She's Somewhere Else Right Now

"There is a word for you.....I don't know it in English....Let me look it up".

My friend picked up his Serbo-Croatian dictionary and moved his finger down the open page of the dog-eared paperback.  I was thinking maybe he wants to say mysterious, statuesque, profound, insightful, gregarious...

"Ah, here it is...AB-SENT. Absent. That describes you perfectly."


I was thinking about this as I was getting dressed after a shower last week, noticing that I had shaved just one armpit. I am somewhere else.

It's true at times, and especially so 20 years ago I first got the label, though I didn't realize it. You could be talking to me and I would be mentally exploring sometimes 5 or 10 ideas, sparked by something you said. I didn't know it was unusual, so I didn't try to fix it. I am much better now, remembering to ask pertinent "listening" questions and repeating back what they say if I am not sure I really understood. I wonder if people think I'm taking the piss when I do this.

After all, I have been called "the Queen of Mock" because apparently I have a "tone" when I repeat things, but it's almost always because I either found them funny or just want to hear it back. I am not always aware of what I say out loud. But when I think about it, I wouldn't like it if people did that to me. So now I often bite my lip, use a nice voice, and other things I ask my children to do.  My best friend misses "the edgy Samantha", but with my newfound awareness I couldn't take the night-long torture of thinking about who I may have offended.





So now I'm more present,  and slightly more bland. and that's ok.

NOTE to parents or spouses of people with ADHD: telling us to buckle down or man up or just "work harder" or "focus" is not enough and not helpful; we just get used to consequences and hone our charm and manipulation to get around the straight route. We need hand-holding in some cases and in others, a taskmaster. We will show annoyance. We will resist and squirm and come up with excuses for not following up. We are wrong. The idea that we will somehow do things our own way (and even prove it sometimes with independent brilliance) is the result of our magical thinking. But our egos can be fragile, so don't treat us like children, we just need some help to do things that come so naturally to the rest of you.

If a child needs glasses, do you tell her "Just focus harder and learn to see better"? Do we say "If the other kids can do it, you can too if you just try harder--you need to train your eyes!"

Part of having ADHD is, yes, not being able to focus, and this does hamper success, but I have found, for me anyway, the biggest problem is being drawn away from unpleasant tasks by more interesting things, things that offer a greater, more immediate reward (for me this is connection with other people.) Impulse control. And how else can it be? The part of the brain that regulates what is important and what is not is NOT FUNCTIONING PROPERLY. And in that moment (I am thinking of school work or doing taxes) we believe we will catch up, do the task at a later time when we feel more motivated. And then, Poof, it's gone, out of our heads, sometimes forever.

I always wanted to do my best. It surprised me and my family to find out that I am in fact a perfectionist, and doing a less than dazzling job is distressing to me. I want to be outstanding in everything I do, and even though the net result is often flat lining, that magical thinking comes along again and believes that with a fresh start we can be dazzling again.

Yup, the lows are pretty low.

Wind was knocked swiftly out of my sails. When that happens....give up! That is my usual course of action. If you happened to read my previous post on handing in my first calculus assignment, full of anxiety, procrastination and ultimately, fanfare, you will note that at the bottom I noted that lows follow the highs. Here I am, in the lows. So...let's explore this shall we?

I waited for my marks, checked every few days, fretted, wondered, did something else, forgot about it, remembered, fretted again and finally clued in when I checked the site that the grade was "incomplete". I also got a tip-off that two of my answers were wrong. That lesson was apparently only the first of FIVE I was to hand in all at once. YAAAAA! And it was SO CHALLENGING just to do one.  Immediately I felt foolish, then panicky and overwhelmed, then optimistic, then overwhelmed again, then self-loathing kicked in so I put it aside to deal with for another time since it is such a bad feeling.

It has been about a month now since I have known and since I can't get past the next lesson (on limits, which just keep hitting a mental block in my taxed brain), I have shut down. I mean, look how much effort it was just for me to hand the bloody thing in...ugh, the sweats come just contemplating.


In my assessment for ADHD, the therapist noted in the cognitive performance portion, that as the challenge increases, my performance increases, but it takes me such a great effort to get there in the first place I hardly ever do. The errors come doing the mundane tasks and so my sense that I can do it at all is dampened from the start. 

Well, I will be attending an ADHD coaching Meet-up for the first time so maybe they will have some answers for me.They even have sort of a buddy system so I'll figure out what that is about. I don't want this to be yet another abandoned course.

So, what are the 16 things?

I can't do things the straight way.

The second any task begins to feel like it is on a linear path, I have to break it up somehow. Even as I write this, I'm drawn to get up and tend to something else, or look up something online.

Any big task looms so large in my mind I am intimidated at the onset. So I make everything into a game, like the one I use with cleaning. I live in a huge house, so I make a deal with myself to attack a finite number of items in each room, increasing the number in each room until I get to 20, at which point the place looks pretty tidy, so I begin the same process with actual cleaning. I end up with a place I can live with, and if I get distracted along the way it is not so hard to go back to it. The rest of the family doesn't seem to mind, and if I look a little insane doing it, so be it.

High School Transcript Brings Palpitations

If you always did well in school, what I describe will seem like a foreign language to you. I just picked up my high school transcript, and it was worse than I thought. I was secretly hoping time had changed my marks through homeopathic logic. Only 8 of my marks were over 70 percent over the span of 4 years, all of those in the first 2 years.

If you ask what makes doing well in school such a challenge when you have ADD, you are likely to hear about distractions, lack of focus, difficulty settling in to do the work. There is something much more to it than that, though, the invisible force field guarding success.

I want to isolate what that "other" factor is, and I had hoped it would make its presence known as I delve into my high school level Calculus course. Well, this morning, it popped up, and in an attempt to name it, embarrass it and kill it so it doesn't slow me down anymore in my life, here is what "it" is:

I have taken weeks getting through the first lesson, doing the calculations, then typing, drawing, then graphs, making tables, finding and correcting plenty of mistakes. And it was no picnic. Focusing makes me extremely sleepy, and taxes my brain, makes me irritable and edgy, brings headaches. But now, it's ready to hand in  (you upload it to the site for marking). There is nothing stopping me now from handing it in save a last look and re-naming of the file. Yet there is a HUGE, strong force, like an invisible hand, pushing me back from actually doing it. Here is the process, in real time:

time to hand it in
but it's not ready yet
ok, have one last look at it and get it ready (doing that now)
daughter climbs on my lap, wants my attention. I continue to do my work
finally make all the finishing touches, daughter is wanting to play on the computer.
I have to entertain my daughter. Maybe she'll watch a movie? Go put one on.
ok, I am back.
my heart is pounding. Go to the Distance Learning website, prepare to upload first lesson. My heart pounds more. I see it there, my lesson, "Rates of Change and Derivatives"
my daughter comes back in, she is scared of the movie and needs it changed.
I'm back again. What am I feeling?
It's more about my cognitive process: There must be something I overlooked, I don't think I got the questions right, teacher is not going to like the format, oh just upload it. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, I'll never get through the course, I'll drop it like the others, If I had this much difficulty doing the first part, how can I get through the whole thing? now that I sent the first one in, there will be an expectation on me to do more. Great, now I have even told people I'm doing it, I'm going to look like a loser when I drop it and start something else.
Oh look, there's a part here for "reflections" that I am supposed to write in and upload too.Done.
After one more interruption from the girl, and writing up my reflections, It is done.
I hit "send", it's gone, nothing I can do now.
I feel great....a little exhilarated even. And the whole process of handing it in only took 1.5 hours, that is with me forcing myself to do it. Under usual circumstances I would have cleaned, gone outside, checked Facebook, probably delayed submitting it for another week at least, if at all. Hey that wasn't all that painful.

But the exhilaration is a dangerous thing, as I have learned recently. Highs are followed by low lows. Am I prepared to deal self-doubt, worry, then probably dismissal, low feelings about myself, and a strong desire to abandon the whole thing? We'll see what happens, right now it's a good feeling.

Let's Go: Purgatory! Insomnia's nightly journey to nowhere.

It really is a waiting room of sorts, only there is no one to make small talk with, unless I get online, and you aren't supposed to look at stimulating flickering screens.

I currently think of myself as an unpaid shift worker. It's why I took to motherhood so easily--I actually got more sleep once I had babies; their sleep schedule mimicked mine!

The tricks that I have learned to use to help me fall asleep (math problems, memorizing geographical names or periodic table) don't seem to work when I am suddenly awake for no reason at 3:00 or 4:00 am.

My recent diagnosis of moderate-to-severe ADHD now explains it; explains the hamster wheel that is my brain so at least I needn't feel like sleep is just one more thing I'm bad at, and I don't feel bad about now designing my life around my need for sleep, taking meds when needed and flipping the bird at people who think I just need to "get up earlier so you'll feel tired."  I'm already tired, and not nearly as cranky as I have a right to be! Instead, I have learned a few tricks, but they all take incredible discipline, something the ADD makes near impossible.

So instead of just indulging self-pity, I've decided to write about my challenges and reach out to other people who feel that their lives have been blindsided by brain wiring issues, including the sleep problem.  I want to talk about my insights into parenting (which requires structure and discipline and consistency, especially for my son who has a developmental problem of his own), depression, creativity, the modern world, as well as to document my adventures in going back to school at 40, all while using a brain that is being regulated by an air traffic controller who has fallen asleep in the job. Let's hope I can keep it up.