Yeah so I wrote another post...

...but because I violated one of my own rules, I hid it. I didn't delete it. I put my conviction behind every word, and I really feel the way I do. Anyway, we don't need to get into it, but I violated one of my own rules. When a person reaches a certain point of frustration, it's hard not to sometimes.

Everything in my life right now requires extreme patience. Extreme for me in any case. I have pieces of everything that I can work on, but I ultimately have control over none of them. I just have to wait.

I think the house-buying was what tipped the scale just a little too far for me to handle with ease. Yes, we are working on buying a house. It's a lovely house. An old New England house with lots of cool retro features that we love. Buying it, because of its age, involves coordinating a bunch of contractors to come in and out and give us ginormous numbers that we're trying to finance along with the mortgage. Really, it's all in good shape but a few critical items could use an update...better to do it now than have the ancient furnace kick the bucket in New England in January!

You can't just let anxiety tell you "don't buy a house because it's too hard!". But it does feel like I took on another job on top of the two that I already have. On top of family life. On top of you know, every other damn shebang.

I guess the only thing to do is just keep working on the pieces. I don't anticipate enjoying it. But I'm going to keep working on it.

I talked to my therapist today and she said "remember you are not alone...other people feel these things too in these situations". I'll just go with that.

Shame Spiral.

My dear friend who for the purposes of this blog we'll call "The Mermaid", talks about the Shame Spiral. Like it's spelled with capital letters. Like it's larger than you and me. Because in the moment, it certainly feels that way.

It's that feeling she gets when her baggage relating to all of her imperfections or perceived imperfections or deep wounds from the past rises up like the tide to try to swallow her alive and drag her out to sea with the rest of the debris. By the time it's around her ankles she feels that she will drown, and then of course the panic sets in. Sometimes that means I get a phone call, which is fine with me really, because as a previous commenter posted: misery loves company and frankly I can often relate.

Yes, I have my various "issues" but I've always been willing to jump in and take challenges and push myself, and have always felt like I was ready to climb the next mountain, because WHY would anyone waste their time with MOLEHILLS. And I'm tenacious...I think it's a result of ADHD actually...even before I was diagnosed I was aware of how easy it was to start and not finish things, and I developed a serious complex about it and it made me feel really lame, so I developed an almost compulsive need to finish everything I started.

Then I attempted my Iron Man Are You Fucking Kidding Me-athlon of 2010...quick recap for the first time reader: I finished grad school, ran a small business, held down a paralegal job, met my now-husband after swearing for 34 years that I would never get married, moved in with him and his children, planned and executed a wedding for 300 guests, got a dog...and got asswhipped by the worst migraine vertigo that my neurologists had likely ever seen. So there I was disabled to varying degrees for...a while. Certainly longer than I ever had been before.

And let me tell you...if I had baggage before about worrying about not finishing things...let me tell you...that hit me in May of last year, a year and a half ago, and I'm still not only literally recovering from the whole thing in that my brain still isn't 100% of what it used to be. It was like recovering from a concussion really...and interestingly since my mother was going through recovering from a mild concussion at the time, it was interesting to note parallels. But I finally just realized tonight, as my husband asked me to make the kids lunches tonight instead of tomorrow morning and I had a minor meltdown...that I am carrying a giant suitcase full of shame with me these days.

Shame is a charged word. Shame is a word that I'm not even sure I can say out loud right now. It's so provocative to me right now that I'm actually trying to get up the nerve to say it out loud because I've clearly really hit on something and I think it's something that's holding me back...or at least something I need to move through in order to continue recovering from that whole experience.

I am ashamed that I have limitations. I am ashamed that I spent most of last year unable to engage regularly in my family's morning routine because it triggered illness on my body. I am ashamed that even now I have to be very careful about how I regulate my activities and my energy to make sure that I'm not pushing myself too hard. I am ashamed that though it would be more helpful to my husband for me to make the lunches at night instead of the morning (it's a long story), I just can't do it right now. And it's like Kate Bush wrote "when you can't tell your sister, when you can't tell the priest, 'cause it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it...to anyone".

I am ashamed that the coping strategy I have used for years of pushing myself tenaciously through to the finish line in nearly any situation I've seen fit to challenge myself to...can now cognitively and physically disable me.

I do not pity myself...but I AM afraid, and I AM ashamed.

The lunches are just a metaphor. They were my way of dipping my toe into the routine, with the hope of being able to take on more as the school year progressed. Sonny isn't trying to make me feel bad...he's just trying to make a morning happen in a stress-free way. But to my shame suitcase it sounds like "it's still not enough". And it hurts.

To add a layer of the possibly ridiculous but true, I am also ashamed of being ashamed...a classic Shame Spiral. Because then you are ashamed that you're ashamed of your shame...a barber pole of unending shame, rising up in your soul (at least I still have a sense of humor when I'm miserable).

So yeah, my ankles are steeped and I'm carrying a shame suitcase barber pole thing. And worse, I'm mixing some really clanky metaphors (what's new). I'm kind of glad that I noticed...so that maybe I'm can start unpacking that piece of baggage. I can see the lock's a bit sticky on this one though...

On being and feeling: Awesome

Today many of my friends are circulating this admittedly terrific post online, about how everyone should wake up full of awesome. You know, loving being you...enjoying yourself...feeling good in your body...awesome...here's the post: Waking up full of awesome

Awesome, just like you used to be, every day! It talks about how when we were all five, we woke up feeling awesome and we should try to tap back into that feeling now. As much as I love this idea...and seriously, I DO strive for that feeling every day with mixed results...this was not how I felt as a child.

I did not have mean parents. In fact I had a whole extended family of people who ADORED me. And in many ways I feel like my birth marked a transition for my extended family, at least on one side...where some of the dysfunctions of the present were allowed to become the dysfunctions of the past (not all of them...but some of them). It was a time in American history (the mid 70s) when people started to take interest in their "feelings" and the importance of those feelings, and what those feelings told them about how they fit into their families and their world. When I was 5 we moved away from our home state, 3,000 miles...I still had warm and meaningful connection to that family but we had additional distance from some of the "quirks".

I was a cute, pigtailed, smart little girl, and I daresay, fairly awesome. And I didn't take no shit, nosiree...I wasn't one of those pushy, flashy little girls, but when people pushed me, man, I wasn't budgin'. "No flies on that kid" they said. I was just very confident about my convictions. Nothing wrong with a little girl who feels confident about her convictions.

But even as a young child, I had two distinct sensations: I often felt like a grownup trapped in a child's body. Perhaps blame my family and 7 years of only child status, but I was treated like a person, not a child. And on some level I always looked forward to being a grown up, because the "other" status of children felt very wrong to me. It made interacting with people awkward, because I didn't really identify with a lot of other "kids" and many grown ups were not able or willing to treat me like a grown up because duh, I was a child.

My other companion was what I now know was anxiety.

ADHD was not such an "issue" for me when I was 5. I was in kindergarten. I fucking loved grilled cheese sandwiches. I watched Iron Sides with my mother when I came home from school. I had a blue bedroom and spent much of my free time dancing in my room to Disney records. My teacher found me entertaining enough, and my parents thought I was the shit. I wasn't running around the classroom...my mind had space to wander. My mother made me a Cookie Monster cake for my birthday. I tried to grow an orange tree in my backyard from seeds (this was doomed to fail in the Seattle climate, my mother told me, but whatevs). THIS, was all certifiably awesome.

But I did worry. About ghosts. I worried a lot about ghosts. I worried about "savage killer bees" coming to America to sting us all to death. My teacher's name was Mrs. Savage and I was just stunned that she had anything to do with these horrifying bees. And when I went to other people houses I sometimes got a sick feeling in my core, all up and down the center of my torso, a crushing feeling that made me unspeakably sad inside. And when that happened, suddenly everything looked different. Children know sadness too, and children know anxiety. Even when nobody did anything "bad" to them, the spectrum of their emotions and sensations is incredibly complex and they can "feel" so much more than they can even understand.

I now know that mental health pros call that"everything looked different" feeling depersonalization...that state of feeling detached from your surroundings in a way that, if you don't understand what's happening, can be terrifying. Now, when I feel it, I know what it is and can divert myself away from a panic attack. Then, I just pretended it wasn't happening and desperately, achingly waited to go home, or for the feeling to pass, whichever came first.

As I grew older, my relationship with anxiety became more complex, and my anxiety load was often just too much to harbor, so it expressed itself quietly in many ways. Usually little "OCD" tics...clearing my throat...brushing one foot briefly on the ground each time I stepped. Picking at my skin. Counting and ordering things. Categorizing things (pages and pages and pages of lists of alphabetized names for horses, anyone?). Sometimes it expressed itself loudly: temper tantrums. And sometimes I was a passive aggressive little shit. Every night when I went to bed, I was afraid of ghosts in a very intense way (and I apparently had visual migraine phenomena as a child...which did nothing to discourage my belief). As I got older, I controlled my food intake in a very unhealthy way. I refused to use public restrooms...I washed my hands dozens and dozens of times per day. I REALLY worried about what people thought. I was terrified of letting people down. As of course with ADHD a real player by the time I got to high school, keeping up with what I thought I needed to do in order to not let people down was a huge challenge. I constantly overcommitted myself, always slightly underachieved, and always, always felt like I was letting someone down, even when it was just myself I was perhaps letting down the most. I was extremely self-critical, even as a small child.

My mother noticed these things, and being a social worker and a smart person, she did help me to learn about some good ways to deal with these things. And I cannot tell you how grateful I am that she did. I am also, and this may be hard to believe, grateful that she did not rush to medicate or define me, because I had the chance to learn to deal with daily life, unvarnished. My parents did NOT push me to get perfect grades, they supported me in becoming a well-rounded person, even if that allowed me the rope to hang myself with overcommittment, lol. That in itself was pretty awesome, really.

Back to awesome, here I am getting all heavy about a cute blog post about being awesome. It's just challenging to separate anything about my experience from that anxiety. It was really always there in some way. Does it make me less awesome? No. But it's presence won't allow me to go "yeah, everything was fucking sunshine and rainbows awesome!".

Even though NOW I feel more awesome more of the time than when I was a child, I STILL feel like I am searching for awesome. And some days it's easy to find that sweet spot. Some days it's not.

It's never forever.

It's time to admit that every time the anxiety goes away, there's a little crumb of hope in a crack in my mind, that hopes it's forever. But it's never forever.

Generalized anxiety disorder and ADHD share that fine quality.

Sometimes I wish they would both go away.

10-ish days ago I visited my therapist and I remember she asked me the routine questions. Here were my responses:

Do you have any depression: no
Do you have any anxiety: nope, not really, I feel pretty good
Are you suicidal: absolutely not
Are you homicidal: hmmmm, let see...um no

Each of those answers was absolutely true. I felt great. Any anxiety I was experiencing was directly related to some things going on in my life that ANYONE in the same position would be experiencing...it was purely situational and we had plenty of time to talk about those situations.

This is that other kind, the kind that is almost unbearable. If there was a switch I would turn it off. Medication isn't really a switch. It's a vacation. I am grateful for the vacation, I used to feel this way all the time after all, but it's true that the contrast between the vacation and the return to reality makes what used to be routine harder to bear.

I can't stop tightening my throat muscles in a particular way. I'm unsettled and a little propelled...driven to move, to talk, to "do", and with a certain intensity. I pick at my skin. Uncomfortable in any given moment...unable to settle on a peaceful moment. Like a butterfly I go from flower to flower but each flower is on fire and I must keep moving. Unable to land, I tighten my throat, over and over while my legs search for a way to connect my feet to the floor.

Through this, I function in my life, but it is just so uncomfortable, and I do not enjoy this feeling of intensity. It's just too much.

And what does it mean? My medication seems to do something for me most of the time...except for you know, most of last winter when I was horribly depressed but too depressed to realize that I was depressed. Or you know, every so often, seems like at least once every 6 weeks where my anxiety level just seems to be too much for a bit...some of it is hormones...is all of it hormones? Are my meds just not right? Is it unrealistic to expect to feel better more of the time? Or am I just so enmeshed in the fibers of this anxiety right now that I'm not even thinking clearly.

All I know for sure is that I don't feel good. I cannot find peace in my own skin, and though I am functioning in my daily life, I am so uncomfortable.

It's never forever. The anxiety...the vacation from the anxiety...none of it is ever forever. And honestly I am worried about what may happen as the seasons change. It took a long time, to recover from last winter's depression. In this northern paradise we call home, winter is long...and here it comes. I'm afraid to get stuck there again. Terrific, now I'm pairing the situational anxiety on top of the chemical one...wahooo!

Maybe I need to print this blog post when I see my prescriber next month. Maybe I'm not as insightful as I like to think I am. Maybe the meds are wrong. Maybemaybemaybe.

Maybe.

Drumroll please...

...Sonny has decided to try ADHD stimulant medication.

There was no pressure within our household for him to do so, and there was no pressure from outside either, for that matter. After seeing me and our daughter try them, and have beneficial results, he thought he might try them too. Sonny is like me in that he is an adult with ADHD, for whom ADHD presents challenges, but he has also learned a lot of ways to cope with those challenges. He has been at the same job for over seven years, is a busy professional musician outside of his day job, and has lots of friends and social connections...but I think that also like me, even though he functions well, he was interested to see what it might be like to not have to work quite so hard for certain shades of normal every day. He really is the primary parent in our household, very hands on with his children, so he deals with more of the logistics and details that could really be a handful for a person with ADHD to keep track of, and in my opinion he kicks a lot of ass. I can't think of any reason why he shouldn't pursue a treatment that might give him a little more peace in the midst of our very, very busy lives.

So far, he gives them two thumbs up. He's going to try them a little longer and see what happens, assess the landscape. I love him just the way he is so really, as long as he perceives a benefit to himself, and there are no harmful effects to him or anyone else, I'm happy with his decision.

I'm also happy with the way his prescriber has approached it. She has given him a not huge dosage of a non-extended release version. It gives him a chance to try it out without being stuck in it for HOURS in the event that he isn't liking what it's doing. Because he lives with me, he knows that the come-down from a short-acting stimulant tablet can be a little janky, so if that happens it won't be a surprise. He'll try it for a little bit and then they'll reassess.

Good times. We'll see what he decides :)

I would not necessarily recommend this...

But it's funny so I'm telling you anyway.

Yesterday I knew I had some insanely boring tasks to complete at work...so I didn't just take my Concerta, I freaking doubled the dose.

I should clarify, I have taken that amount before and been fine, it just gives me a harder focus than my usual dose. My usual dose, while not a hard-focusing mechanism, DOES take the edges off of my irritability, mood swings, and general "wtf" that I wake up with every morning. I choose the lower dose because I know that it's going to be sufficient for functioning on a day when I know I'm not going to be in a prison of data scrambling and data entry for 8 straight hours.

Mother of God, I knew this was going to be the most boring day of my life...and by golly that 36 mg of Concerta had me so focused that I couldn't even put my head phones on and listen to music like I usually do because my brain was like "GIVE ME THE SILENCE I CRAVE AND DO NOT DISTURB MY MOJO WITH THIS SILLINESS". I crunched that data like it was marshmallow fluff. For nearly 8 hours...with almost no breaks. And of course, while hardly eating a thing because Concerta superpowers do not require fuel.

I am SO glad I never tried cocaine in college.

One size does not fit all...

...I read a lame cookie-cutter article about surviving college with ADHD today. Lame because it assumes that every strategy makes sense for every person with ADHD. Click here for said globalizing article

One tip in particular, really raised my hackles: stay away from online courses.

As an undergraduate, I did not have the option of online courses. I had difficulty sitting/staying in class, I had difficulty concentrating in class, I had difficulty completing reading assignments, and I graduated with a 2.6.

As a graduate student, I discovered that online classes were PERFECT FOR ME. I "attended" them when I wanted to, I worked in the middle of the night on my "classwork", I still struggled with the reading assignments, but because I had more energy and felt more engaged by the online format, I had more patience to try strategies for attacking them (like using a highlighter as I read, and reading only the first and last line of each paragraph in long articles, so that I could get the basic gist of them instead of trying to slog through every detail for 35 pages). I graduated with a 3.73.

I would not have survived grad school without the option for online classes, if only because I absolutely cannot sit still for 4 hour classes on a regular basis, without professors who don't mind me doing other stuff during class (like flipping through People magazine...I listen better when I'm multitasking). I realize this is not the case for everyone...but writing is one of my strong points, and I find online discussions engaging, so for me, perfect. The courses are visually structured for you online so as long as you are engaged enough to check in and stay on top of things, the structure is already there for you, and it's there on your schedule, whatever your schedule may be. I understand why the article cautions against online formats for students with ADHD, and can especially see the potential pitfalls for younger students who are still learning how to organize their lives and their study habits...but for some students this is a much better option, and I hate the idea that others might read this article and not explore that option, when it might actually help them.

If they're not willing to give the article the space it needs to truly be informative, I wish they wouldn't even publish stuff like this. I can just see an editor going "yeaaaah...could you cut this 3,000-word article down to a 650-word one-size-fits-all soundbite? thanks s'much..."....