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.

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.