I was diagnosed with severe ADHD after undergoing a comprehensive battery of psychological testing in my forties. The diagnosis plus medication has helped me a lot but I am not cured and I still struggle in certain ways.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) is a condition that affects how your brain works. Despite its name, ADHD doesn’t mean that you lack attention. It means that it’s harder for you to control your attention or direct it to certain tasks.
The following is a list of the top six frustrations I have because I have ADHD.
1. People think you are lazy.
This is the worst part about having ADHD. From an outsider’s perspective it looks like we are not trying to be more organized, motivated and tidy but our brains work differently from most people’s brains. For example, when someone who has ADHD tries to clean a kitchen our first reaction is feeling overwhelmed. My mind becomes bombarded with a series of questions like: Where do I start? What direction should clean in? What do I do first? What is the most efficient and best method for cleaning the kitchen? How do other people clean kitchens? Will people judge me for the way I clean it? This makes me feel completely stuck and filled with anxiety and stress.
I have a strategy that I use where I go from left to right focusing on the edge of the mess and trying not to look at the entire mess. It takes a great deal of effort, but I can do it. Having to go through this process for every task in one day is exhausting and requires a lot of will power and energy which decreases our capacity to get more done in a single day and it can be discouraging.
2. You lose a lot of stuff.
I have lost three toques in the last three weeks. The worst part is even if you have strategies in place to make sure you don’t lose anything you lose stuff anyway. My toques are always supposed to go in the inside pocket of my winter jacket even if I take it off while I am still wearing the jacket. It sounds like a foolproof plan so I am completely baffled by how I could have possibly lost my toques.
3. Time blindness
People who have ADHD have no sense of the passage of time. I can tell someone I need a few minutes to write a quick email before I leave to go somewhere and find myself shocked when I look up at the time when I am done and realize that an hour has passed. One positive aspect of this is if you get stuck in a delay at the airport it’s not really a big deal because I have no sense of how long I have to wait. I use visual timers to help me with this problem.
Here is a link to the timer I use.
4. Hyperfocus
Hyperfocus is kind of an ADHD superpower. If I find something interesting and important I can sit and stay focused on it for hours and it feels completely normal to me. I can get a lot of writing done when I hit hyperfocus. The problem is people in our lives can get frustrated when we get locked into something for hours. Using timers is helpful for this problem too.
5. Constant thoughts.
I never get a break from my thoughts. I can’t just sit somewhere and appreciate the silence. Throughout the day, I have constant reminders of things that I have done that cause me shame, will do, could do or just interest me. I can’t just take a shower. When I take a shower I write blogs in my head, think about relationships, embarrassing memories etc. When I am done and I leave the bathroom, I am miraculously clean and pretty much have no recollection of having had the shower. One bonus of this aspect of having ADHD is that when people are looking for ideas I can come up with an endless amount of them and I have never had writer’s block.
6. Relationship issues
This one can be tough for a number of reasons. When you live with someone and being neat and organized is something that is important to them it may be hard to live up to their standards. Sometimes, I have to make a choice between cleaning my dishes and getting to work on time or cleaning my bedroom. Sometimes, I don’t have the capacity to do both.
Even social gatherings can be hard. Recently, I was invited to join some friends for a visit. My ADHD med just wore off when I got there but I was doing pretty good at keeping up with the conversation until the host put out some snacks. I started to think about how hungry I was but in Canada most people don’t dive into snacks immediately when they are served. There is often an undefined waiting period but I have one friend who dives right in and that is kind of nice but when I was in university in 1990 and I was living in BC and it seemed like people were more comfortable with diving right in so I started to do it too but then I remembered doing that back then and my best friend’s roommate was tired of me diving in right away and told me in front of everyone how much it bothered him and I cringe when I remembered that incident and I remembered how I had to reconsider if that was a BC thing or just the people I was hanging out with and there was orange cheese on the plate which I thought gave me migraines but I haven’t had migraines lately so maybe I can eat orange cheese now and I am a guest so I should probably go first because nobody eats anything before the guests eats.
Then, I realized that while I was thinking about this everyone was talking about something I missed and I had no idea what they were talking about. I just nodded and smiled and prayed that nobody asked me a question. Then, I realized that I had not made a note of the time when I sat down so I could have been there for two hours or more when I planned to be there only for one hour and I became extremely anxious but I had to pretend I was completely fine.
Having ADHD can be exhausting, demoralizing, humiliating and depressing. It can be funny too. I follow a couple of Instagram accounts of people who point out the funny parts about it, and it makes me feel better but I think we need to acknowledge that there is real pain for people who have ADHD.
My medication, learning about it, and having an ADHD Coach from the Canlearn Society helped me a lot. There are people in my life who are supportive and understand ADHD which also helps. They are patient with me, help break down tasks for me and they can tell me if I have enough time to do what I wish to accomplish in a day.
Allan
P.S. If this blog resonance with you, you find it interesting or have questions please leave a comment below.
Here is a link to an interview I did with my ADHD coach on my podcast, The Bipolar Disorder Moment.
Discussing ADHD and Bipolar Disorder with ADHD Coach Laura Godfrey
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