discouraged

[sdwa]

I have ADHD. Now what? It’s the Now What part no one is good at helping with. Even the best advice in books I have read is hard to implement. I can’t do it alone, and I don’t have the money to hire someone to walk me through it. And even the best advice falls flat – because if it were just a matter of knowing what to do, I would do it. That’s what nobody gets. I don’t need a boat-load of helpful hints. I’m not a moron. What I need is a system in place to support me, and I can’t seem to get that system in place. I’m FED UP. I feel like I’ve been trying to get help for these stupid problems for my entire life. I did years of therapy – total waste of time and money. I tried religion, and got a ton of guilt. I tried going back to school – twice – and still can’t get a better job.Then I got a diagnosis and some meds – but no real advice or direction about what to do. So I tried coaching – encouraging, and helpful in forming an understanding, but not in actually getting my life off the ground. Then I tried a support group, which was kind of okay, only nobody really knows any better than I do what to do about anything. My house is a nightmare of clutter. Paying my bills is impossible. I can’t find anything. And I live with three other people who don’t help with the mess. I can’t do everything myself. When I make progress, someone else undoes it. Plus, a house has an annoying way of needing to be cleaned more than once. I’d like to blow torch the entire place. What upsets me the most is feeling like real help is not available and doesn’t exist.

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[Bibliophile]

A diagnosis does not change who you are. It just puts a label on it. You have to decide what you want to change and go from there. Start small. If you want to manage your bills, come up with a system that works for you. I use online banking to pay the bill immediately when it arrives, but I set the withdrawal date near the due date of the bill. If I let it sit, I will forget to pay it. My philosophy is “do as much as you can when you remember to do it as waiting will result in it not getting done every time.” Sure, this is very rigid and other people don’t understand the compulsion to finish the task, but it helps get the stuff done. If you want to clean your house, figure out a schedule to stick to but also a way to make it regimental that it always gets done. I find that repetitive tasks require a strict routine or else they only get half done or forgotten. A digital organizer helps, but only if you use it religiously.

It is hard and we certainly fail more often than we succeed. The important thing is to keep trying no matter what. I think one of the reasons so many ADHD people get accused of being egocentric is that we have to spend so much time focusing on our own performance in order to cope with our impairments.

Incidentally, my house is a disaster area too and always has been.

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[Curlymoe115]

If you know that the money will be in the bank for due dates put everything on automatic withdrawl if you can’t manage to find time to set up your own payments. You didn’t say whether you are related to the 3 people you live with, but if you aren’t then sit down and set up a chore chart that lets everyone know who is responsible for what. If it is your family you can try the same thing but who knows how successful it will be. You can always kick unrelated people out and find someone new but it is not as easy for family. And if you have more willpower then me, see if you can shed yourself of some of the clutter by using the 3 boxes. Keep, discard and giveaway. Only keep it if you have room for it, most things can be given away. There are always people looking to haul away perfectly good stuff. And there is a new society that I saw on the tv that has pledged to not buy anything new (other then groceries) for the next 365 days. You can tell yourself you are doing it for the environment. If you can do these things you will find that your mess gets smaller because there is less stuff. If you only have a weeks worth of laundry (everything you own) then on the 6th day you wash everything you own and you are good for the next week. 4 plates, and cutlery. Wash after every meal. Stop subscriptions to all material. Buy groceries one day at a time. 1 set of sheets and blankets, and one weeks worth of towels. Buy a receipt copier and scan all receipts that must be kept into the computer then throw them out. Box up and seal all momentos. Suddenly no more mess. We can dream even if we can’t translate this to reality.

I am trying a new book, Survival Tips for Women with AD/HD by Terry Matlen. Maybe this will be the book that changes it all. At least I got it out of the library and in a few weeks I will return it so it won’t permanently add to the clutter.

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[Wgreen]

“It is hard and we certainly fail more often than we succeed. The important thing is to keep trying no matter what,” says the Librarian. She is right.

Since this is a Canadian website, allow me to quote the Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus:

“La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” [= The struggle itself towards the summits suffices to fill a person’s heart; it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy. (In Homer, the gods condemned Sisyphus eternally to roll a boulder to the top of a mountain in the Underworld, only to watch it roll back down every time. The gods of antiquity evidently believed there was no more brutal punishment than relentless, futile labor.)] ADHD is a boulder we constantly try to push up the mountain. You either keep pushing, or it rolls back and crushes you. Maybe one day there’ll be a cure. For now, we try this, we try that. Sometimes we have some successes. But mostly we just keep pushing. And we try to avoid total nihilism—we “try to imagine Sisyphus happy.”

You’ll get suggestions here and elsewhere on the sight that might make life a little easier. Good luck.

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