The Forums › Forums › I Just Found Out! › I Have a Diagnosis, Now What? › Have I gotten a diagnose? At least im on my way. › Re: Have I gotten a diagnose? At least im on my way.
Hey, that sounds like what we all go through when we first get the diagnosis! It’s like we’ve gotten a great new toy, and we’re excited and scared and happy and sad, all at the same time. And we want to tell the world about it. I’m told that new parents are the same way. I wouldn’t know. I’m a confirmed singleton, and I wouldn’t have a child in my home.
You don’t need to do anything to “feel” what ADD is. It’s your “normal” state, and has been for most of your life. You can now understand why you did stuff like setting your room on fire or breaking into a mall, but it’s a waste of energy to give in too much to feelings of having “wasted” years because nobody figured out that this was the reason for your behaviour. Acknowledge those feelings, sure. But if you focus too much on them, you’ll make yourself feel really bad. Better to think of all the great years you have ahead of you, now that you’ve been diagnosed and are starting treatment.
Medication is supposed to stimulate the parts of your brain that need stimulation in order to give you focus and clarity. It’s kind of like when you put on a pair of glasses for the first time and realize that this is how you’re supposed to be able to see things. “Normal” people are calm most of the time, but fall apart in a crisis. A person with ADD is the calmest person around in a crisis, but is a nervous wreck when things are calm. It’s just that our brains need stimulation, and when we don’t get it, we have trouble functioning. Medication will not do everything for you. It’ll just make it easier for you to implement the other coping strategies to deal with your problems of impulsiveness, concentration, organization and motivation.
Having ADD is exciting, as well as frustrating. “Normal” people’s brains work in a very linear, boring fashion. They go from point A to point B to point C, and so on. They get where they’re going, very efficiently, but they miss a lot of scenery. An ADD person’s brain is like the internet. We start at point A, go to point B, then see that point Q looks interesting so we go to it, then see that point 47 is interesting, so we go over to it…and before we know it, we’ve gotten many steps away from our original journey, but we’ve discovered some really cool stuff along the way.
So you’re not “the guy with ADD”. You’re the guy with the “internet brain”!
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