Month: February 2020

Time travel (starting in the middle, as always) with ADHD

My concept of time is different to yours. I don’t experience it the same way that you do. For me, the world works in terms of ‘now’ and ‘not now’. Past occurences ALL feel like yesterday if I think about them. The future beyond the next week is really hard to grasp – most of the time, even an hour away doesn’t feel particularly pressing. If I think about either past or future too much, it gets overwhelming trying to figure out which bit of them to zone in on and actually pay attention to. I don’t book holidays without someone else to go with because I can’t conceptualise feeling happy ‘later’. Saving money is the same – I have to focus on the feeling of achievement I get from meeting the saving goal now, rather than any kind of promise of reward at the end. Delayed gratification is an alien concept.

A string of chaos

Whatever I’m thinking or doing -now- is the only thing my brain sees as important – even if I was focused on something totally different 10 seconds ago. Something like the laundry that I was only half way through hanging to dry, which I only started because I’d come downstairs for the bathroom clearner, which I was only looking for because I’d decided to clean the sink after I’d gone to wash my hands, which I was only washing because I’d just pulled all the storage boxes out from under the bed and dusted all the lids, which I’d only pulled out because I needed a hammer from one of the boxes, which I was looking for to hang the 20 picture frames I’d left laid out in a pattern on the living room floor about two hours previously. The frames had been sat stacked in my dining room or moved around my house for 6 months while I repeatedly failed to focus for long enough to choose the photos I wanted to put in them. At home, it’s chaos. At work, it’s exhausting.

Stories

Stories and errant thoughts never follow a straight line because I see them as a whole. I struggle to find the point I need to “let you in” at in order for you to understand what I’m talking about. I usually have a massive thought process and then look broken for a second while I explain that there’s something I need to tell you but I have to tell you three different things first. Those three different things will absolutely become a LONG lead-in story to explain the million mental leaps that took place in the last 30 seconds to get me from the fact that you telling me about your car reminded me of a giraffe that licked a pole once….. Trust me when I say, the long stories are better than getting the giraffe story out of the blue!

The only time I’m good at straight lines is when I’m zoning in on a ridiculously complex office process that needs harassing until it makes simple sense. Oddly, for someone who reads out everything from agendas to to-do lists in the wrong order unless I really concentrate, I’m really good at process mapping. For stories though, I’m used to the confused look people get when I jump in at the middle of a thought, or jump back to something we were talking about hours ago as though the conversation never even paused because I’ve not processed the gap in time the same way they have. Or I skip back to another point in my writing, because I’ve forgotten the break in the middle where I’ve talked about something completely different… like process mapping (see what I did there?).

Following me

Close friends have learned to either catch up quick, let me explain the weird thought process so that my giraffe story at least makes some vague sense, or they bluntly tell me to fill in the gaps because I’ve totally lost them. Or, even better, they just happily get on with things and don’t even pay attention to the fact that I can’t sit still and am forever messing with something so that I -can- think more in a straight line and follow what they’re all saying. I love them for it.

Everyone pees….

Some people have always seen my “now-ness” as quite free. Other’s berate me for all the things I forget because they aren’t happening in front of me and tell me that I just need to try harder to do things the way everyone else does, because everyone loses track of the time. (I read a great comeback to the “try harder” people. Yes, everyone loses time or tells a story out of order occasionally. Everyone pees too. But if you’re going to the toilet 60 times a day, I think you probably stand out slightly from the average pee-er.)

I know that those people are all correct really, and my time-travelling is both freedom and a curse. But it’s who I am, and I’m learning to own it.

Starting in the middle with ADHD

So, at 31-and-a-half, I’ve started a diagnosis pathway to find out if I have the neuro-developmental difference known as combined ADHD. I’ve been told by numerous health professionals over the last few weeks that they’re pretty sure I’m right and I DO have it at a vaguely stratospheric level, but it’ll take up to three years for an NHS specialist to confirm it and give me access to medication that could help me think and concentrate. In the meantime, I have a life to fix, a ton of potential to unleash, a career to develop, a brain to understand – and a lot of writing to do to make sense of it all.

If you related to any of this post for how your own brain works, or you want to learn more about the different types of ADHD, at some point I’ll share too many resources that helped me with my own ‘eureka’ moment before I start delving into all the things I’m learning that are helping me to live better. But because I know that writing up those resources is a future job (!) here’s my email address if you want to give me a nudge for them: beyondpaperstars@gmail.com

I’m tired – and processing that I definitely have undiagnosed ADHD

I think most people would agree that I’m usually a pretty happy person. But I’m really, really tired today. I’m tired physically, I’m exhausted emotionally, and I am done with the extreme effort it seems to take me to do the simplest of things.

I’ve had a lot on recently, and a lot to process I guess.

The last time I was -this- tired was back in November. I was constantly screwing up at work and home in every way possible and in spite of having just started seeing a private counsellor* I turned to our generation’s digital oracle (Google, obv) and threw some magic words at it: “Why can’t I do anything right?”

I was expecting the usual – I know I’ve suffered with periods of depression, particularly after big losses. I know I had anxiety. Hell, I know I get more down in winter so of course I’d feel a bit crappy in november.

What I wasn’t expecting was the first article that came up in the results at the time. The title was “Do you have undiagnosed ADHD?”

There’s a LOT more information and action between that moment and now, (most of it is a hyperactive blur) but as usual I’m approaching things from the wrong point in the story and the short version is that, just over two months later, I am absolutely convinced that yes, I do have undiagnosed ADHD, and I’ve already begun the pathway to a proper diagnosis through the NHS.

Since that first Google I’ve been learning about ADHD – and talking about it, and writing about it – pretty much constantly, and probably driving at least some of you loopy in the process. It’s partly out of fascination – suddenly, I have this perfect, ready made roadmap of how my mind works and,more importantly, how I need to change my approaches to things so that my mind CAN work.

This roadmap also comes with the possibility that I can actually fix things – you see, for every part of ADHD that’s new to me, there’s another research paper or book or person or video or twitter channel or comic strip with a whole bunch of ways to manage the problems and make the most out of the strengths that come with it.

And I’m impatient. I wan’t to fix things *now*. So, in less than three months:

  • I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my entire perception of myself and the world is highly likely to be VERY wrong, in some pretty fundamental ways.
  • I had to process my emotions. I went through joy at finally understanding WHY I find some things so very hard and others not, why I struggled at particular points in my life, and how many possibilities there are again now that I know how to actually tap into my best self. I also felt rage, and sadness, at how much emotional pain I’d experienced because I’d learned that so much of me was wrong.
  • I’ve had to face and finally acknowledge a long list of things that I find it difficult to do, and that I’ve been burning out trying to do those things the way people expect me to. And that SUCKS. I hate not being able to do things. If you tell me no, I’m instantly trying to figure out how to make it a yes.
  • I’ve had to single-handedly start building the equivalent of a user manual for myself so that I can actually start functioning. Because once I know I can do better, I feel totally compelled to try.
  • I’ve also had to accept that NHS waiting lists are long. Extremely long, and that I’m going to be on my own with this for potentially a couple of years and just have to trust myself because until I see a consultant, I won’t know for certain.
  • I’ve had to learn, pretty quickly, how to control my scattered mind and impulses to demonstrate to my employer that I am, in fact, able to successfully combat this with enough sheer effort of will because the moment I started to talk about it, some people instantly wrote me off without knowing me.
  • And I’ve had to acknowledge that my biggest impulses are around spending, and instant gratification – and immediately start learning to control those two in particular to even start to get a handle on the coins I was hemmoraging by the hour.

And honestly – I could be super chipper that I’m finally getting answers and finally demonstrably getting better in so many avenues of my life because I’m working so hard TO learn to do things in a way that lets me actuallly succeed in a world that isn’t designed for me.

But is IS hard work. And hard work is HARD and it is ALLOWED to make me feel crappy for a while. I don’t instantly need to find that perky little list of positives to verbally balance myself out and brandish the happy things on it like a pre-emptive apology for the shame of just not-being-very-good-at-this-whole-being-alive-gig today.

We ALL know I’m going to be fine. I know I’m going to pick myself back up and keep going. But for now, I’m just really tired. And it’s ok to acknowledge that.

Night x