Reply To: Procrastinate to the extreme

[blackdog]

Well, I am currently trying to recover from a particularly bad episode of depression, so you’ll have to forgive for trying  to have a more positive outlook.

Also, after 40 years of never reaching my potential, never achieving any of my goals, seeing almost every one of my dreams dead and buried, I have to believe that there is some hope for the next 40 years.

Hope. It’s a very important thing to have. And telling people with ADHD that this is it, you’ll never achieve those goals, those dreams will never come true, you might as well just sit down where you are and give it all up, takes that hope away.

I failed in my first attempt to go to college, before my ADD and depression were diagnosed. Does that mean that I should abandon my current plan to go back to college? That’s it, I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life working at Tim Horton’s, or Walmart? I’ll never go to college, never finish that course, never have the career I want to have, never earn a decent living?

This brings up another interesting aspect of ADHD. The feedback loop. We carry all of this mental baggage around with us all the time and when a situation that had a negative outcome in the past arises again we instantly recall all those other times. The last time I did this it didn’t work, and the time before that, so it won’t work this time either.

And you get used to certain thought patterns and they become comfortable for you. It’s like that song by Gotye says: “You can get addicted to a certain kind of sorrow”. This is how one of my friends described it:

“…. sometimes to break myself out of these ‘negative patterns’ i try to figure out why my brain likes them. generally everything comes down to tweaking something good in your brain even if it’s a bad thing. For example i used to pick fights with my husband a lot, especially when things were going well, because that state (happy and normal) was totally alien to me and it made me panic. So picking a fight and having a lot of stress in our relationship actually made my brain happy….”

It’s a subject we have spent a lot of time discussing as she tries to help me through my journey. Basically, it’s like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. What you think is how you feel and how you feel is how you act.

Look at it this way. What if Stephen Hawking had just given up when his ALS was first diagnosed? What if Rick Hansen had said I’m in a wheelchair, how could I possibly run around the world? What if the therapist my friend goes to who has helped her and countless others to learn how to manage their disabilites and be successful in life had decided he could never do that because he has ADHD?

ADHD is a disorder, not a death sentence. Yes it is a real disability. Yes it needs to be taken seriously. But it also needs to be, and can be, overcome.

Okay, time to put the soap box away and get off my butt and stop procrastinating. I was originally only planning on typing the first sentence. But then my brain just ran away with me. You wouldn’t believe how long I can go on….

Right. Getting off of buttocks now. Time to get to work on that to do list. Just one more thing first….;)

Hate typos, had to fix them. I’m gonna go now.

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