Re: ADHD Journeys and the Unbelievers

[wolfshades]

KrazyKat: remember when you first took the totallyadd.com self-test? Remember the excitement as you started to realize, you were hitting almost every single indicator? I do. It was so amazing. “Validation” and “epiphany” are the two words that described my experience. I knew that I knew that I *kNEW* this explained so much of what I’d gone through in life. It was like – I was stumbling around in the dark before, thinking that the ambient light was truly all there was. And then, after taking the test, a big bright light got switched on and suddenly I realized that low-light dynamic wasn’t what everyone else was experiencing.

After attending a few of Rick Green and Dr. J.’s seminars, I knew that validation wasn’t, um, valid just yet – and that i needed to get thoroughly tested. I had no idea it would take so long. It was like the world’s longest foreplay. And then, after $1000 and months of waiting, the results came back. The psychiatrist sat me down and showed me the chart, which included what a “normal” person looks like, and then where I was – which was almost completely off the charts. It’s a wonder I ever managed to cross a road without getting distracted and then run down by a car. And THEN there was true validation. It wasn’t the “sudden lightbulb” experience again though – it merely brought a deep deep sense of satisfaction that I was right.

So of course when you tell someone, and they come back with “oh I have that” you sort of want to punch them. It’s not a “this is my condition, not yours” sort of territorial thing. It’s an unconscious devaluation of what you just told them. Like the condition “belongs” to everyone, when you know damned well you went through hell to get to this point.

I think, now that the emotion of the whole discovery has gone by, I can probably cope a little better, rather than gritting my teeth. A good response might be: “really? Because OMG if you do have it, you shouldn’t ignore it. You should really go to a psychiatrist who specializes in this condition, and get the tests done. If you go to the one I saw, you’ll end up seeing a psychometrist and a psychologist as well, and get ready to pay $1000 because the tests are fairly intense because they want to rule out a lot of other mental conditions. And they certainly want to rule out the normal distracted experience that everyone sometimes get. Now that you suspect you have ADHD, don’t you hate it when everyone else presumes they do too, even though you know they don’t?” And then you pat them on the shoulder in commiseration. (And you smile your evil smile)

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