Just Diagnosed with ADHD?

Rick Green:

When I first got the ADHD diagnosis I was an adult and I was relieved, actually delighted.  Ahhh! But I was warned bad stuff’s gonna come up and you may not be

happy for long.

I thought, what?! why wouldn’t I be happy? why wouldn’t I be relieved to find out the reason my finances are always a mess and I have a thousand projects on the go

and I’ve never finished most of them, and I’m always delivering stuff late and, I’m exhausted all the time from pulling all-nighters, and last minutes, and that this was actually fairly common and quite treatable in fact. If I’d known, if I’d known sooner, oh why didn’t I why?

Imagine you had another disorder. Say your left leg is three inches shorter than your right leg, only you don’t know, it hasn’t been diagnosed.   You’re sixteen years old at your high school prom and you’ve asked the girl of your dreams, your first real date, and on the dance floor you knocked her flying right into the prom queen, who fell in the punch bowl, and after getting treated for the black eye from the prom queens boyfriend, your date, the girl of your dreams, left with another guy and

you spent 30 years in therapy trying to deal with your hostility towards women.

Then later when you showed up late to every university class because you kept banging into lockers, well your just obviously, some kind of social phobia or a destructive, self-destructive behavior, and later when you find yourself knocking over coworkers the company spent a fortune sending you into anger management

classes.

I’m not trying to make fun of these others problems this is an analogy.  When you spend two years of your life walking around in your house and you had to get medication for agra phobia, and then OCD, and then they suggested you had left turnitis and you tried nine kinds of herbal therapy and you discovered you’re really allergic to chamomile and now you’re 42 and the salesman who’s fitting you for a tuxedo says ‘hey you know your left leg is three inches shorter than your right leg?’

Oh Pooh.  Suddenly you understand that the dance floor disaster, the walking circles in the house, the being late and banging into… and you are pissed.  Didn’t anyone notice?! and you’re sad the girl of your dreams left the prom with another guy and they lived happily ever after.  Well until their messy divorce.

It’s gonna take a while to deal with all that sadness and anger, but when you do and you’ll start to feel this eventually.  You’ll reach a point of well, now my leg is shorter.   What am I gonna do about it?  You can do something about it, I don’t know a shoe with a three-inch heel or leg surgery or you know you could just make allowances, and you might even want to try dancing again.   Make sure you’re near a wall for support.  Support’s good.

Give yourself some space, always give yourself a little space a little wiggle room.  Maybe warn your dance partner that you tend to go that way.  Ideally find a partner who tends to go that way and you can balance each other out, and then you can really start dancing again and suddenly it’s like you’re 17 years old and you’re queen of the prom.  King. Your king.  I mean king of King , I’m king of the prom. yeah.