We have a lot of catching up to do since the last time I was blogging regularly. Since then I have had a couple of kids turn 18 and move out and we moved and renovated – are renovating – a house. The number of pets has fluctuated (mostly up). I’m well on my way to completing the writing of my first book, along with being eyeball-deep in researching my second.
One of the most earth-shifting changes for me in the last couple years has been being officially diagnosed with ADHD.
In the spring of 2019, a friend shared an article on Facebook: ADHD is Different for Women by Maria Yagoda. Though I had struggled with depression and anxiety for years, the idea of ADHD had never occurred to me or come up in treatment.
The article resonated with me, especially:
Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”
I dug deeper. *
My situation is not an uncommon one. As a student judged with above average intelligence, I grew up in the midst of frustrated adults, parents, teachers, and others who just could not understand why I wasn’t performing up to my potential.
Every year, I was placed in my school’s gifted program based on my standardized test scores. And every year, without exception, they kicked me out of the program for not being self-directed enough. Though I could ace any test put in front of me, turning in homework, or rather not turning it in, pulled my grades down every semester. Frequent moves masked my social inadequacies. The cherry on top was that every year in grade school, I received the ironic award for the Messiest Desk.
My room at home was no different, a wild conglomeration of books, papers, and toys that could never find a home. Each item was too important to me to even put out of sight. When faced with organizing any space, I froze, paralyzed by complete overwhelm.
As an adult, I eventually figured out a complex set of systems that keep my life humming along, though I have always had the nagging feeling that I was working harder than was necessary. I was always sprinting just to keep from falling behind. During one conversation with a friend, I was stunned to find out… to be continued in a minute.
I had to look up why my cat is always yowling while she carries her toy around. **
Anyway, I was stunned to find out that she had no lists of chores, or groceries, no databases of clothes in closets or medicine in the cabinet, not even a budget. She said, I kid you not, that she just did things when they needed to be done.
Every experience I had of doing things “when they need to be done” has resulted in things either getting done all the time to the point of ridiculousness or not done at all. Like the time when my husband had to take me by the shoulders and say, “We have enough butter!”
I had forgotten the butter on a few trips to the grocery store and then my brain switched into a permanent state of “Don’t forget the butter.”
The same scenario regularly plays out with other grocery items as well. Right now we have six bottles of ranch dressing in the pantry and two 10 pound bags of brown rice. We either have 12 extra tubes of toothpaste or none at all. There is no in between.
Learning about ADHD brought light and clarity to many of the cobwebbed corners of my mind. While the diagnosis doesn’t fix the problem, it helps me to see the way my mind works with more realistically.
Some ways my diagnosis helped me to understand myself better:
⏰ Time Blindness: My husband, Jay, used to entertain himself with a little game. He’d position himself between me and a clock and then ask me what time I thought it was. Usually, I am at the very least an hour off. In my mind, the last time I looked at a clock was five minutes ago, pretty much no matter how much has happened since then. Now, though, I have a watch with alarms so I am not worrying about forgetting to pick up my kids or eat or turn off the stove. My watch also dings me every hour on the hour, which keeps me more rooted in actual time.
🐠 Memory issues: A friend of mine once told me that there are two types of people when it comes to organizing. There are those who store things in clear containers and those who store things in opaque containers. I thought for sure I was an opaque container person. Solid colored containers reduce all that nasty visual noise of all the stuff on the shelves. But, alas, I was wrong. I am and will always be a clear container person. Out of sight truly is out of mind. That is why you find me with piles of books and papers, art supplies, and “stuff to be taken to the car” piled in directly in the path of the front door. The flip side of the memory issues is that it has given me permission to get rid of a lot of stuff because I will never remember that I have it anyway and would buy it again.
🔎 Hyperfocus: When my interest is engaged, my focus is sustained and intense. I take a deep dive into subjects I want to learn about and have the ability to keep going for hours. Pomodoros are not for me, they just mess up my flow. Who needs breaks? On the other hand, woe to the child who is trying to get my attention when I am swept away in creating or writing or research. I also have a tendency to utterly exhaust myself through hyperfocus.
✅ Inability to prioritize: The Eisenhower Matrix has forever stumped me because everything seems like it should definitely be in quadrant 1. Because if it’s not in Q1, then it will never get done because I never get to the end of my Q1 list.
🥺 Rejection Sensitivity Disorder: This one is a bitch – the worst one of all. What RSD does is give me the opposite of rose-colored glasses when I have to guess at what other people mean when they talk to me, look at me, or when they react – or don’t react – to me or something I’ve said. This is the nasty little tendency to take everything personally, and not only personally – as an attack. But learning that this is a thing my brain strangles me with has been helpful. It slows me down and makes me ask, “Is that just the RSD talking right now? Maybe I should wait and calm down and see how it all works out.” I have also found a workaround. If I can take criticism in the form of someone teaching me or if we are learning together, then I do much better, even finding the discussion that can follow invigorating. It takes careful reframing, though, and often a lot of mental energy.
🧠 Executive Function Disorder: When I made my notes for this post, I defined each of these symptoms with a few words, just to remind myself what point I wanted to make. I finished all the others except for Executive Function because I find this the most embarrassing. How ironic to come back to it today – drag myself back to finish the post and find that the subtitle I had given this one was about having trouble starting tasks.
Executive Function Disorder is made up of several of the other items on this list, like time blindness, issues with working memory, and the inability to prioritize. However, they all fall under the umbrella of EFD.
What it boils down to is that my brain is like a classroom of rowdy fifth graders where the teacher is taking a nap. Or maybe she left. I’m not sure, it’s hard to tell with the noise going on. The little students are trying to be good and hold the class themselves, but they are not very good at it and keep finding other things to do.
ADDitude Magazine explains EFD like this:
Broadly speaking, executive functioning refers to the cognitive and mental abilities that help people engage in goal-directed action. They direct actions, control behavior, and motivate us to achieve our goals and prepare for future events. People with executive dysfunction struggle to organize and regulate their behavior in ways that will help them accomplish long-term goals.
🐝 Anxiety: the crowning glory of the whole mind-zoo of symptoms. Anxiety is the result of trying to mentally dash from deficiency to discrepancy in my brain and try to keep it all straight and look like a normal person who has it all together. It’s a lot of mental work and it keeps my self monitoring awareness cranked up to 11 at all times.
I intended to finish this post with an explanation of the brain chemicals involved in ADHD and ADHD treatment, but it is already overlong. Tune in next time for another long post about dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. (But probably not the very next post. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
*A few ADHD Resources (not a comprehensive list, obviously.):
- ADDitude Magazine
- Women with Attention Deficit Disorder by Sari Solden
- “How to ADHD” Youtube Channel
**It’s one of two things – either she is “hunting” and is bringing me the “food” she has provided and wants praise and attention, or she is trying to teach me, her kitten, how to get off my lazy butt and hunt for myself by bringing me the prey so I can pounce on it.