The Forums › Forums › I Just Found Out! › My Story › Advice on getting appointments + riduclously long life story of a 19y/o › Re: Advice on getting appointments + riduclously long life story of a 19y/o
Anonymous
I’ll have to admit it took me a week of bouncing against it before I could slow down enough
to read your post, Chris. That I coincidentally just happened to have taken my pills a couple
of hours ago may have helped a bit.
You can safely cut back a bit on the exercise unless you are planning to go competitive.
That will give you some time and energy for the studies, which must come first right now.
The rate you are going is more appropriate for an athlete. Not a good fit for a scholar.
Your best measure of how much is enough is how well you sleep at night. Ease up on the
mileage until you feel the balance of daytime energy and nighttime relaxation stabilize,
which for you will be pretty easy to find because of your youth and the regular schedule
you already keep. Right now you are probably not overdoing it by much but as you cut
back you will definitely find your mental abilities by day will improve and your nighttime
sleep will go from recuperating from exhaustion and stress before passing out into
being more relaxed and falling asleep more easily, recharging instead of recovering.
Once that starts happening your daytime performance in intellectual tasks will improve
a bit, and by improving your focus it will feed back by helping you find and maintain
your balance between gym, road and desk.
Don’t get me wrong though. That initial burst of higher activity probably did you more
good than harm and helped you tighten your healthy routine but right now you need to
train as a student and not as an athlete because the cost of overdoing it is pretty obvious
in your inability to fall asleep quickly. You won’t completely solve that by cutting back right
away but you should be able to make real progress on that front while you wait for access
to a doctor and whatever plans you make for prescriptions or other treatments. After that,
once you get a prescription and/or training that works, don’t be surprised to find your grades
leaping to a whole new level while your social life starts to carry itself without special effort.
As for a social life, don’t force it or anything. It doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing wrong
with having less of a social life as you go through courses. You will find that just being yourself
and reducing your own stresses will do far more for you than trying to make it happen with
conscious effort. It’s easy to feel obliged to socialize and feel guilty for not doing enough but
those are exactly the things that stress you out and make you a pain to be with; so don’t worry
about it at all, concentrate first on the job at hand and you’ll be able to take the occasional break
without any pressure, which is the whole point in having a bit of downtime.
Getting that first appointment does tend to take time no matter where you are. I had a six
month wait before my first appointment. I believe it’s like that all across this continent, and
we’re the lucky ones. Pull the trigger and make that appointment. The wait is long enough
already and you are already taking care of yourself so there no point in adding more weeks
before you can get the last pieces of your solution in place. If you move right now you’ll be
in really good shape for the fall semester and the increasing workload and complexity of
those courses will feel more like cresting to a 10% downhill run than like hitting the wall.
The main thing I’m saying is: Refuse to feel guilty because you are already running a good
plan that will dovetail neatly with whatever the doctor recommends. Refuse to feel guilty
for not going through as many battles or accumulating as many scars as some of us; because
scars are overrated, we’re not really the types to dwell on the past and “the good old days” were
generally not good enough to be worth remembering. Most of all, refuse to feel guilty because
that guilt in itself is mostly a symptom of ADHD which it feeds on itself whenever ADHD kicks
in and you miss an appointment or hand in a paper a day late and a paragraph short.
You’re moving forward or at least are pointed that way, which is good enough for today,
and nobody can say otherwise, not even you; because you aren’t beaten even while
fighting a battle which few outside our ranks could even imagine, much less survive.
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