It's been a year and a half since I formally got diagnosed with the inattentive version of ADHD.
Prior to this I didn't have much of a sense of what ADHD really meant (associating it more with learning difficulties in school... which wasn't really a problem for me), so it took me a while to adjust to this news.
But after spending the past year going to neurofeedback treatment + targeted approaches with my therapist (specifically Body Doubling + EMDR trauma therapy), plus now starting to look into other facets of my life I've been struggling with (sleep + physical therapy for back instability -- long story), I have a lot of thoughts now about living with the knowledge of having ADHD... and Other (see two posts ago).
First Off: What Does It Actually Mean In Practice?
Ultimately, the ADHD I have means that I struggle with Executive Dysfunction -- I have difficulties regulating my mind when it comes to thoughts and emotions.
Let me list out a number of the symptoms that plague my day to day:
- Attention Span: Probably the most obvious one given I have "Inattentive" ADHD.
This just means I am very distractable because my brain is always chasing the next dopamine rush because I am deficient in dopamine rewards when I need it. Completing ordinary day to day errands does not give me the mental satisfaction/dopamine it gives others so I often find myself mid-errand moving on to the next thing before my current thing has finished (example: leaving a stream of things on the floor that I dropped midway into using one of those things because my mind already moved onto handling something else).
In the long run I end up taking longer than a neurotypical person to complete a task because I was juggling 50 other to-do items I wanted to do today and context switching the whole time -- which is why my job (which my psychiatrist called "chaotic" when I described it to her) is not helping my mental life here and I frequently work extra hours to play catch up.
This doesn't mean that I can't focus my attention -- people often note that I do engage with them attentively in conversation (unless I'm frequently checking my phone, but smartphones are a whole other beast here) -- but doing so is mentally exhausting for me and I often compensate by spending a lot of time alone later.
Rather though, I don't have control over when I want to pay attention -- and when I do pay attention, it's often hyperfocus (and I lose track of time when this happens which falls into time blindness below).
- Poor Working Memory: I compensated for this over the years with lots of note taking (because I know I will forget things), but basically if you take away my notes I am very forgetful. I often find myself walking up/down stairs to grab something only to forget midway while walking what exactly I was trying to grab and then wasting 10+ minutes trying to rack my brain to remember what it was before I sometimes move on to the rest of my day (only for me to remember what it was 4 hours later).
Also more recently, going to my email to search for something, only to IMMEDIATELY feel the subject of what it was I was looking for disappear into the ethos of my brain fog. Like my memory is a cloud I'm trying to hold onto and it's disappearing through my fingers.
Also (and friends who know me can attest to this), I misplace things in my house ALL THE TIME. Until AirTags came out I very frequently misplaced my keys. (I also had a mildly traumatic incident where I dropped my keys while picking up the mail and wasted a half hour looking for them in the bushes when I was running late to pick up friends for a show, but that was just really bad luck).
- Task Initiation: I often put together to-do lists of what I want to do today, only to immediately not do any of it because I don't feel like it today. I feel a lot of inertia trying to start something on my list that I'm not in the mood for but know that I have to do "sometime in the distant future". The only thing that literally will get me in the mood is the panic of a deadline that is impending in a few hours and then I'm subsisting off the "rush" which isn't sustainable.
Weekend transitions (Sun-Mon and Fri-Sat) are generally difficult for me as I'm usually still in either weekend mode or work mode going into either.
- Emotional Dysregulation: My therapist recently commented that this has improved for me this past year (her evidence: clearing me for EMDR trauma therapy which is only feasible when one is no longer struggling as much with emotional regulation). But basically up until recently, I was struggling with tendencies to mentally spiral and ruminate non-stop about things I had little control over -- intractable problems both at work and in my home life.
- Cognitive Inflexibility: This one goes hand in hand with the above, but I have difficulty adapting sometimes to problems and end up repeatedly doing something that doesn't work (thinking outside the box doesn't necessarily come naturally to me).
But that said, I am very suggestible -- so if other people propose solutions for me, I can adapt to those. This is an area that has improved more with my therapist in body doubling.
- Time Blindness: This is a mixed one because people see me as someone who actually comes on time or even "early" -- but I am heavily reliant on alarms and playing tricks on myself (e.g. booking an event on my calendar earlier than the actual time so that I leave "on time") in order to accomplish this. Otherwise I'll end up doing something silly like spend an extra half hour looking up Pokemon plushies on the internet rather than leave my house at the time I intended (this literally happened today).
I generally have difficulty estimating how much time a task will actually take and I struggle a lot in this area especially when it comes to planning. And lately with the advent of AI this has only gotten worse...
- Object Blindness: "If it's out of sight, it's out of mind." I have a lot of things in my place that I forget are there and other people will notice these before me.
This also means I can live with problems (broken things, etc) so long as I'm not actively paying attention to them.
- Internalized Shame:
The world was made for neurotypical people.
Other people in my life have trouble understanding why I sometimes operate the way that I do. I have spent most of my adult life being ridiculed for things like spacing out while driving, being "careless" about my possessions, constantly putting errands I don't feel like doing off until the last minute, not acting on things that should be prioritized sooner, not paying attention while someone is talking, friends asking "why are you like this?" where this means some form of being "difficult"--
This means that I have a lot of internalized shame over things that seem otherwise second nature to my parents and friends. These things do not come naturally to me and I have always known to some extent that I am not "normal." I have quirks. I have mental compulsions that lead me to prefer to acquire a mass collection of collectibles so I can spend hours organizing them to make my mind feel at ease rather than face the uncertainty of what exactly it is I want in life and who I want to spend my life with (to which people have told me I am "confused" over my sexual preferences).
When I think about what I have to actually do to function as an adult in society on a day to day basis, it is overwhelming and exhausting. I can only keep up with daily medicine, exercises, groceries, laundry and dishes and trash, health appointments, payments, house cleaning, remembering to eat, somehow trying to maintain a social life because "it's good to not be alone," and then on top of it my mind that won't shut up and let me sleep at night so I end up staying up for hours and am just tired the next day and next thing I know I'm sad on a couch tonight because I have no control over how my mind works.
I once had a mental breakdown over sorting mail and sat depressed in a chair for an hour before giving up and playing video games instead to make me feel better. And that only worked until I started feeling sad while playing games and the only solution was to fall asleep on accident at 8:30 PM and wake up again at midnight to mentally spiral awake in bed for 4 hours.
I make frequent to-do lists to get the nebulous chaos of my mind on paper and figure out what exactly it is I actually want to do amidst all of noise and interruptions, because every other minute I'm thinking about something else I should do that I know I'll probably forget in 30 seconds and then spend another half hour panicking about because the deadline to make it on time would've been now had I not just wasted 10 minutes looking for my hat and sunglasses because I'm paranoid about the mole in my eye developing into skin cancer and I wasn't paying attention when I misplaced them last night because work exhausted me and I forgot to respond to my coworker yesterday--
ADHD feels like a curse. I didn't really know what it was until little more than year ago, and when I told my family about my diagnosis, their first response was to tell me they didn't think I had it despite two therapists, a psychiatrist, and a team at a neuropsychology clinic telling me otherwise.
And I've spent all these years internalizing their critical voices in my head so that even when they aren't here I'm still arguing with them.
---
Anyway I'm venting a lot right now. The reality is with all of the health appointments and treatments I've done over the past year, I am trending in a better direction than I was over a year ago when I started this.
But I still have nights like tonight where I want to grieve what I experienced. Because for 35 years I had no idea and felt aimless. Putting a name to the face of this disorder has done wonders in helping me figure out what to do now, but before this I was helpless.
In trauma therapy earlier this week, I admitted to my therapist finally after 4-5 sessions working on the latest memory that I had spent all of this time rationalizing explanations for what I had experienced rather than admitting what I was feeling emotionally because I never got the support I needed to address my issues. She asked me when the last time I recalled someone in my life trying to comfort me in this area and I realized I could not remember. Instead, I've been trying to comfort myself with explanations making excuses for the people in my life I depended on because nothing else had worked.
And I've been sad for a long time.
(journal from 10 years ago: God didn't answer me so I realized I had to dig myself out of this trench myself)
I want to move on with my life already and fix things, but emotionally I don't thing I've let myself grieve fully yet. I just keep asking myself how long the sadness will continue because it feels endless sometimes. And I feel shame over even feeling sad in the first place.
Anyways, I'm already past my bedtime and need to turn on the CPAP machine for my sleep issues. I didn't get around to doing my physical therapy and breathing exercises today because I needed to get these thoughts out of my head first and this 2 hour post ended up taking over my bedtime routine.
Tomorrow will be a better day. I still believe that. I'm just waiting for my emotional self to catch up and reach out to the hand I've been trying to extend to it.
