Halikar's Blarg

Well played, Jason. Well played.

Imagine with me please.

You wake up, get out of bed and shuffle off to the bathroom. Throwing water on your face, you start a mental list of things you need to do today. You make sure the kids are getting out of bed, then walk through the kitchen and note that the sink is full of dishes.

You sit down at your desk in the living room and start writing down your to do’s onto paper. In getting a blank piece of paper, you find your list from yesterday and copy over the things you didn’t do or finish. Your wife comes in and tells you her list of things she wants you to do along with her emphasis of what has priority. Your wife is rushing around to get ready for work so you have to pay full attention to what she is saying so you don’t miss anything. However, your mind keeps wandering back and forth between what she is saying and trying not to lose what you already had in your head. This makes it hard to focus and several things slip from your mental list and your wife’s list don’t make it to your paper list. You figure it won’t matter as you’re sure you will remember them later. She never mentions the dishes.

You turn on your computer. You check your email and see there are several things that you really need to do, some of them old that you’ve forgotten so far. They get added to the list. You get very focused on the list and don’t notice the bustle of morning preparations everyone else is going though. Your kids ask if they can turn on the television and you suddenly realize what time it is. You get everyone out the door so you can drive them to their various destinations. You don’t notice the dishes as you pass them.

In the car you can’t think. There’s traffic to pay attention to, your daughter is just chatting in general to no one in particular, your wife will interject things to you that you know you should pay attention too but it’s all too much input at once. You can’t filter it and frustration sets in. You drop the kids off and can finally process some things mentally. Your wife over reacts a bit to another car breaking in front of yours which scatters your thoughts. You start conversing about something on the radio and those thoughts don’t return. The dishes never cross your mind.

On your way back from dropping off your wife you relish the quiet. You let your mind relax so you’ll be able to focus when you get home. Your thoughts bounce around, associating all kinds of things together, until you settle on a short story idea you’ve been kicking around for a while. When you park in the driveway at home, your mind has blocked out several scenes and some dialog and you want to get in and type it up on the computer before you forget it. You don’t notice the dishes as you pass them on the way in.

When you walk by the phone you notice there are 2 new messages. You play them and find they are from bill collectors offering you exciting new opportunities to pay them. You are now worried about your lack of employment and money issues, your story long forgotten. You look at your computer and think you should run some job searches but are so depressed you just want to crawl into bed in the dark. Instead you try and cheer up by reading a book. The dishes aren’t mentioned in the book.

You realize you have to go to the bathroom again. On the way you notice the time and realize the entire morning is gone. When you get done your stomach rumbles and you remember you haven’t eaten anything today. You nose around the kitchen looking for something quick and don’t find anything. All the food you have requires preparation time because you can only buy cheap ingredients, and anything quick is already prepared and therefore more expensive. Your brain locks because this requires a decision, and any decision is going to eat up time you don’t want to waste any more. You finally settle on scrambled eggs and a micro-waved potato, but the decision took you 30 minutes to make. You don’t notice this because your mind is spacy. You cook and then eat the food, and stack the new dishes on top of the ones already in the sink. You realize your very tired, lay down to rest for a little bit and end up taking a nap. You don’t dream about the dishes.

You wake up in a panic because you’ve just noticed you fell asleep. It’s afternoon, almost time to get the kids from school and you didn’t get the gas for the car your wife asked you to this morning. You run out the door, get the gas, and make it to your kids school 10 minutes late. The kids are chatting in the back seat of the car, but your mind can’t process anything because it’s in neutral. A small part of you does notice all the input coming in, the traffic, the radio, the chatter, but none of it impacts the automatic program taking you back home. You zombie shuffle past the dishes and that small part notices they are there.

Your son goes over to a friends house. Your daughter goes out to ride her bike but your mind remembers she has karate practice in 90 minutes. You reminder her to be back on time. Your more active mind drags you back to your computer and you try and get something done. You remember you needed to do the taxes and research tax software options. You find it difficult to compare different programs so you try and exercise your brain with the daily sudoku and code-breaker puzzles at thinks.com. You had no trouble with yesterdays code-breaker puzzle, but today’s is difficult even though many of the words end up being the same. It’s like trying to think through quicksand, stuffed into a burlap sack, at night. After a forced struggle with the puzzles your daughter comes in 5 minutes late and you have to run out the door to get her to karate. The dishes sparkle in the evening light as you rush past them.

Driving to and from the dojo is halfway peaceful and halfway frustrating. You alternate between upset over not having done much of anything today and trying to relax so you don’t end up depressing yourself more. It works by the time you get home. You call your wife to see if she’s on the bus on her way home and she says she is. You rush out the door again to get her from the station. The dishes lurk in the evening darkness.

Your wife tells you about her day, decompressing and releasing her stress. You do your best to pay attention, but your mind wanders. You see a bear sculpture in a park as you pass and you imagine what it would be like if it came to life. You think about it running down the street after your car, then get derailed by the billboard for a local radio station with Ryan Seacrest on it. You can’t stand him and stew about that before you realize your wife asked you a question. You replay the conversation in your head real fast and answer correctly. You wonder why that was so easy but instead try to focus on your wife talking to you about dinner options. You both agree that you need a couple of things at the store so you swing by to pick them up. Your mind doesn’t spare a single thought about how tight money is or your lack of work while paying.

You get home with everyone, excited about having dinner together and maybe watching the prime time shows, and set the food down on the counter. You turn around to get a pot to start cooking and realize it’s in the sink. Under a pile of dishes. That you now have to do if anyone is going to eat. You are ashamed that you didn’t think about doing the dishes once today and don’t know why you didn’t. This depresses you for the rest of the night, even though you put a brave, happy face on for everyone. You do the dishes and dinner takes an extra hour.

Your wife asks you about a couple of things she asked you to do and you finally remember your to do list, sitting on the corner of your desk, unnoticed but in plain sight. You can recall all the things on it easily, knowing you’d never have been able to get them all done in one day, but even more ashamed you didn’t get more than one or two things done on it. You didn’t think about it and you don’t know why.

You want to distract yourself from the depression with something entertaining but you feel like you aren’t worthy of doing anything except staring blankly at the TV. You split your attention between the TV and looking at games on your computer you’d love to play but don’t feel like you earned the right to. Your family goes to bed one by one at their bed times, you give them their good nights, and can’t find the motivation to go to bed yourself when you should. You finally shamble bleary eyed to bed at 2 AM, right past the new pile of dishes from dinner. You look at them and think, “I’ll do those first  thing tomorrow.”

Which is exactly what you thought last night.

I have, for the better part of my 44 years of life, been struggling with something within myself. I have in part been unwilling to admit it to myself, in part been unable to describe or explain well and in part been afraid to say anything about due to societal pressures. All that is ended.

I suffer from adult ADHD-I, or ADHD type 2 (depending on who you speak to). It is an often undiagnosed mental health issue because people look at those who have it as lazy, slow, spacy, or unmotivated. This is including those who have it, which is what I’ve thought about myself for years. It is characterized by being easily distracted, having difficulty with sustained attention spans on things that aren’t fresh, new and interesting, daydreaming, having trouble paying attention to other people speaking, having difficulty starting and following through on tasks, difficulty in time management, absentmindedness, and appearing apathetic, unmotivated or preoccupied. Current medical thinking is that it is caused by a deficiency in neurotransmitter levels, causing “brown outs” in parts of the brain when more thinking occurs or brain activity is stimulated. There are various ways to treat it depending on it’s severity, both with and without medication. The trick is to have a diagnosis.

My life has gone from a productive one to one where I sit at home all day wondering why I cannot take those first steps to start anything. Not all at once, of course, but over the last decade at the very least. I attributed it in part to the economy, lack of local contacts in the current job market, poor self discipline, bad use of personal information management tools, bad karma, anything but something that might require medical and/or psychotherapist assistance. About a month ago I finally bit the bullet and accepted my wife’s advice and went to see a therapist. That single step, one of the most difficult of my life, showed me there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

That light is still a long ways off, but I can see it’s there. I still need to find a way to re-balance my brain chemistry, build a way of life that exploits the advantages ADHD provides while overcoming it’s many disadvantages, and move forward getting back on track to doing what I want and need to be doing. It’s not going to be easy or quick, and I expect I’ll be falling on my face often (I am already). But I know it can be done, and knowing is half the battle.

The biggest hurdle I currently have is getting others to realize what I am going through. That I am not blowing them off intentionally, not being a lazy bum, not an absent minded professor. It is in a very real sense a disability, since it is a result of a physical manifestation in the brain. But because it is not as easily seen as someone in a wheel chair, it is easy for those who have not experienced it to shrug it off, to believe it is easy to over come, or to disbelieve in it’s existence entirely. Only if that were so.

I have felt like a prisoner in my own head for years. I am not stupid, I have been perfectly capable of doing things that have managed to stimulate me in positive ways enough to over ride my neurotransmitter deficiencies, and have been complemented on how many questions I’ve been able to answer in a variety of subjects. But I have not been able to control my mind in ways that would make me productive. While I can recall things, recalling things when I need to to get them handled has been almost impossible. I can focus on what I am doing, but I can also easily be thrown out of focus by things I cannot filter out when I need to (both internal and external). I can clearly block out steps in a task, but when I need to actually do those steps the whole process overwhelms me and I feel paralyzed mentally in taking that first step. I have not been in control of my mind, my mind has been in control of me. It is a frightening thing, made all the worse by the fact that few others we encounter in life are able (or willing frequently) to understand.

Join me on my trek to overcoming and using this aspect of my life. Along the way I’ll be exercising my eclectic love of a variety of topics as well as my struggles with ADHD. I’ll probably rant about a few things too, life is rarely all beer and skittles. Who knows, some of it might actually be interesting too.