It’s an ADHDer’s time to shine!

There are days in the life of every ADHDer when they wonder why they were born. Why did they need to be put into this world to suffer the indignities that are visited upon them so very often. Embarrassment, ridicule, punishment, misunderstanding, all this and more is S.O.P., part of an ADHDer’s everyday life. Yes, there are days …

And there are good days also, though they get fewer and farther between as we grow up, grow older, start to see that no one gets out of life alive and the days we have left to retrieve our dignity are dwindling.

Sitting, waiting, yawning …

When I was younger, I often found myself in situations that were nigh on to intolerable. Lineups come to mind, waiting rooms of course, chores that seemed endless; all would work me into a state of agitation that made the occasion impossible to deal with.

I told you so … it does revolve around me

I just spent half an hour talking to someone about conforming or not conforming. We talked about whether ADHD means that he can or can’t do a job that is confining and restrictive. And, although it wasn’t mentioned verbatim, we talked about whether he could continue in a relationship that has been an ongoing challenge for him.

I’m not naming names, and I’m not talking anymore about this conversation, except to say that it reminded me of three revelations I had when I was younger, before I knew I had ADHD.

The first revelation was that, yes, the world did in fact revolve around me. The second one was an extension of the first: everyone’s world revolves around them. We are all alike in this respect. We can have sympathy and even empathy for others, we can make Olympian efforts to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. But we don’t need to do that for ourselves, we’re already living our lives. We know to what extent the other people we would try to understand are in our world. We do not know to what extent we are in their worlds.

ADHD Awareness Week

Okay, you all knew that. We all knew that. If we didn’t know before it happened, then we certainly were made aware of it during.

I, for one, had it sneak up on me. I found out about a week and a half before it happened. I wasn’t ready.
But did I make up for it?
I wasn’t ready and I didn’t jump on the band wagon (I couldn’t find my drum anyway). I did post my feelings on awareness in Friday’s post last week. And I did use “ADHD Awareness Week” in the title. But that was written … last Thursday night.

Choose your seat carefully …

Distractions, they’re my nemesis, the bane of my existence. They sometimes make conversation with me a long, tedious thing for those engaged in them with me. I try to be fairly focused when talking to people, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t insert random, unnecessary observations.

In instances where I’ve met someone socially, you couldn’t get a decent history of our conversation from either myself or my victim. I can’t remember and they either are in the same boat or they are non-ADHDers, which means they probably couldn’t keep up with my whirling Rolodex of sentence fragments and random topics.

ADHD Awareness Week

I didn’t read The New York Times piece titled “Ritalin Gone Wrong” when it came out in the paper. I don’t get the Times, or any other paper anymore. Luckily, Dr. Ned Hallowell caught it and gave it the attention that it deserved.
What to do …
Or maybe it didn’t deserve any attention from Dr’ Hallowell. I’m always torn between thinking garbage like the Times piece should either not be dignified with an answer or the author of such drivel should be verbally pilloried and then beaten senseless with a copy or twelve of their unscrupulous work

My local paper, published here in my home town, used to come to my door everyday, but it piled up and I realized that someone other than myself could be recycling these copies, and they might actually read them first. So it hasn’t enraged me in years, it rarely did even when people drew my attention to stories within its homey, folksy pages.

When I was younger, I’d often find myself in situations that were nigh on to intolerable. Lineups come to mind, waiting rooms of course, jobs that seemed endless; all would work me into a state of agitation that made the occasion seem impossible to deal with.
Thank heaven for …

Yet, in my youth, I seemed to have the answer. I would reach a point where I would think I was going to explode … and I would stop. I would take myself out of the picture mentally, zoom out, as it were, and look at a bigger picture, a greater world.

You won’t see me on Pinterest!

Have you been pinned? I have. It didn’t hurt, but I don’t know that it helped that much either.

The thing is, I’m a little worried about the whole thing. I have friends with ADHD and they seem to be trying to cure it with Pinterest. Well, maybe …

Weeks like these are just odd!

The weekend past was Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. Being farther north than most of the U.S. means summer is shorter and winter weather comes earlier. So we like to celebrate thanksgiving before our pumpkins start freezing.

And we take an extra day off to do that. We call it Holiday Monday, which means we didn’t have a real Monday in our week this week.

Nature is worth gratitude …

Last weekend my friend and I went for a nature walk to a waterfall near our town where we sat and talked about the things we were thankful for.

I was looking at a boulder just in front of us, distracted by its beauty, while I pondered being grateful.

I looked at it with an artist’s eye, thinking “… wouldn’t that look amazing in my back yard.” I soon realized that much of the rocks beauty was in its surroundings. It is crowded in on all sides by both things that helped shape it and things that were affected as it was. It was not made somewhere to be a part for something else, it was made where it stood, created with what it stood with.