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This topic made me think a post in of one of my favorite blogs ever (warning: occasional language, constant humor!):

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/05/sneaky-hate-spiral.html

“I’m a bird! I’m a bird! I’m a bird!”

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OMG! There’s a big blank in the middle of Post #1! That’s because I got a phone call in the middle of editing it. Yes, I am ADD. I couldn’t ask for a more shining example of what I do all day long: look for the ADD moments, find them, build my case:

“Exhibit 1,236: Totally ADD Forum post under the heading of ‘Reply to: Always second-guessing.’ Observe, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the sentence that reads Those people that I confide in the most, coincidentally, and then stops at the comma…”

What I meant to say instead was: Those people that I confide in the most, coincidentally, are people who are probably undiagnosed ADD themselves.

And while I want them to consider getting evaluated, anything more than a friendly nudge seems overly confrontational: “We’re alike. I’m ADD. Do the diagram.” There’s no good way to say “You’re just like I was before I got treatment,” especially if the person thinks they’re doing just fine at life, thank you very much.

I want to lift a little piece out of seabassd’s message, because it fits where I am right now:
Another way I may judge if meds are working or not is by how much I’ve checked off my “to-do” list. So I’ve got this really big “to-do” list and I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off and all the time I’m saying…”These Meds. aren’t working!” “Damn these Meds.” What’s really going on is that I’ve created a list that would exhaust a “normal”.

That’s so very me ever since the meds. Before the meds, I probably had just as long a to-do list, but it was so much less fully formed in my conscious mind. Pre-diagnosis, I described myself as a Type Z personality: It was impossible to light a fire under my butt because my butt wouldn’t leave the chair even long enough to strike the match. Everything was chaos, but an insurmountable sort of chaos that led to a general resignation: “I’ll never get these papers filed, so might was well waste the entire afternoon on the internet.” Or writing blog entries that are worlds longer than these two posts put together. Or drawing fan fiction comics for my own amusement.

Then the kids got bigger, and stopped taking naps. They started school. I started to realize people were counting on me to get s**t done once in a while. That’s probably what led me to seek some answers to my inability to get my act together. That, and encountering all the other parents at school, who seemed to know what their schedules were, who knew what was next on the school calendar, who could find time to volunteer, could have my kids over for play dates without apologizing for the state of their house, who actually read the newsletters and papers that came home in their kids’ folders.

How did they DO that?

Anyway, the end result was diagnosis and meds. And ever since then, I’ve been the headless chicken, frantic because I have so much to DO, so much I WANT TO DO, so much I don’t want to do but want to be DONE, SO I HAVE TO DO IT, and it all has to be now, now, now, and it’s made all the harder because not only do I have to carve out time to stay on top of things, since I never had that habit – I also feel compelled to carve out even more time to catch up on all the things in life I neglected all those years. Cleaning up today’s messes, and yesterday’s.

That doesn’t leave much room for things like this; for sitting and writing and reflecting. And I miss it terribly. I want and need to write the long rambling blog entries sometimes, and I can’t find a way to make it happen. My husband’s suggestion was to take a set amount of time – like a half-hour – once or twice a week, but I don’t write that way. For me, writing demands bigger chunks. I’m just getting started 30 minutes in. And it doesn’t feel good, or satisfying, unless I do it the old type-Z way, all hyper-focused, butt in the chair, the fire going straight from head to fingers, no lower extremities involved. Just thousands of words, words I’ll read over later and think “damn – I’m long-winded, but I’m good!” Because I do like to write, and to read what I write. If nothing else it’s a great personal record. I’ve got a whole blog with hundreds of entries that I wrote before I joined this group. I only ever had about ten followers, but I never fail to crack up when I read it, and I feel like I’ve lost something in the transition to list-tackling responsible adult parent. A med holiday is out of the question because, alas, for me, going off them makes me feel like c**p. (Which, of course, just convinces me that I’m some sort of horrible speed addict.)

So, in summary: Yeah, I second-guess my ADD diagnosis a lot, too. I get more done on the meds. My husband and kids would rate their quality of life as “higher.” And I’d probably rate my own quality of life as higher, too.

But there’s a question I can’t shake: Why can’t “higher” mean something beyond “incredibly frustrating?” What do I have to do to get it to something approaching “satisfying?”

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Long post – I tried to break it up with some white space, but it’s still too long. Posting it anyway because it feels good to write the thoughts down.

I was diagnosed…what, three years ago? (I honestly don’t remember) and I don’t think I will EVER stop second-guessing the diagnosis. Mainly because while hubby is a good resource for the “notice a change since the meds?” question (he usually says yes, but not always), after that I run out of candidates for feedback. I don’t want to ask my kids because it doesn’t seem fair to make them rate my performance as Mom. I don’t have a lot of close friends these days. Those people that I confide in the most, coincidentally,

The people who have known me the longest – my parents – I don’t dare tell. Their take on illnesses in general has always been either “it’s all in your head” or “tough it out.” And my father is a retired physician! The one time I floated the idea of my having ADD past my mother – before I was diagnosed – she attributed my long list of difficulties to the fact that I was simply a typical mother with three kids (as she had been).

She meant to be reassuring, but all it did was fill me with doubt and more confusion. Had she ever sent me to school with an empty sandwich? I don’t think so. But my son had the lovely experience of opening his sandwich box to find two plain slices of bread because I’d forgotten to put anything between them.

Perversely, it’s these kinds of stories I need to tell myself now and then so that I can trust my diagnosis and move forward. Otherwise the self-critic starts in with “Malingerer! Lazy butt! It’s all just an excuse for your lack of self-discipline! And for you to get some stimulants!” So it becomes this weird ironic game; in order to feel better about myself I have to go around looking for ways I’ve messed up that are above and beyond typical human screw-ups or typical busy-mom oopsies.

Obviously the ones that happened before I went on meds – like the sandwich incident – are best at convincing me my ADD is for real, but the sad truth is I still have plenty of ADD-style moments now.

What I usually decide is that the ADD moments are fewer, and it’s just that I’m more likely to notice the ones I do have thanks to the meds. (“Insight!” my doctor triumphantly pronounced at one of my med checks.). Sometimes I’ll look back at an oops moment and realize I actually caught myself mid-goof and thus prevented a worse one…as in, locking the door and realizing I forgot my phone. At least I thought of it in time to go back in and GET the phone. That’s an improvement. But of course at the moment it happens all I do is curse and kick myself for not thinking of it sooner still.

Sometimes the second-guessing seems endless. Am I too hard on myself now? Or did I seek ADD treatment because I was too hard on myself to begin with?

That’s part one – yikes! I’ve got more to say in Post #2.

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[quizzical]

Night owl here, too. For me it’s both a body-clock thing and a Quiet Time thing. Although I can’t say that night is when I accomplish much – usually it just brings on a wave of energy for things like Internet-surfing and making iTunes playlists.

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Hunter Vision…I like that. Makes all kinds of sense to me. I’m actually an Inattentive Type ADDer and I’ve been quite UNhyperactive all my life. But after my diagnosis I started deliberately adding movement to my tasks to keep me on track.

Example: I used to grocery-shop by slowly going up and down every aisle of the store, no matter what was on my list. Just to see if there was Stuff I Forgot to Put on the List, Stuff on Sale, Random Cool Stuff, you get the idea.

One day I decided to simply beeline right to each item as it appeared on my list, even if Item 1 and Item 2 items were at opposite ends of the store, and Item 3 back at where I started. I ended up covering a lot more distance, but I finished my shopping in half the time. So for me, motion does work, although it’s still a struggle to initiate the process.

Might be why that old “retrace your footsteps” strategy when I lose things has actually worked for me as well. Sometimes I’ll combine that with the Sherlock thing – only silently, because I know it’s a bit silly – but I’ll walk along and narrate my way through the clues. Here’s a real example from only yesterday:

Lost book; why isn’t it on the couch? The game is afoot! “You got up to make dinner, but then you decided to open the windows; it was a beautiful day, you’d been lying on the couch, reading, but now it’s dinnertime; you need fresh air for energy for the task ahead…Naturally, you would choose the route that took you along the most windows between the couch and the kitchen…

And that window there was particularly sticky; you had to climb a chair – ”

And there’s the lost book, next to the open window.

Elementary, my dear Watson!

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I actually do that, too…only I ask God. I feel a little silly saying it, but it’s my biggest touchstone with my faith – the thing I ask for and always receive. When I lose some random object, I will stop and – sometimes silently, sometimes not – say, “God, please help me find my [lost item].” And it has not failed me yet…

I got a new iPod for Christmas, courtesy of my husband.

Two days after Christmas, an email went out from the choir’s music librarian: She’d been cleaning up the choir room and found a little iPod…Did anyone lose one?

My gleeful email reply: Me, me, meeeee….

So now I have TWO iPods.

Merry Christmas, ADD-style: Late!

🙂

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I agree wholeheartedly with Rick about the difference an interested teacher makes!

I got to thinking about my own teachers, classes, etc. Interestingly, some of the classes I liked the least were the small, seminar-type ones, where there are sixteen people sitting around a table, and there was a lot of group discussion. On paper that all sounds very engaging, but I hated it, mostly because I was painfully shy, and on top of that I was at an Ivy-league school and feeling incredibly intimidated most of the time. I would sit there bewildered and amazed that there were people who could think on their feet, who could respond to questions right then and there. Often there would be one or two students whose breadth of knowledge had them dominating the conversation, pulling connections to whatever we were discussing out of their brains like a string of magician’s silk scarves, red, yellow, purple, sparkling, flaming….”I find that in his earlier works – ”
And I just sit there and wonder HOW THE HELL DID I GET HERE and think I WILL BE REVEALED FOR THE FRAUD THAT I AM VERY VERY SOON…

No, my favorite classes were the lectures. I have to point out that this wasn’t so until I started sitting in the front of the class. In my first year I would hide in the back, and of course my mind would be drifting in the first five minutes. But if I sat in the front row, I was riveted, because those professors styled their talks to carry across a large space, and so the intensity level in that first row was palpable (and yes, sometimes that meant spit-flecks, but dodging them definitely keeps you awake!).

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Awesome link, Larynxa – my subconscious must have been at work when I titled my post; I thought maybe I’d come up with that idea myself but when I watched the cartoon I recognized it – a fact which shows my age, I’m sure! Thanks for the blast from the past! 🙂

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@ blackdog: LOL!

@mulegirl: I can’t tell you how many times I get “stuck” in the shower because I can’t remember whether I washed my face or not, did I rinse my hair or not, etc… Often the only way to solve the dilemma is to wash my face again!

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Loving these entries – I forgot I’d started this one! 🙂

Here’s one for the holiday season, although I do it all year long:
Multiple times I’ve been shopping and left my cart to look at something…then gone back and taken the wrong cart! Bad enough when the cart is mostly empty, but once I grabbed a cart chock-full of someone else’s groceries…and he had to say “excuse me, but I think you have my cart….”

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Wow, this is me – still, more than a year after diagnosis – or is it two years? (wow, I’ve totally lost track)

“I did well in school.”

I did well in school – honor roll, 99th percentile on all those weird standardized number 2 pencil tests. In the smart-kid classes, calculus, AP history, college prep all the way. Good SATs, I got into a top college, from which I graduated on time with a good GPA. Yep. I did well.

BUT –

Good God, were there some bumps in that road.
The form “Warning Notice” sent home by my 7th grade math teacher. I forget my grade – not horrific, but it was dangling precariously close to failing. In the comment section was written only this: “She seems to be in her own world much of the time.”

The year we were not required to turn in any science lab write-ups until the end of the year, at which time we were expected to have handed in a total of 30. My total one month from the end of the year: Seven. Somehow the rest of them happened by June, but it wasn’t pretty.

The calculus course I dropped three-quarters of the way through senior year, because I was failing it so spectacularly. I’d already gotten into college, so it was quietly wiped off my record and therefore it didn’t kill my GPA. I’m pretty sure there were doctor’s notes involved, because at that time I was being treated for major depression.

The college English final exam I missed because I wrote the date in the margin of a notebook that I never looked at again. They let me take the makeup exam.

The countless all-nighters for writing papers and studying for exams. That horrible moment when the black window hovering above your typewriter suddenly becomes purple, and the realization that it is dawn snaps your neck so hard that you nearly topple backward.

Those printed notes that you couldn’t bear to read from the career center you couldn’t bear to visit: What Will You Do After Graduation?

Still trying to figure that one out. I’m 48.

But, yeah, I did well in school.

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Just thought I’d pop in and say hello! Sorry I’ve been such a stranger!

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Old topic re-awakened…

but very interesting to me, because I’m inattentive type and very shy. Meaning, I look like a good listener, because I don’t say much, but I’m actually a terrible listener, quietly sitting there with my mind a million miles away!

My husband is not ADD, but he’s got family members who are, and they are probably more on the hyperactive side. They talk A LOT.

I find it very trying to be around them.

Then I have a brother who is undiagnosed but clearly has at least some degree of ADD. He talks a lot, too.

I find I enjoy talking to him for a while – I’m always happy to take his calls – and then at some point I hit my limit – rather suddenly – but he’s clueless and still going strong.

I’m working on jumping in and saying “Hey, gotta go,” but a lifetime of Not Making Waves makes this difficult.

The only difference I find between talking with ADDers and non ADDers is with non ADDers I’m more likely to blame my inattentiveness when I can’t follow or add to the conversation, whereas with ADDers I tend to fault them for those same difficulties (“When will they let me get a word in?”).

At times I find it disturbing when someone’s “ADD-ness” bugs me, since I have it too – I sit and wonder if I’m A) A horrible, unsympathetic person or B) misdiagnosed. Not fun.

I would say that in the end, my ability to enjoy a conversation with someone is more about a conversation’s subject matter than whether the person is or isn’t ADD. As far as my ability to communicate effectively, well, that probably goes to my interest in the topic as well.

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Me too.

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Stupid autocorrect! It changed my h-i-n-e-y into a “honey!”

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