AKA week [del]2[/del] 3
I could probably go on long enough to make your eyes glaze over.
I get frustrated by how I lose time so easily. I hate not having enough energy get the house clean. I hate spending twice as long as I should to do things because I’m constantly looking for something.
My social skills suck, because when other kids were learning them, I was wandering around in a daze.
I hate that work is always stressful, no matter what I do.
I am constantly losing track of time. I have been accused of collecting clocks because I always need one in line of sight, otherwise it would take me 45 minutes to do something that would take a normal person 10 minutes. I can’t wear a watch anymore, so several clocks in every room of the house is my current solution to that.
I also have trouble getting the house clean, but that’s because … OH look! Shiny!
I don’t usually lose things anymore. I learned early on “a place for everything and everything in it’s place.” Being late for school 3 times in one month because my backpack was missing taught me that.
Oh I can relate! I spent sooo much time daydreaming as a kid, I’m surprised that I had what few friends I did.
I hate my commute. 30 miles each way, even though there is a store 2 miles away. My performance reviews haven’t been up to snuff, so the closer store didn’t want to transfer me when I moved to this city. I have a feeling that my next review will be much better, and I can save time better spent on homework.
I have been doing a lot better for the past 6 or so weeks since I started taking Adderall, but my dosage still needs some tweaking. The ADD comes back full force in the evenings.
I hate that it’s a constant battle with yourself and all of life at the same time. And there’s nowhere to go. Even a moment’s peace of mind may result in forgetfulness, frustration, even failure.
I hate every bit of it. Getting nothing done because of the inability to focus, untill something triggers the hyperfocus, and then I really get nothing done because I’ve spent the last four hours making sure that other thing is perfect.
I know you didn’t ask for advice, but…
Trying to force myself to create good habits, like *always *putting my keys and my work badge in my purse has really helped me.
Removing distractions also helps. I removed every pre-installed game, even the solitaire, from my computer as soon as I get it.
As for housecleaning, look into getting a cleaning lady. They can be had for shockingly cheap. (If it doesn’t seem cheap, do a little math to figure out how many hours of your work it takes to pay for a cleaner, and then figure out how many hours it would take you to do the same cleaning.)
The ability to do a simple, easy task.
Normal Person:
ADD:
So, I get up, still holding the popsicle stick, to clean the microwave, and the commercials end and the program comes back on. So I flop back on the couch, still holding the popsicle stick.
Its like that, every damn time, for every damn task.
I do like the hyperfocus when it comes to computer programming tasks, and video-game playing, but otherwise, it sucks.
I hate that many people believe that ADD is a made-up excuse.
No, it’s not. My brain is wired differently from most people. You want someone who can hop from Shakespearean sonnets to child care to fixing a computer in 10 minutes without becoming discombobulated, I’m your woman. You want someone who can stay with a task for four hours without interruption IF there’s enough pressure or it’s really interesting (for a defined value of “interesting”), I’m still your woman. You want someone who works like an average person, handles distractions and interruptions like an average person, and has an average person’s mental endurance and focus? Nope. I’m not even on the same planet.
I hate that without my ADD med, my top limit for any mental or physical exertion is two hours. That’s it. I’m done. You may tell me to keep working, and I may try my hardest to do so, but I’ll be staring at a light fixture trying to figure out if the bulb filament is aligned N/S or E/W within 10 minutes.
I hate that when I am actually able to keep pace with the normals because of my hard won coping mechanisms and medication, no one notices, and when I do something really great that can be credited to the upside of my ADD, everyone shrugs it off. But Og forbid, something slips by that can be directly attributed to ADD, and suddenly I’m making excuses. Gah!
I hate wanting to do five things at once, and how hard it is to prioritize said things, and how easy it is to get derailed once I actually make a plan.
Take yesterday, for example. After I finally decided to go home and put off shopping until today, this was supposed to be the plan. Before anyone else got home, I was to:
What actually happened:
So, the living room is vacummed, but the kitchen floor and sanding are still not done. sigh. Every day is like this, if not much worse.
Oh, as another note, those three things I wanted to do? I knew I’d most likely have less than an hour to acomplish all three. I know that’s not enough time, but that doesn’t stop me from deciding I can do everything I plan anyway. Part of wanting to do five things at once is that I also want to do far more than I ever have time for too.
I’m supposed to be working right now.
I hate living in a country that has NO APPROVED MEDS FOR ADULT ADD. Kids can get Concerta, but not adults. Ritalin used to be prescribed off-label for adult ADD, but then Novartis clamped WAY the hell down after a spate of abuse cases popped up. Now the only indication is for narcolepsy, so ::cough:: guess what I’ve been diagnosed with recently? 
I hate that I have piles of books on organization, ADD-friendly strategies, etc. and never finish any of them or remember to implement and stick with some of the great ideas I find therein. But hope springs eternal eh! Why, just today I found what looks like a fantastic read on organizing oneself at work.
One thing I do like, though, is that every last one of these posts could have been written by me. From one ADD whack in faraway Tokyo, thank you.
When people ask me what having ADD is like, I tell them it’s like being a fireman, and EVERYTHING is a fire.
Establishing habits is one of the hardest things for me to do - are you more on the hyper or the inattentive side of the scale?
I end up needing the distractions. If I try to focus for too long without breaks then I get antsy and jittery. OTOH, I avoid TV like the plague
I’m saving a lot of time here by just saying “ditto”.
I love the fireman quote, I’ll be using that.
In grade school, I spent a few years in an independent study experimental class room. We did 6-week goals, two week goals and started each day by writing daily goals. I was horrible at it. These days, purely by way of learning accommodations for myself at work, I have a big white board with ‘stuff I gotta get to’ listed in different colored marker. On I-Google page, I have my Tasks prominently listed, and they also show in my calendar. These are the ‘sub-list of things I gotta get to’. Each morning, as stuff comes to mind that I MUST do today, I grab a sticky and put that right on the bottom of my monitor.
My 4th grade teacher would be so proud of me, I finally get it!
My favorite thing about ADD is when something shows up or happens that I’ve completely forgotten about. It’s like every day is full of surprises!
Inattentive and easily distracted. I had minor hyperactivity as a kid, but fortunately I grew out of it.
Yeah. When I’m having a day like that I put several things I need to work on, on the table and bounce from one to the next.
Working from home, where I don’t bother anyone with the foot tapping, also seems to help.
It’s not the people that actually come out and say it, it’s the people that get the slightly glazed “I’m being too polite to mention that I think ADD is a made up excuse” look.
And I don’t understand how I can explain this shit to someone else when it doesn’t make sense to me, all I need to do is to do the thing I’m not doing, how hard can that be? :mad:. It still never feels to me like it will be hard, why would it, I just need to do it?, it’s just it never ends up getting done.
And had great fun with the first doctor, “I don’t think you could be doing a PhD if you have ADD” What? the PhD I’ve just told you has taken six years and I’m struggling with appeals on the viva right now, that PhD?. “We don’t recognise adult ADD as a condition in the UK” (I had to go back home to my family GP and take a copy of the NICE guidance)
And still not getting the medication right, but when it works it really works, and oh my god other people can concentrate like this all their damn lives. Going to pharmacists for new raised dose tomorrow, so fingers crossed.
The thing that I really hate though, is the never ever being proud of anything that you do, because you always always know you could have done better.
Ugh. The other day I overheard a couple of guys talking about how ADHD was a crock and when they were kids if they acted up they just got swatted. :mad:
So. I’ve been wondering if I might possibly have ADD. It never crossed my mind before but my Aunt’s husband has it, and when she explained ‘‘hyperfocus’’ I was like… oh. I have a problem with getting caught up in things almost compulsively for hours - like the internet. And I definitely lose track of time and I definitely block everything else out. I’ve spent hours composing a single SDMB or blog post without realizing all the time I was spending. My record is 7 hours. 7 hours on one post. And I deleted it.
I also have a really difficult time paying attention, especially when people are talking. It’s not on purpose. My boss will be explaining something to me and it will trigger some completely random line of thought and then it will dawn on me she’s still talking and I have to fake like I’ve been listening. I’ve never gotten caught doing this (except by my husband) but I do it all the time. I do the same thing with television… about 10 minutes into a show I’ll have to ask my husband what the hell is going on because I started thinking about something else and forgot I was watching TV.
But I was under the impression people with ADD often had difficulty meeting deadlines and stuff… so not me. I was a straight-A student through high school and have missed a deadline maybe once in my life. I was never targeted for behavioral or performance problems or any of that.
If I did have it, how would I know?
Having a problem with deadlines isn’t a universal symptom. As I mentioned in the last thread, I don’t have problems with *other people’s *deadlines. Not at work, and I never did at school either. In fact, a lot of people with ADD find it easier to manage jobs with hard deadlines rather than open-ended ones where things are due “whenever” or “as soon as possible,” because having a concrete goal helps us to focus, whereas no deadlines makes us panicky about figuring out what to do when because we suck at it.
Ack. I hate hate hate it all, but the worst for me is how I invariably lose interest in whatever the heck I was interested in a few minutes or days or weeks ago. I just can’t finish anything - after I start it, it’s boring. Excruciatingly boring. I simply cannot make myself resume the boring thing.
I also agree it’s infuriating when people (and I’m thinking here of my husband) say they don’t “believe in ADD”. I once told a psychiatrist that ADD probably didn’t believe in her either.
Are you me?
I would add that I can’t seem to only watch TV, or read a book. I do both at once and miss half of each of them most of the time. If it is a REALLY good book, I get so lost I won’t even hear the phone ring and when I get up to go the bathroom, I have been known to run into walls because I was carrying the book and reading on my way there.:smack:
tldr
Same here, deadlines make things a lot easier, especially when you know that they are actually real deadlines. My work got so much better at Uni, just because they had a firm “if it’s not in on time it doesn’t get marked” policy.
That’s another thing thing to hate, you can work in a high pressure, high stress environment fairly effectively, or you can work in a low stress environment and stress about the work you aren’t doing. The stress isn’t really optional.
On the hyperactive, restless side, I’ve always noticed that it always tends to manifest when external factors are forcing you to do something that your brain “isn’t ready” to do, like sitting in a classroom. I think the reason that it doesn’t get seen as much in adulthood, is that adults generally have more freedom to avoid those situation (see also - wanting to murder people in queues)
Is anyone else here with ADD reluctant to learn to drive?, the prospect of doing this has always worried me, basically because I worry about doing so given my difficulty in sustaining attention on a task. When I mentioned it to the psychiatrist she indicated that it was a very common fear associated with the condition.