Re: Driving, and dealing with anxiety

[Curlymoe115]

I didn’t drive from the time I was 17 until I was 22 because of fear. One day my Father in Law had run so many lights and was going down the wrong way that he just pulled over and handed me the keys. I shook all the way home. Gradually I got more confident (some would say over confident) and for the most part I handle driving very well. But I hate traffic. I am always fearful that I will be hit and I hate merging with other cars. Some parts of the month it is much harder to drive because I just know I am going to be in an automobile accident. I went back to work in July so now I have to drive every morning. The traffic is horrendous and there are just so many vehicles. I know the odds of my being in an accident multiply every day because of changes in weather and light conditions. This winter I have decided if I am still working that I will take the bus. Yes, there is less convenience but there is more reassurance that someone else is handling traffic and road conditions and I can just sit back and read my book until we get there. My last two jobs, the first I left at 3 in the morning and left for home at 3 in the afternoon and the other I took the LRT to work downtown. No where near the traffic conditions of rush hour there and back.

As for organization, I have never been terribly organized but I am fast. At work people ask me to do something and I can have it done much faster then they think. But the bigger the desk the more clutter and papers can pile up. But at the end of each day I sort through all the junk and organize it. So you would never know that that very afternoon I couldn’t find my pen under all the paper and had to search 3 or 4 times for it. Even with medication now, my organizational ability doesn’t seem to get any better. But I am able to remember more tasks and complete them. But I also lose track of time and work through lunch or breaks if I am in the middle of something, (or start something else on my to do list). The person that I was sent there to replace is back. So my job is theoretically ended but I am still there. I think she has ADHD because she has no system. What I can do in an hour it can take her all day. She is a nice person but her skill set seems to be lacking. She is very anal in recording everything but this does not make her job easier, it just makes it slower. She has been trying to organize something for the last two weeks that I could get done in an afternoon. I will be helping her with this this week. I thought one of my co-workers was joking or being harsh when she said that what I had done in an hour had taken her a day to do. But, alas, I see she was being generous.

I am 42, I was diagnosed at 6 but other then the knowledge of my condition no other reference was ever made. I have always carried with me every implement to do every job I may encounter. We, women, carry purses. They become our life line. Inside that cluttered space is paper, pen, pencil, calculator, tissues, medication ect. for any thing that may come up. The more I may have to do the bigger my purse gets. Now it is the size of a carry on and weighs as much. But I may have everything but I continually search for it.

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