Tag Archives: adhd

ADHD Strikes Again

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Task for the day to is to finally sort through my Amazon returns. Reasonable choice, they’ve been piling up to a ridiculous extent.

Yeah, a good number of the most expensive ones are from like six months ago and can no longer be returned because I forgot to print off the QR codes before they expired. So I’m annoyed with myself because that’s easily $500 in ADHD tax. Trying to remind myself that we’re not hurting for money and that these things happen, but it’s not the easiest.

On the upside, Adderall seems to be working. Day…5? (took Sunday off, threw off my count) now and I’m still feeling good. Still lowering the activation energy between what I want to do and what I can actually do. So I’m taking it. Hopefully there’ll be fewer ADHD taxes in my future.

Adderall 10 mg Day 1

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This…is a very odd feeling. I’m not sure if it’s placebo, the fluke of a good day coinciding with my first day on the medication, early-med euphoria, or just…the meds doing what they’re meant to do.

I woke up (slept past my alarm but that’s not the end of the world), did my eye mask, got out of bed, weighed-in (down 3.5 lbs from last week, that’s nice), put the kettle on, took my meds with a Boost High Protein, made tea, did my morning pages, affirmations, and task dump while drinking tea, then thought “I should shower” and…got in the shower.

Like. Just. Got undressed and turned on the water. Hopped right in.

This is not normal for me. It usually takes me all day to get myself in the shower because I’m convinced it’s boring and will take forever. I just…got in, though. And yeah, it was a long-ish shower, but I remembered the list I wrote in grease pencil on the shower wall and just…followed the steps. Easily. Some distraction in between, but what I think is probably a normal level? Like, a couple of minutes, not until the water gets cold.

I put gel in my hair after. Remembered deodorant and antiperspirant work best right out of the shower and put it on. Then cologne. Sat in front of the fan in my bathrobe to let my hair air-dry while eating some lemon skyr and reading Scientific American and…was ready to get up when the skyr was done. Mid-article. To get dressed and do chores. Boring ones. Laundry, taking out the trash, loading the dishwasher.

K came up then so I talked to him for a bit, but I still remembered I was going to do chores. When he went down to take his medication, I…got dressed (pants size down!) and did the chores. Like 45 minutes to an hour of them. Loaded the dishwasher, took out two rounds of recycling and a load of trash (would’ve done more, but it’s hot and my feet were starting to protest), hung up laundry, gathered and loaded more laundry, swept the bunny play area and gave them a new box of hay to chew up. Not a lot, but things that normally would’ve required intense effort and possibly wiped me out for the day, depending on how good or bad of a day it was.

I also…there’s this thing with ADHD where you see something that needs to be done but don’t automatically do it the way other people do. There has been toilet roll packaging on the floor of the downstairs bathroom for actual months, it drives me nuts every time I pass it, but for some reason I do not understand I never seem to pick it up and throw it in the trash even though I know I should.

Today, I picked up the packaging and threw it in the trash. And picked up a book off the floor and put it…ok, not where it goes because it doesn’t have a set home, but I put it somewhere that was not the floor.

I did the same with some old Amazon packaging that was on the floor in front of the kitchen. And paper towel packaging. I just saw it…and dealt with it.

And look, these are things I have always known I should do. Not doing them has always made me feel kind of like shit because they’re things everyone is supposed to be able to do. A five year old should be able to be taught to pick things up and put them in the trash, but I have never been able to and I know what that means people assume about me.

Today, though, I did them. And I’m not sure I can attribute that to just having a good day because I’ve had good days before and that’s still never happened.

I don’t feel wiped out, either. I did a fair few boring, tedious, will have to be repeated tomorrow type tasks and I feel…fine. Like I could do more. I may put the lights, bell, and cup-holder on my bike so I can go for a ride after picking up groceries. Or I may read or think through the next chapters of the fic I’ve been stalled on for months. I don’t feel like all I can do is read a vapid romance novel or play games on my phone. I have a bit of a headache, I’m reminding myself that I need to hydrate, but overall I feel pretty good.

I really hope this isn’t just medication euphoria. It would be nice to be able to feel like I can do things all the time.

Yup. I’m hella ADHD

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Finally sent in my ADHD documentation to start medication. It was a whole thing because I kept forgetting because–oh right–I have ADHD so I ended up having to call and get the portal opened again and it was honestly obnoxious but it eventually got done.

Got a message back within 24 hours. Immediately assumed “oh no, I did something wrong”. Decided to look at it before diving into my morning routine because otherwise it was going to bother me all morning.

The message is basically “Yeah, you’re definitely ADHD, we’re just gonna skip the normal secondary evaluation and send you right in” XD

Given that I had a five standard deviation discrepancy between my VCI and WMI scores on the WAIS-IV, plus a TOVA ACS below -10, yeah, a second (third, really) evaluation would probably be a waste of time.

Would’ve been interested in taking the Stanford-Binet, though. It accounts for scatter better than the WAIS, which in my case is obviously necessary.

I really am fuelled by tea and spite lmao

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Today, I had to do something that, for reasons passing my understanding (not really, I just don’t like the underlying psychological reasons involved), was causing me to shut down. It was not hard. I was simply sending an email. I had been told “no” though and that sent my nervous system into shut down mode because being told “no” obviously meant that I had done something wrong and stupid and unreasonable and could not be trusted to ask for anything else ever again. (None of these things are true, I am aware of that, but good luck getting my brain to accept it.)

Additionally, I’ve reestablished my tech blocks because I had a rare moment of clarity on…Monday? I think? And remembered that I don’t actually enjoy spending all my free time on Reddit or playing Sims. I like Sims, it’s fun, my little legacy family is cute, but spending all day on it for weeks at a time just makes me feel bad about myself. I have the ability to block the program on my computer, I have the ability to block Reddit on my phone and tablet, there’s no reason I have to continue to allow them to run my life.

The first days of reestablishing my blocks are always hard, though. I get bored and twitchy and my ADHD brain very much does not like the sudden lack of stimulation. I notice the things that trigger my anxiety and stress more because I don’t have a ready distraction, which means my mental health gets worse before it gets better. After a week or two I reach a more stable baseline again and can work better with my analogue tools and CBT+DBT, but that week or two is rough and I don’t always get through it without returning to what’s comfortable. So it’s not at all surprising that when I woke up today feeling under-rested (I got maybe five hours of sleep), overwhelmed, and generally cranky my first instinct was to say fuck it and disable the blocks.

I happened to be at my desk instead of in front of my tablet, though, and that meant I had the pocket journal I had planned to finish months ago already out in front of me. It didn’t take much writing before I got to my frustration over the seeming inability to do uncomfortable things and my desire to prove that I can, in fact, stick with things when they’re difficult or uncomfortable, which then led to wondering when I stopped believe that of myself because I don’t remember it being a problem when I was a child, or even really into my teens.

Unsurprisingly, I decided this is my father’s fault XD It’s as good a reason as any, and that man’s voice is what usually pops into my head when I feel like I can’t accomplish or finish things (specifically, him telling a third party in front of me that the reason he didn’t want me to take the CHSPE was that it would teach me to quit), so it’s really not an unreasonable assumption. I’d guess a fair bit of it is also the undiagnosed ADHD childhood experience of being constantly told I never finished what I started, probably exacerbated by not being able to finish at London Met or cosmetology school and having to change majors when I finally did manage to get my degree. There were valid extenuating circumstances for all of those, but I suspect a part of me does still believe that should have been able to get past them anyway.

Regardless, I blame my father for a large portion of it. If nothing else, the man is definitely responsible for a large amount of trauma and the greatest portion of the decline in my mental state after about 15. And that then turned into why in the world I am still allowing this man to have that much control over my life. It has been over 20 years since I last saw him, close to twenty since I last spoke to him. He should not still have this much of an influence on me.

So I decided to prove him wrong. I can do hard things, I can deal with discomfort, I am capable of finishing things and putting in the hard work and doing what needs done.

I sent my email, kept my blocks, and celebrated the win…to stick it to my asshole of a father who haven’t seen in a couple of decades XD

Whatever works, right?

Having a good day

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I am feeling surprisingly good today. Hitting a bit of a sleepy moment, but given that I only got about six hours of sleep last night that’s not totally surprising. In terms of motivation, I feel quite good. Like I can actually tackle things. I even took out a couple rounds of trash and am thinking of maybe trying to write a bit.

I love when I get these moments. They’re not common, but they always feel a bit like magic. Like if I could just bottle this feeling I’d be ok. Because it’s not even necessarily that I want to take out trash or clear the vanity or write or anything else, it’s that I am aware that those things need to be done and it takes little to no effort to actually do them. I’m a bit scattered, yes, because I don’t have a focus for the energy, but I’m not just sucked into a constant hole of exhaustion and feeling like every tiny task is overwhelming.

I don’t think I’ve ever in my life had this feeling for more than a day or two at a time, but it’s lovely when it does happen. And it makes me wonder if maybe this is what most people feel like all the time? And maybe I should see about medication or something so I can feel like this more days than I do? But I’ve never not had ADHD or depression, so I don’t know if I’m just assuming other people are managing better than they actually are. And I honestly don’t know what to write or say if I do ask about changing my medication. “Hi, it was easy for me to take out the trash today and I was wondering if maybe there’s something that would make it easy to take out the trash every day”? It sounds ridiculous.

But also…it’d be really nice to feel like this every day. Or even, like, 70% of the days.