One mans fortune …

I spent most of my undiagnosed life blaming bad luck for the lows and feeling very lucky when times were good, which wasn’t often. I didn’t then, nor do I now, believe in the art of fortune telling.

I get a kick out of numerology when applied to birth dates, because the numbers are based on a calendar that has a random start date.

Tarot cards may be more accurate, I don’t know, and I’m equally unenlightened about palm reading. They could be the real deal … though I doubt it. My palms are so scarred that I don’t think you could read them anyway, even if they were actually written on. Oh, wait … eggs, bread, new guitar … maybe I can read my palm.

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Today, I’m Blogging for Mental Health.

Today is Mental Health Month Blog Day and I wanted to do something to participate. Many of you may be aware that, while my personal mental health issue is ADHD, my personal challenge is to battle mental health stigma. I’m not alone, many bloggers work hard to minimize the effects of stigma with every post they write.

One of my favourite bloggers, Melanie Knapp, writer of Psychology Discussions, also believes in reducing stigma. Her voice is softer and gentler than mine, but her message is no less powerful.

She and I have decided to share a title for Mental Health Month Blog Day. And that title is the one you see at the top of this post. Here is her post.

And I mean it!

Well, maybe not these shoes …

Don’t judge me. That’s really all I want to say. Don’t judge me and I won’t judge you. The part about walking a mile in my shoes is somewhat irrelevant. If you truly do know what it’s like to walk a mile in my shoes, I know you aren’t about to judge me.

But if you don’t know what it’s like to walk a mile in my shoes, if you don’t know what it’s like to have ADHD, let me make it easy for you. You already have all the symptoms. Well, if you don’t have all of them, you have most of them.

• Do you ever start doing one thing and end up doing something else?
• Do you ever walk into a room and wonder what you went in there for?
• Do you ever say something and, possibly while you are saying it, start to think you shouldn’t be saying it? And then know you shouldn’t?
• Do you ever make an appointment and then forget about it, completely?
• Do you ever find that you need intense activity to jump start your thinking?
• Do you ever over-indulge in something just because it feels good to?
• Do you ever leave some task to the last minute and then, when others would be giving up, you do it with little or no time to spare?

Me too. But here’s the difference. This is the norm for me. This is my life, from one end of the day to the other, these things happen for me over and over and over, ad infinitum. Or, I guess, ADD infinitum.

For instance, I can walk in to a room, wonder what I went there for, return to the room I had left in the hopes I’ll remember, only to wonder what I’m doing in that room. And even when it isn’t that bad, I still do it twenty times a day.

You might go in to a store to buy a quart of milk and come out with the milk and a chocolate bar. I’ll walk in to the store and come out with 10 things I wasn’t looking for, five of which I can’t afford and two that I already have at home … but I won’t have the milk.

Is there a problem here?

Yes, these things are problems. But you judging me won’t fix them.

I’m glad that those of you without ADHD don’t have to put up with these symptoms [...] I don’t think you could take it.

And while this might be a bit judgmental on my part, I’m glad that those of you without ADHD don’t have to put up with these symptoms at the intensity and frequency that I have to endure. You see, I don’t think you could take it. We, the ADHDers of the world, have been working and living and playing with these symptoms all our lives, you’ve only been told what it’s like.

So I’m asking you nicely, don’t judge me, or others with ADHD, until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes.

And for heaven sake, try not to walk a mile in my shoes.

Tools and toys, ready to roll …

Sometimes I think that working for a contractor is the best possible job for someone with ADHD. There is structure without routine. There is a set expectation. I know what I’m supposed to do and when. I can do my best work and it is appreciated.

And often, when I go that extra mile or figure out how to make something better or do something more efficiently, that’s appreciated also.

Did I mention I’ve started work for the season? Well, I have.

And there’s more. There’s something about working that I love. I mean working as in having a job. The thing I love about it is the focus that comes with engaging your brain in a task that is judged successful when the time is up for the day. Whether the job itself is finished or not, I’ve put in the day. I go at it with the goal being to get to the end of the day, and I succeed.

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The city of my birth has grown at an alarming rate.

And I only know one of them. Well, okay, I know the one where I set my GPS to an address and let it tell me where to go. I’m use to being told where to go, I’ve been told plenty.

I would really like to set the GPS voice to that of a Scottish Female. I find that accent very appealing. But I’m pretty sure I’d just find that to be distracting. I’m also certain I’d be taking wrong turns just to hear her say “That’s okay, sure, we’ll just be recalculating and we’ll have you back on the rrrright rrroad in noo time.”

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In school, I didn’t learn no art real good.

When I was a young lad in school, as you will know if you have parents or grandparents, I had to walk twenty miles to school each day and twenty miles back again, up hill both ways, and it always snowed while I was walking. And often times, that was the good part of my day.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I am not lying when I tell you that I went to one room schools, as in “Little House On The Prairie.” Grade one and grade two were spent in a school with grades one through eight all being taught by one teacher. How did I learn anything you ask? I learned everything. If the teacher was talking I was listening, struggling to comprehend lessons meant for people who ranged from a year older than I was to people twice my age. But I couldn’t do my own work.

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Maybe getting through this is childsplay …

If you have ADHD, you’ve got trouble. You know the symptoms as well as I do. And yes, we all agree that we love our lightning brains, but the controls on them aren’t what we would have ordered if we had been getting the custom model instead of the factory refurb.

The thing about ADHD is that our minds don’t develop completely in a couple of key areas. We’re left with the executive function of a child.

That means that even as adults, we make mistakes that are viewed as children’s mistakes. When we screw up, we do it in a childlike way.

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Is this Executive Function for dummies?

Having ADHD means that I have non-functional executive function, executive dysfunction if you will. This is the part of my cognitive machinery that is supposed to help with decision making.

It isn’t that it doesn’t work, it does, when I engage it. But engaged should be its default state, and it isn’t . Or at least, when it is needed, it should kick into gear automatically. It does not.

Worse still is that, since I have to engage it manually, I have to decide whether I need it, without having it engaged. Do you see a problem there? How am I to make a decision on whether I need the decision making machinery without having the decision making machinery up and running.

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Been there, Done that, Got the T-shirt!

Are you tired? Are you bored? Have you had enough of ADHD? Do you want a cure? Do you want a way to fix it? End it? Leave it in the past?

Join the club. That’s what we all want.

That’s why the people with the latest therapy or herbal remedy or book or diet will always have customers.

Don’t misunderstand me, some of the books outline plans that help some of us, maybe even many of us. And many of the books available do the great service of reminding us that we are not alone in this insidious disorder. But we are as diverse a group as there could be. Even the things we have in common aren’t common to each and every one of us.

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I can’t draw very well …

I’m sure you’ve heard that people with ADHD are very creative. It’s nice to think that may be true, and it may be true, but it isn’t yet a fact.

A fact is something that current tests show to have a high probability of truth. At one time it was a fact that the sum orbited the earth once a day. Now we know that the earth orbits the sun once a year. It looks like the sun is going around us because earth is actually spinning itself around once a day. That gives us a view of space towards the sun and then a view of space away from the sun.

Since there are no tests to qualify or quantify creativity, there is no way of testing the creativity of anyone. The only test is if they create

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My old Pentax, manual external focus. My manual focus is internal.

Why can I focus on some things better than others? And why is it that the important things seem to be harder to focus on? These are questions that plague me.

They plague me particularly when I’m trying hard to view my ADHD as a way of being, rather than a flaw in my being.

I am always hoping that understanding issues will lead to being able to rectify them. If not, then I hope understanding them will possibly present a usable work around for the issue I’m studying.

The first thing I’ve noticed about things I am better able to focus on, is that they are, more often, things I enjoy. So why do I think they are less important if I enjoy them? Perhaps that is a self esteem issue. If I like them, they can’t be that important.

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