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I wasn't diagnosed until a few months ago (I'm 24). You are very lucky to have gotten treatment at 15. I managed to hold a 3.0 GPA through high school and a top college without doing reading, or any work on time, or even buying books through all of college, but every day I resent that I was able to be a "functional ADD," because as soon as I left the womb of academia the real world hit HARD. I never understood how to manage basic little mundane life tasks or even find an occupation that interested me because EVERYTHING was interested at first and then suddenly not at all. When I think about what I could have accomplished by now if I had been treated throughout my middle and high school years...it's all very depressing. Be happy for the time you've had.
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Aug 21, 2009 16:47
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:36 |
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I don't know what category, my doctor just said, "Listen let's try this..." but it definitely feels like it's working. My symptoms were typical of ADD but not in the impulsive or hyper way, I'm highly disorganized, often anxious, I talk quicker than most people and often try to fill in the end of their sentences if I'm pretty sure I know where they're going (and I usually think I do). The most telling manifestation of it would be that every task I considered would immediately get broken down into 20 other tiny steps and even extended into the future. Like: I have to write an article for my job. Normal people (I think) would say, "Okay let's go to the event and take notes and then write the article." I would say (when I'm not on meds), "Okay step 1 let's google this thing then I should go out to the event which happens to be near my gym so I should probably go early and then go to the gym first. But do I want to be all wet from the shower at this thing? I don't know, maybe I should go to the gym afterwards. But then I might forget and not go at all. Okay so just commit to going! Fine, okay and bring a notebook to take notes and a tape recorder in case you forget to take a note down and also a camera, but first I have to find my camera in my apartment..." until I end up thinking something like, "...and then after all that poo poo I'm gonna get a little freelancer's check and have to go scout out another loving story nobody's gonna ever read and then I'll be 30 and then 40 and then 70 and then dead and nobody's going to care either way so what's the point anyway?" That ending part is where you get depressed due to your undiagnosed disorder and wonder why you can't seem to move forward with life or why you even care about moving forward since it all seems worthless in the end. It is, obviously, completely overwhelming and made it impossible to accomplish anything. I would sometimes find myself sitting inside on beautiful days for 4 or 5 hours just because I couldn't decide what exactly to do out there. It was like the opposite of hyperactivity, it was hypermentality and it really loving sucks. mike grace jones fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Aug 21, 2009 |
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Aug 21, 2009 17:19
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Stofoleez posted:Did you ever experience a kind of mental paralysis or anxiety when you had to do a thing? Like, when I'm unmedicated, if I'm doing something like reading a book or watching television or staring at a wall, and I know I need to take a shower, I'll become physically ill at the possibility of making myself do anything other than what I'm paying attention to. In school and professional life, this...revulsion isn't the word, and neither is illness, but the anxiety of it just drives me over the edge. Yes definitely, there's a common underlying fear of confronting whatever step comes next in my big, unmedicated, addled-up day-planner brain. Mostly because I don't think about the next step, I think about the next 3 dozen steps within that next step, making something mundane into something overwhelming. But also I don't want to derail and turn this thread into a support group, so I'll shut up for a while.
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Aug 21, 2009 19:41
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Brydinut posted:However, I feel like I perform pretty well and my mental abilities make up for a lot of what I lack attention-wise. A recent piece in the New Yorker described a study that tested children for their self-control ability by seeing if/how long they could last alone with a candy without eating it when they were promised 2 candies in the future. They checked the children later in life and those who demonstrated the most self-control were doing significantly better in school. Even more than IQ, self-control correlated with success. Knowing my life, my intelligence, my self-control, and my disorder I am not at all surprised by those results. The medication is there so I can exercise greater self-control. It absolutely helps that.
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Aug 26, 2009 22:02
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