, these things feel like the end of the world. A lot of stuff for me when I was in high school definitely felt like the end of the world. I just wish I could go back in time and hug my younger self and say, ‘First of all, it’s going to be OK, and second of all, you don’t make friends by just loudly talking at someone for two hours and not leaving them alone.’”
Oversharer runs at the Son of Warehouse Theatre venue at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival while An Improvised John Hughes Movie can be seen at the Salle Pauline-Boutal at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain. More information on both shows can be found at the Fringe’s website.