Tag: adultadhd

Fed Up

Dec 9th, 2022

I remember my high school history teacher, I hated him, he was such an obnoxious pig, a total misogynist. I feel bad even saying that now, as I don’t have it in me anymore to hate anyone. I know it hurts me more than it hurts them, and hate is a cancer. It was 1991, and this man was that type that was ‘old fashioned’, meaning that he was overtly sexist, and probably covertly racist, in a time when a person in his position, an American History teacher slash football coach, could easily get away with both. I didn’t learn anything from him except that a man could get away with acting like a total asshole if he was one hundred percent committed to it. He barked and bellowed like an angry bulldog, one that gruffed too much, sick of being underfoot, trying to get attention through intimidation. I didn’t learn a bit about American History from him but I did learn a lot about stereotypical American masculinity; my god, what a dreadful thing, to grow up a boy in America. I struggled so much in his class, it was one of the first, for this was not a place for critical thinking, only memorisation and regurgitation of names, dates, and places that to me seemed abstract. History seemed only to exist as a timeline, with no relevance to a midwestern life or even to the events of the recent past of my self or my parents. The only thing that I clearly remember from this year was during one lecture, I have no idea what it was about, he said this – that they were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Now, I have no recollection even who ‘they’ were, this they that he was referring too. It’s just this idea, of being totally fed up to the point that there is nothing left to lose. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. He was probably talking about some uprising, some pivotal change in history that caused some group somewhere to collectively say enough is enough, probably led by a few brave souls that stepped forward first to take the initial risk. This is how uprisings happen, there is always that tipping point in a cultural context that sparks the fire that burns it all down. I do wonder what he was talking about, and who knows, perhaps someday maybe the fog will clear enough that I will remember. I think so often of that phrase, though, as it seems to me so universal.

I’m fed up, too. Fed up of not being able to finish anything. Fed up to not be able to concentrate on anything. I’m sick and tired of masking, pretending, using avoidance and escape techniques to get through the day, every day, only to collapse into a ball of fried nerves at the end of the day, or even after just an evening of solo parenting, having yelled at my kids to just please be quiet. I’m sick and tired of doing a job that I’m not good at, of stay at home mom who is trying to launch a consulting business but can’t afford to hire help as her husband doesn’t see the need for it and he controls the money. So I’ve been stuck in a non-stop loop of activities that demand all of my executive functioning to complete – driving the kids, running the errands, shopping for groceries, cooking the food, doing the laundry, buying the clothes, cleaning the house – leaving nothing left for anything else that I need to do to move my working life forward. Forget about actually enjoying my life, most of my down time it seems I am simply recovering from these relentless tasks. Strangely though, these tasks also make it easier for me to hide from the problem too, as if I focus on them, I don’t have to sit down to try to move my work forward. If I focus on the mother load, I don’t have to fail in this other area, as this is the area is where I struggle the most.

I have ADHD. I’ve known that I’ve had it so long that it used to be called ADD or ADHD – Attention Deficit Disorder with or without hyperactivity. I have know this since high school, but at this time there was no medication for it, or if there was it was rarely prescribed. I have never been officially diagnosed, or maybe I was and I just don’t remember. It was just such a part of me that I even used to kind of joke about it. But now, it is no joke. I think it is my core problem, really. It’s only a problem now because it has become unmanageable and I need help. I need help to manage my ADHD and I am living in a country that doesn’t even recognise that it exists. I am married to a man that highly doubts that it exists, who thinks that Americans essentially dramatise everything, make excuses for everything, and medicate anything that causes them the slightest discomfort or inconvenience. He thinks I should just ‘do some sport’ and complete one task before moving on to the next one. In the face of these challenges I am trying to be compassionate towards my husband and patient with my doctor to get the help that I need to get control over my life and get the help I need. Honestly, the fact that it’s not easy to get a prescription for ADHD medication has probably helped, if not to fix the problem, to at least get clarity on what is the root cause of my dysfunctional behavior.

In primary school and middle school I was a straight-A student. I had no academic difficulties in school until I arrived in high school. I remember loving to learn, even diagramming sentences. I loved this structural approach, where every word had its place and reason for being in it. My first real challenge was high school French, which I dropped after one semester. I couldn’t learn it because I couldn’t study. Every other subject before, I learned easily and quickly. With French, I remember being totally stumped. I couldn’t comprehend another language without understanding the entire structure of the grammar and how it compared and contrasted to English. I wanted to know the etymology of every word. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to simply sit down and study and memorise the work, as I had never had to do this before in any other subject. I never had to work to get good grades, I simply understood what ever was being presented and so I remembered it. The problem with having to actually study was not that I was lazy or didn’t want to, it was that studying something that wasn’t one hundred percent interesting to me was nearly impossible. I couldn’t retain information, I had to read things over and over as my mind would endlessly wander. I literally couldn’t focus. I could read a page and retain nothing. My eyes would jump around the page. I remember trying to read out loud in hopes that hearing the information would help me to remember but it didn’t. It was so hard, so painful to feel this way. I can remember the feeling clearly, even now it gives me anxiety.

Slowly, and quietly, I gave up. I stopped doing the work, little by little, and just squeaked through to pass my courses. I’d pull out a good enough grade on an exam at the end of the semester, or write a paper, slap-dash as they say, and just get by. The teachers knew I was smart, and maybe they even liked my ability to speak up, or speak out, to contradict where the others wouldn’t. I was smart enough to know where the line was and I would respectfully disagree, at least. Maybe they passed me out of laziness, or for being a pretty blonde white girl, knowing that if I failed they’d have to engage with my parents or the school administration, so they would pass me through to be the next teacher’s problem. Finally there were assignments I just didn’t do, such as my proposed final English paper on Homer’s Odyssey, a book that I borrowed from the library but never even opened, one of so many over the years. I now have a library of books that I haven’t even opened. I joke that I have them for my retirement, but I think it’s more than that. I have a real trouble focusing in on what it is I actually want to do, whether in the large or small tasks. Professionally I am just now figuring it out. I hate to admit that I committed to my (very expensive) graduate degree practically on a whim. Same to my marriage, if I’m being honest. For these life-altering choices I engaged the same mechanics of decision-making that thought it was a reasonable idea to do a 10 page paper on The Odyssey and then not even open the book. I let the paper deadline pass, probably skipped school that day, and then never spoke of it again. My teacher let it slide, and I slipped through to graduate.

As I write this, I feel a strange, familiar sense rise up in my heart. I think I’ve been using this strategy to get by since my high school years. I still use it today, but now I have the excuse of motherhood. The trap really, as there is always something that can be or needs to be done for the kids and the family, that keeps me from reading the book, or working on my business strategy, or prospecting new clients. But really, what am I avoiding, and why? Is it failure? I know that by trying I will at least succeed in small amounts. I think what I am avoiding is the terrible difficulty, the same difficulty that I see my son try to surmount as he reads the sounds of syllables in his first attempt at reading. Some days, with much encouragement, he gets through them with only a few inversions of sounds, but others, nothing he reads makes any sense to him and my heart breaks for him, not only because I see his frustration and the anger he directs at himself, but because I know exactly what that feels like.

Even now, I do anything I can to avoid the fear of feeling that way, of having to read something five times before it makes sense, of feeling like I’m stupid and that there is something wrong with me. So instead, today, I will try to mother myself as I do to him, to encourage myself, be kind with myself, to take breaks when I really need to and then to come back to it, to finish the work that needs to be done. But just like for him, I will continue to search for answers, to stick up for my self to my doctor, in a country that doesn’t recognise ADHD, to say that actually, I do know myself well enough to self-diagnose and I need all the help that I can get. The risk of not addressing the core problem is just too high. I am not going to fail this time because I am no longer afraid of trying. I am afraid of continuing to fail because I am not dealing with the core problem. I am no longer self-medicating with alcohol and cannabis and I want some real help to solve this. It is not enough to be expected to be sober to solve the problem if the problem is what I was trying to solve with those substances to begin with. I will not end my days as a mother who lost herself in her kids and hid behind a learning disability, or disorder, or whatever this is. I must finally figure this out and become the person I am meant to be.
The Unfinished House

Dec 8th, 2022

One of the main reasons I decided to get sober was to figure out the real source of my difficulties. What a funny thing to say, really. As I write it, I realise that how I’ve expressed how I feel is by translating a common French casual way to express, vaguely, that something is wrong in your life. It’s the way you would say that things have been hard lately, without going into any detail, to someone who you don’t know very well, to which they would respond with a generic recognition of what’s been said without asking for any further explanation. This type of interaction is quintessentially French. It’s at once expressive and impersonal, formal and revealing. There is a social recognised boundary which is not crossed by either party in the exchange. Et voilà.

To say ‘my difficulties’ feels like the ultimate euphemism. What I am trying to discover, to realise, is how the very core of my being functions, to understand the mechanics of my unique operating system. Please don’t mistake this for delusions of grandeur, I’m not saying that I’m exceptional, no, this is not about ego. I am at a point of recognising and accepting that my experience with and in the world may not be like most other people. Yes, there are many similarities, human emotions, concerns, troubles and the like that I share with everyone else. What I am interested in understanding is how the brain I was born with is similar or different to most others, and how my upbringing effected my personal, social, and intellectual development. How the way that I think, learn, process, and experience things began and has changed throughout my life. How did experiences and substances effect me, both positively and negatively?

I thought about reincarnation when I was about 4 years old. I remember figuring out what happens after we die is that our spirits continue on. To me this made perfect sense. I was present in a body, when I closed my eyes I was still there, in the blackness, so when I would die, I would still be there too, in the blackness, until I could open my eyes again, somewhere else, in some other body.

Also, when I would fall asleep at night, at the same age, I would close my eyes and press against my eye lids to make colors in the blackness. I would focus on these colors until they would start to move and it would feel like I was flying through the blackness along trails of dots and lines of colors.

Even now, as I sit to work, I am drawn to distraction by everything that is not what I need to focus on. So, what is this urge? Is it my brain, or is it my self – my inability to focus or my total avoidance of tasks at hand? It is so difficult to separate the two, especially at my age, seeing as my behavioral patterns are so very well worn in. This makes it hard to differentiate, as whatever mechanisms that do exist are not only the result of my innate chemistry but are deep neuro pathways, the result of years of repetition, experiences, traumas large and small, a variety of interpersonal relationships, and both a complicated self-view and world-view.

Also, I have my coping mechanisms. Now it seems I am left with coffee and food. I just had coffee and left-over lemon buttercream cake for breakfast. Not at all healthy, but a sensory reward of a warm, rich, liquid bitterness paired with a tangy, sweet confection of no less than three different textures. Seems that sensory seeking is something I’ve always done, in one way or another. Where is the line between normal and abnormal? I don’t know, but I’m sure that I’ve made a habit of crossing it, over and over again with any sense that I could stimulate.

I have so many coping strategies, and have only started to realise the scope of them and how I’ve gotten away with them for so long. You see, many and most of them are positive for myself and those around me. Take cleaning and arranging for example. This is a complicated one for me, as it is deeply tied to my childhood experiences. I grew up with two parents that didn’t really know how to clean and organise. Or maybe they did, and they never had the time or focus to do so. Whatever the reason, our house was always messy. Not an everyday type of messy, resulting from the tornado of busy children who love getting into things, but the kind of messy that is never resolved. Boxes that never quite get unpacked, projects that are put aside for later, in a house that was built from nothing but never finished. We would eat on just half of the table as the rest is full of unsorted piles of papers and mail, and the kitchen bar is the same. Piles and piles of laundry on an unfinished bathroom floor and the toilet mounted on plywood where tile was meant to be. Why anyone would choose to install a textured linoleum kitchen floor, with tiny little crevices to capture countryside dirt was beyond me, but I would scrub it nonetheless to have it clean, occasionally. I was baffled by my parents’ disregard for the state of our home, and embarrassed, ashamed that that was how we lived.

So I cleaned as much as I could since as long as I can remember and I decorated in my head. I finished things that were left indefinitely unfinished, imagined how much nicer the wooden plank floors would be if they were just given the attention they needed, to be sanded and stained. I would imagine this over and over again. I would trim the bare windows, finish the stairs so they closed at the back, so I’d not have to imagine a monster underneath grabbing my ankles as I bounded down the stairs. I still remember the one step that was loose and would pinch my foot if I landed wrong, sometimes now I dream of it and the pain is amplified. I would have definitely finished that step, just tightened the two boards so that they wouldn’t pinch tender feet. I didn’t much keep a diary when I was small but I remember once writing about how I had decorated the living space downstairs, all in wicker furniture from Pier One Imports. To me, it was the perfect compliment to the nature outside, our house was tucked back in the woods on an idyllic piece of land that had been cleared before we moved there. My father designed and built the house with only a little bit of help but at some point, he seemed to just give up, and it was left as is. My mother never mastered how to organise and hated to clean, so the house was just a terrible mess, most of the time, and I was left to imagine just how beautiful it could have been had anyone with the power to do so would have paid attention to it. What a horrible metaphor for how I felt, too.

I could write so much more but now I must work, as I feel like if I continue I will have to go on forever until it is all out. So for now I will leave this too, unfinished.

Tag: adultadhd

Fed Up

The Unfinished House