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