InsaneJournal

Current mood:	optimistic
Current music:	The Blessed Silence of the Night

ADD?


My life sucks. Let’s face it. I’m 27 years old, I don’t have a job, I have rarely finished anything I set out to do and I am living in my parents’ home on my parents’ welfare, slowly bleeding away their chance at a nice retirement. I am the open sore on their financial future, and I can’t seem to get my head out of my ass and do something about it.

I flit about from idea to idea, from grand plan to not so grand plan and I while away my hours reading fan-fic and writing stories that never go anywhere. After all, I can see where the story goes and what happens in it, what would be the point of putting it down on paper anyway?

I have been struggling to figure out what is ‘wrong’ with me and how to fix it. I often say things like ‘I am a failure as a human being.’, ‘I am lazy.’, ‘I don’t care enough to want to do it.’ and my personal favorite, ‘Back the fuck off, I know something’s wrong, and I’ll fix it when I get to it.’ My parents both really want me to find a therapist to help me work out what’s wrong, to help me become the person they know I can be. I’ve been struggling with it. I found a few therapists over the years but it always fell flat. I always felt like I was being abandoned, misdiagnosed etc.

Today I went to see my new therapist. We sat down and she asked me why I was there. I told her I was depressed, that I moved home two years ago and I can’t seem to hold a job or do anything of any value. So she asked me about school, and my childhood, I took a deep breath and laid out as much of it as I could. An hour later and we had just gotten to my brief stint in College. She had this look in her eye like she had an idea. I was waiting to be told something like, well you are depressed, but you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and move on. Instead she pulled a book off her shelf and asked me to read it before our next session. She wanted to know if I identified with anything in the book. If possibly this was the solution to the problems that have plagued me my entire life.

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., and John J. Ratey, M.D.

ADD? I had been tested for that as a child and it was most emphatically something that was NOT wrong with me. She asked me to read it anyway. She told me that sometimes those tests are not capable of diagnosing the problem because ADD isn’t a very exact definition of the problem. Something along the line of Attention Inconsistency Disorder would be a better term to use. People with ADD are often plagued with the inability to focus as well as the ability to hyperfocus at times. So I agreed to give it a go and we set up a time to meet very soon.

So I have spent a large chunk of today reading through this book and damned if doesn’t describe exactly how I feel, how my life has gone, where things are not fitting, why I feel so overwhelmed all the time. Why I have anxiety disorder, why I am so depressed all the time why I feel as though I am a failure as a human being even while KNOWING that I am smart and capable and and and . . . . wow . . .

Here’s a quote from one of the case studies that really resonated with me (page 95):

“Oh,” she answered, “that is about a cough drop someone left on the dashboard of our car. The other day I saw the cough drop and thought, I’ll have to throw that away. When I arrived at my first stop, I forgot to take the cough drop to a trash can. When I got back into the car, I saw it and thought, I’ll throw it away at the gas station. The gas station came and went and I hadn’t thrown the cough drop away. Well, the whole day went like that, the cough drop still sitting on the dashboard. When I got home, I thought, I’ll take it inside with me and throw it out. In the time it took me to open the car door, I forgot about the cough drop. It was there to greet me when I got into the car the next morning, Jeff was with me. I looked at the cough drop and burst into tears. Jeff asked me why I was crying, and I told him it was because of the cough drop. He thought I was losing my mind. ‘But you don’t understand,’ I said, ‘my whole life is like that. I see something that I mean to do and then I don’t do it. It’s not only trivial things like the cough drop; it’s big things, too.’ That is why I cried.”

This is SO my life! I want to do things, I intend to do things, I think about doing things, but then . . . I don’t. And it MATTERS! It really matters to me. Every time I set out to do something and just don’t do it, some little part of me starts to get a bit tense, and bit worried, a bit anxious, and every time I think about it I get a little bit more upset until I just can’t think of it any more and I force myself to ignore it completely just so I don’t have to deal with the negative feelings that it causes.

I want to be better, I really really do, but I just don’t know how. It’s frustrating and maddening and some days I just want to lay down and . . . well not die because quite frankly I have far to much to live for, but maybe just sleep for a while and let all the bad things go away. But they don’t go away, not really. They are still there like the monster under the bed.

I feel like I have found hope by reading this book. (I still have about 200 pages to go). I feel like there is an answer here for me. For the first time ever I have been given an idea of what might be ‘wrong’ that resonates with me. That describes all the little bits and pieces that don’t fit, that lays it all out and tells me emphatically, I am not a bad person. I can do it. Others have been there, and now they are moving on and dealing with their lives and making their ways in this world.

Maybe my life doesn’t suck so much after all.