Re: Successful ADDers annoy the h*ll out of me.

[sdwa]

@DubRod –

What I’m suggesting, I guess, is that the initial poster doesn’t hate you, but is just deeply frustrated and struggling.

I’ve learned that resenting people who are doing well only causes me to dwell on bad feelings – it doesn’t make me more productive or more effective. But those feelings can happen when I’m in a state of despair, when I feel like nothing I do works, when I feel like I’ve been searching for solutions for years and all my efforts lead to a brick wall. You get that, right? Sometimes people feel like they’ve come to the end of the line, and they feel like failures because they can’t understand why, despite their best efforts and intentions, they still can’t achieve their goals, or even identify their goals.

No one hates you. I’m happy for you if you are doing well, I really am, and if one were to put a more positive spin on the successes of others, at least we can feel some hope that it is possible.

There is this kind of superficial, dismissive, commercial element that creeps into a lot of ADHD material – the “ADHD is a gift” kind of stuff – well, I don’t think it’s a gift in a society where most of us are expected to function in a way that goes completely against how we are hard-wired. It’s a real problem, a real “handicap” in an industrial society.

Pretty much any “right brain” activity involving intuition, synthesis, creativity, holistic thinking, understanding systems and relationships, etc. comes naturally to me (and probably most of us.) The “left-brain” analysis, step-by-step, linear, methodical approach to life is, however, what gets rewarded by society.

As a student, I noticed the education system likes to give out a little piece of information at a time. Here’s a pine cone, here’s an acorn, here’s a leaf, here’s some bark, a rabbit, a deer…and gradually that might add up to an image of the forest, but I would be the last to know. I would learn more quickly if they told us up front: This is a forest. Then I would understand how to think about the things that come from it.

To use another analogy, if someone sets up the file folders for me, pre-labeled, then I can figure out where everything goes, but if I don’t know what I’m looking at, it could takes weeks of piling up seemingly unrelated documents before I could begin to know how to separate them into categories, and even then I’d wrestle with whether the categories were correct. Oh wait, that’s not an analogy – that’s my desk.

I need to see how the parts relate to and form the whole. Without knowing what the Big Picture is, I fail to recognize what’s going on. Most people come at the world with the ability to gradually assemble their understanding in a linear way, or maybe to not even know or care about the Big Picture.

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