I miss...

...the sound of my grandfather's feet shuffling, in the middle of the night. As he moved from one door, to the other, and back again, as we slept. Locking the door. Unlocking the door. Fumbling to slide each lock open, then sliding them closed again with a click. Over and over, all night long. Never certain of our safety, no matter how many times he did it.

But I was always reassured by the sound of him doing it. The sound of his being there...the sound of his obsessions, keeping us safe, but holding him hostage.

Vyvanse and Celexa, the tango in my brain...

If I was sitting here right now with my Nurse Practictioner, I would not know what to say, because frankly...there is no defining throughline to what my medication is doing right now. It's only been about 12 days so it's not totally reasonable to expect a reliable result yet, but seriously...I feel like a tossed salad.

Nothing has rendered me non-functional, I've been going to work, going to meetings, doing all of the normal things that I do. I have also lived a life, overall, that has involved a wide array of feelings and emotional experiences anyway, so if I feel anxious or just a little "off" I know it's not going to kill me and I can push through it. But inconsistency is still rather unsettling, and it's certainly not something you can necessarily plan around.

One day I feel totally mellow, and very focused...the next day so anxious that I literally cannot think...then I might spend an afternoon driving the backroads of NH listening to classic rock (which I would normally NEVER do) and the breeze hitting my face and just driving with no aim because it just plain feels great...later that same day I might be so amped up that I can't stop talking and just hours later will sit in a crowd of people and have no desire to talk, at all. Yeah okay, it's a little eccentric, but everyone has fluctuations in mood and energy throughout a day...this is definitely more fluctuation than I am used to, and I am used to fluctuation, lol.

This kind of fluctuation is the thing that I think makes it hard for people to be convinced to comply with the instructions they are given for their medication. For example...if your prescriber says "this might give you some nausea at first, but give it a chance if you can and call me if you have a problem"...that doesn't mean decide that you are only going to take it every two days because you just don't want to deal with the nausea and then don't tell your doc. It is also hard for people, I suspect, to get used to feeling "different" from what they are used to. And sometimes, clearly, meds that mess with your brain just suck. Me, personally, I am extremely disciplined about following instructions, AND communicating with my prescriber when things aren't working the way I'd like them to. Even through the nausea of the last medication, even when the last one was like a big chemical baseball bat making me sit face down on the table giggling. I'm a tough nut. And this combo just isn't "that bad".

I am willing and able to work hard to see where this particular med combination goes. I'm not going to pretend I'm having fun right now while I'm not knowing quite where I'm going. But I have to remind myself that I am not in this for a certain outcome, but "to see what happens" and if medication is, in fact a good option for me.

It's a special challenge in my case and may require extra tinkering because I have a ton of anxiety along with ADHD. Most ADHD meds are likely to increase or induce anxiety...which is part of the reason I am taking an anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medication along with them...you see the dilemma, the need for tinkering with dosages, the lack of exactness, and it sounds (and looks, in my pill case) like an afterschool special. "This one's an upper, man...and this one, this one will totally mellow you out..." Cut to the "good kid" taking a brightly colored pill and another smaller one and making the tragic mistake of swallowing them, and REGRETTING EVER MAKING THE DECISION!!!

I definitely do not regret making this decision. The definition of this aspect of my ADHD journey however, as much as I don't enjoy it, is uncertainty. That IS what this is about...until it's not. Either I will find a combo that works or I won't. The bottom line for me, that my therapist and I fully agree on...is that my anxiety, both on its own, and as the result of ADHD will kill me. Not with immediacy...but it will slowly take its toll on my mental and physical health. It will chip away slowly at the various systems of my body, it will likely shorten my life and compromise its quality. I have had health problems in the past because of it...and I have seen family members haunted and killed by it because they did not have the ability or inclination to tell it "no". Their fates range from the humorous (fear of dentists, fear of hairdressers) to the tragic (fear of feeling, fear of commitment, fear of failure, alcoholism, fear of death, suicide).

If any of these are my fate, it will not be for lack of trying. The inconvenience of uncertainty, is not an acceptable excuse, for me, to give up. I refuse to simply surrender myself to fear.

ADHD Made Me Do It...learning to say no

One of the keys to the renovation of my life is paring things down. Reducing my commitments. And then learning to create fewer of them in the first place.

Hard to dive into this task when...I literally cannot pare things down further right now.

Not for another 4 months. So I've taken to delegating...but even in delegating you bear responsibility. And I don't want that responsibility right now when I want to be redefining my relationship to responsibility. I'm not talking about abandoning responsibility, or ADHD-ing myself into a totally unrelated and brand-new life trajectory. I mean true and meaningful change of whatever type seems most appropriate.

I'm really babbling abstract here, sorry.

When you have ADHD and have spent much of your life feeling like a failure because you are not "living up to your potential", it is easy to overcompensate by accepting a ridiculous amount of responsibility...to prove to myself, and to others that I was not a failure. But everyone has a limit. I pushed and pushed until I reached mine because I could not stand that feeling of disappointment anymore.

As I pushed myself to follow through with my ideas, I thrilled myself with my ideas and my ingenuity, but terrified myself with my ability to move with lightning speed, my ability to overlook certain kinds of details while boring to the core of others, my abillty to rationalize overcommitment. There's a reason that many women with ADHD are mistaken for bipolar...oh wait, there's a missing piece here that you need...

Allow me a totally ADHD moment of indulgence here, an illustration that I think you really need for this to make any sense at all...when I have one of the "BEST ADHD IDEAS EVER" pop into my head (and when I am not medicated, it happens all day long, over and over and over and...), it is literally like a drug has been injected into my brain and I am high-ass-high and it tugs at me and I cannot stop thinking about it. It is an exciting way to live, always delighted with new ideas. Each idea joyously grabs my arm and demands my attention. This could mean one idea that enchants me for part of a day, it could mean dozens in an hour, pulling me from one thought to another. It is exhilirating...unlike a bipolar high, it is usually much more temporary. I can map world peace in an hour, but not finish a simple spreadsheet in front of me. I can outline a brilliant plotline for a novel I may need to write someday if not this afternoon but forget to check the voicemail. It's a classic ADHD problem, total lack of prioritization, because the tug of the new idea is so great that nothing else matters just then...and there are just so many new ideas. All the time. This is the reality of my ADHD anyway.

Combine this with my fevered drive to disprove the baggage of my past and I've got one big mess to unravel, an avalanche of obligations just waiting to crash down around me because I have indulged more ideas than I should have. Imagine all of those AMAZING ideas...ALL being brought to fruition all at once. And this is part of what brought me to seek help because I realized how precarious my balance was, and how far I could fall.

But the first key to all of this...is sticking it all through. Living with my choices, even though I know that not all of them were good. Ouch.

And...how DO you redefine your relationship with overcommitment when you can't shed any of your current commitments? How do you pull yourself up from the bottom you've hit, when you cannot yet shed any of the weights that got you there in the first place? And the answer is...I don't think I can.

It's just limbo. But I'm struggling to see what the lesson is, in this extended torture. Perhaps I'm supposed to just live in this mess a little longer...to imprint on my mind what I don't want, what I don't want to do to myself again.

Because I did do this to myself. No matter what teachers said...no matter who I think I let down...I was the only one who could make these choices that brought me here to this mess of overcommitment, this overdose of responsibility...this abuse of myself. That's the real kicker...now think about THAT in terms of ADHD...every impulse in my body says "fuckit, cut yourself free"...but I have to sit tight...because it is not yet time. I am forced to experience the passage of time in a way that I would never previously have chosen.

People Magazine: The Ultimate Mental Vacation

For me, because my mind is already hypervigilant, relaxation is about the most overwhelming demand anyone could make of me. You seriously do not want to see me on a weeklong sitting-on-yer-ass-on-the-beach vacation...I can't even imagine why in the hell that is fun for people. But it is a fact that most people with ADHD don't take medication for their entire lives, for various reasons...that means you better learn some skills to make life more manageable when the naked, chemical-free brain is unleashed.

So I tried something new this week. I went to a yoga class this week and LOVED it. Seriously...it was mentally engaging enough that I was totally into it. Will definitely try it again. I was indeed so relaxed when I was done I didn't want to talk. AT. ALL. And that's a rarity, lemme tell ya...I was also shocked at how much raw energy I released from various underused parts of my body. Wow.

Another idea I am tinkering with: meditation. I started tinkering with meditation in high school. Unfortunately some of my experiences made me not want to do it anymore. That's a whole other story in itself filled with weird "out of body experiences" but I'm going to let my 30-something year old brain take another stab at it.

You know what really relaxes me though? Okay true confession, I am way too engaged by true crime stories...on television, and today, it happened to be on the internet...I literally spent 5 hours doing nothing but read weird tales of true crime on my computer...I hardly moved...and I can't normally sit and read like this unless I'm REALLY into what I'm reading. My body felt like delicious, relaxed Jello when I was done...my mind felt free. You know what I think it is? Now that I don't actively infuse my life with drama/wild abandon/charmingly spontaneous plans that disrupt all decisions that came before (classic ADHD method for keeping ones life interesting enough to focus on) it's safer for me to read about other people's drama...and weirdly, perhaps disturbingly, that's relaxing.

The true crime stuff must tap into the same part of my brain that People Magazine taps into, and People Magazine is seriously the ultimate relaxation inducer for me. I'm not joking, and oh, how I wish I was! People Magazine is one of my only consistent tools for relaxation. I used to bring it to school when I was working on my paralegal education...I finally gave up trying to "just focus" in class and discovered accidentally that if I brought a magazine to class to read (hidden behind a school book!) that it was way easier for me to just stay planted in class instead of needing to get up to leave and run around in the halls (pretending I was doing something other than avoiding going back to class). I also (note to teachers who think that all fidgeting in class is a bad thing) got WAY better grades once I started allowing myself these little indulgences. In addition to it being a great bite-sized in-classroom break, I can sit and read the thing cover to cover with absolute focus and obliviousness to the world around me. My hypervigilant brain just goes "ahhhhh" and leaves me alone for awhile as it pores over the glossy, moron-infested pages. Think about that for a minute...a trashy celebrity magazine gives me the same effect that people pay money for drugs to achieve. If only reading it took more than an hour!

With People magazine as my most trusted method for relaxation, you're probably beginning to see why I needed to reach out for more creative ideas ;) But oh, I'm not one to fix what ain't broke. I would much rather focus my energy on making better, saner decisions in my life, and allow myself vicarious drama indulgences if that's what it takes...

I'll still go to yoga though...that shit was hardcore!

Classic ADHD Moment # 8457

Alright...I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but here goes. So I AM diagnosed with ADHD, that's the whole reason for this lovely blog. But that's doesn't mean I'm a disorganized shipwreck of a person. In fact, because of my ADHD I have learned to be extremely organized, sometimes at the expense of sleep, sanity, and all else. I feel a strong drive to follow through on my commitments to others/to the world around me despite my overcommitment (working on it!) and so I've come up with lots of little ways to make sure I get done what I need to get done, and end up in the right place at almost the right time.

Well my latest experiment in self-organization is using a calendar. Bear with me...because the payoff for this tale of the dangers of changing your methods is totally worthwhile. You need to know...I have avoided them like the plague for years because when I have that little box to fill in, I will make it too full in no time. Years ago I decided that I would only commit to what I could keep in my head, in my memory...haha. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen but I assure you, it's helped me maintain a nice sort-of healthy line between my soul and my workaholism. It's meant a few extra post-its on the steering wheel at times to remind me of things, but hey, they work...assistants have laughed...but it's better than them crying when I mix things up and they have to help me fix it :)

Well recently I decided I wanted to free myself of the post-its on the steering wheel...so I set up a Google Calendar. I'm on a computer somewhere all the time, whether at the law office, the kitchen store, the studio, the house. I put all my appointments on the calendar, and set an informal limit of no more than two obligations per day. So far, so good, sounds like a PERFECT PLAN.

Until this morning when I am sitting at the law office at about 11AM and decide to check my calendar, only to discover that OH SHIT, I missed an 8AM appointment. The post-its on the steering wheel was way better because I could SEE them when I got in the car (and for me and my brain seriously lacking in RAM, if I don't see it...it does not exist) ! SHITSHITSHIT! This was an important meeting...with the Exec Director of the local indie cinema, a rep for the huge local theater house, and their Marketing Director. We were supposed to be meeting to discuss a project we're all interested in developing in town, and I've been seriously looking forward to this meeting ALL MONTH.

ALL FREAKING MONTH.

I wrote an email to the group explaining how embarrassed I was that I had missed the meeting, that I wasn't usually like this, that I was so sorry to have disrespected their also busy schedules...etcetcetc, five Hail Mary's...you get the idea.

I get a response from the theater rep about a minute later saying "ummm...we changed the meeting to next week".

(PAUSE)

(MOTHERF*CKER)

I wrote the group back with a "Wow...now I'm even more embarrassed...please just know I've had a really hard week...see you next week...".

I am today's winner of the asshat crown. I know my therapist would say "you need to work on forgiving yourself" but instead, I'm going to kick my own ass for about 15 more minutes...then I'll think about this thing called forgiving myself...

It's a funny thing, these moments (and the fact that I spend an enormous amount of energy trying to ensure that they don't happen). I am actually quite open about my ADHD (and anxiety, if you must know) diagnosis in many situations. It simply isn't appropriate or beneficial in a situation like this though, to bring it up, to be open, so you have this quiet experience--of solitary acknowledgement of your chemical imperfections. There's nothing really to be done but apologize and move on. It's just that when you have ADHD it's easy to fall into worrying that it might happen again...because you know it will at some point, no matter how hard you work, or how good your intentions...which for me, then ignites the overcompensation of workaholism all over again.

On top of it I just switched meds this week...that's REALLY something you don't just mention to people in a professional situation "I'm sorry I thought I missed our meeting that I didn't actually miss, I'm taking new psychotropic drugs this week so I've got black holes in my brain the size of Jupiter for about the next two weeks!".

(flogflogflog self one more time...)

Bwahaha...okay, going back and reading this...the humor is making itself more apparent. I'm going to channel my therapist and remind myself...and you...that nobody is perfect.

This is what progress looks like...

Started Vyvanse last week and my eating schedule and sleep schedule are all effed up as a result...though I am slowly adjusting, this has effed up my "everything else" schedule too. With my life the way it is right now, I can't handle that kind of interference without endangering my sanity. Plus, a lot of other people depend on MY stuff getting done. So I did something I have rarely done in my life...instead of torturing myself to get everything done, instead of quitting something preemptively before it can fail, instead of waiting for the boulders to fall around my feet...I called my sister to come clean my house. I asked some friends to help me with publicity...and bookkeeping. And interestingly, just delegating these duties made it WAY easier for me to let my mind attack other tasks. Duh, right? Yeah, I know...but I didn't know until I "knew" you know?

Now the challenge will be not letting me use temporary help as an excuse to add more to my plate :) Better spend some quality time meditating on that one...

The Benefits

I have had many jobs where I have been THE perfect person for the job, precisely because I have ADHD.

Really? Really. My ability to go with the flow, ability to multi-task, creative thinking, and boundless energy are perfect for working in a criminal defense law office. Working with the demented elderly. Working in advertising sales. Any job that involves people juggling, and lightning speeds, and I have done these aforementioned jobs and many more.

I am also exceptional as "that employee that is perfect for plugging a hole in whatever pinch you may be presented with, because I have unique skills along with the aforementioned awesome traits". I am always that person. I've made a bit of a career out of that, if nothing else specifically. Beyond being a sign of my ADHD it is also a cultural trait of the family that spawned me. (Chicken...or egg...or ADHD...I think about this often, and wonder if my family could qualify for a group rate for ADHD treatment.)

The malfunction (THE malfunction) reveals itself in my choice of the word "many". Most jobs are boring to me after an extremely short period of time. So I generally have a couple of them at a time, and not for the money...for my sanity. Having two, sometimes three jobs is the precise thing that keeps me interested in any one of them.

Is this good? Is this bad? I don't know. It is simply what I have done. It is how I have learned to "be" in this world. It pays my bills and validates my uniqueness.

I think about this a lot lately because I am examining a lot of choices as a seek to shape a new future for myself. This is something that, at this point...I don't think I would change. These are the conditions under which I thrive...why would I change what is working? It's hard enough work changing what doesn't....