At the moment, I'm on a waiting list for an assessment to confirm a diagnosis of ADHD for me. I know there's been a lot of noise about how it's over diagnosed these days and that there's no point in getting a diagnosis if you're no longer studying, but firstly, it's definitely worth it, and secondly, no, not everyone has a little bit of ADHD. You might experience momentarily lapses in focus or forgetting what you are doing once or twice a day, but I literally forget to drink. I ended up so severely dehydrated during the hot weather a few weeks ago I had to call my parents to come and collect me and my car from work over an hour away because I was in agony, I was throwing up and I didn't know what was wrong. It's the reason why I tend to have a bottle of something or one of my flasks permanently in my hand - because that wasn't the first time I have ended up so dehydrated, but I am hoping it is the last.
Somehow, that's not even the most annoying part of the way my brain works.
There is a feature of the 'condition' (God, I hate calling it that) which is called ADHD paralysis and it's the reason a lot of people who are eventually diagnosed in adulthood spent a lot of our childhood being told we were lazy. People think of ADHD as the tiger bouncing (which even now my mother is struggling to see was probably due to ADHD), lack of attention or hyper focus, and a need to be constantly busy, but it's also the fact that it's not the body that can't sit still - my body would be exhausted and broken if it could keep up with the speed that my mind runs at. The best it can do is fidget to try and expend some of the energy that I don't know what to do with. There are also times where my mind is racing with a million and one different things, and writing itself a to do list, whether that's an immediate one or things I want to do 'eventually' to the house, the garden, places that I want to visit and things I want to try, and when I have a list all I can do is sit on the sofa and feel exhausted by the idea of everything that is on the to do list and trying to choose one of them to do. Overcoming that exhaustion is really hard, and it is like trying to put a firework up your own butt. It's the total opposite of when I wake up with too much energy and throw myself at every task I can think of and either exhaust myself really early on, or I keep getting distracted from the original task by finding lots of other bits and pieces that need to be done.
The ADHD paralysis thing has been bothering me more the last few weeks because I have been working parts of the weekend and I find that once I'm done with work, I really struggle to get myself out of work mode and into getting something else done, or going out and doing something fun. I'm affected by it a lot, and I know that part of the reason it is able to run my life is because I can be very sedentary, working from my sofa and only really getting up from the laptop when I want a brew (but, flask) to get food or a few other reasons. That's the nature of my job though.
Anyway, rant over. And since writing a blog was on my list of things to do, hopefully that was enough of a kick to get my brain out of paralysis mode and get to doing something else before it gets too late in the day for me to reasonably do something. Unfortunately I always seem to get restless about this stuff on a Sunday evening, likely because I'm looking down the barrel of another week at work where I know that I just wake up, work, and sometimes forget to log off until so late in the evening that it's dark outside even in the middle of summer, which is just another habit that I need to get out of.
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