I had my second appointment with the new ADD nurse practitioner/PhD today. She's really fantastic. I can't say enough good things about her. I was expecting a short med eval, but I was there for 50 minutes, and she did quite a bit of counseling as well as reviewing how the Adderall was working. She gave me so many helpful suggestions.
My big "ah ha!" moment of the day was when she suggested that I wasn't necessarily disorganized, just differently-organized. In other words, not organized like "normal." All of my stuff is in piles, but I know what's in the piles and I know how to find it when I need it. I've spent so much of my life trying to force myself to function "the way everyone else does" instead of devising a system of functioning that would come more naturally to the way my brain operates. It has caused me so much pain and anguish, so much shame, so much frustration. I've wasted so much time and energy trying to force my square-peg self into a round hole, and I've beaten myself up mercilessly for not being able to get through. For not being able to be "normal." The agony eventually became unbearable and I broke down.
I wanted to cry. Then I realized: those tiny goals I've been setting for myself at TL's suggestion? I've actually been reorganizing my world in a way that actually works for me. One tiny step at a time, I am allowing the world to make sense again. I'm listening to myself, learning to pay attention to what defeats me, what overwhelms me, what confuses me, as well as what empowers and motivates me.
Same with how mad he used to get at me about cleaning. He'd yell at me to clean the living room, and I'd try to tell him that I didn't know how -- I had no idea where to put anything, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and I didn't know where to begin. I begged him for some bookshelves -- there was no way I'd have been able to put them together myself -- because a) WE HAVE NO FURNITURE AND NO STORAGE. AT ALL.; and b) having shelves would help me visualize where to put stuff. He refused. He said I could have bookshelves after I cleaned the house. But I couldn't do it without the bookshelves, dig? I didn't know how to explain it to him...or maybe he just wasn't interested in listening. More and more lately I have been wondering exactly when he gave up on me. It's ironic that he was the very first person to tell me I had ADD and yet was the least supportive person in my life. Maybe he just wanted a label to slap on his reason for abandoning me and the animals. Whatever.
Well, now I'm rambling. I had some other stuff to say, but it's gone now. What I eventually wanted to get at was that I stopped at Powell's after the ADD thing (and after stopping at Home Depot for wood pellets and Petco for cat food -- my poor shocks) because I wanted to check out Thom Hartmann's books on ADD. What I ended up buying instead was Four Weeks to an Organized Life with AD/HD by Jeffrey Freed, M.A.T and Joan Shapiro, MD. What caught my eye was this:
Finishing with the Phobia
The simplest things sometimes seem out of reach. If these things were complicated, it would make sense to put them off forever. But they aren't. And, yet, some of us treat them as if we are facing a session of bamboo spikes under the fingernails. Perhaps we are a bit like Ed, caught in the same spot again.
Ed sat at his desk, staring at the usual disaster. Stacks, some six or eight inches high, perched and balanced on each other and covered almost the entire writing surface. Sound familiar? But, as it is with many people who use this "horizontal filing system," Ed felt confident that he knew waht was in each of the piles. It was a good thing that he did, because he had two bills that had to be paid immediately. If he didn't get the payment made by the end of the banking day, he would incur eighty-six dollars in late fees, and it was most likely that his cell phone would not be working by the weekend.
It would take only seconds to locate the bills that Ed had to pay. But Ed sat and stared at his desk. "I should do this," ran through his thoughts, and yet his body didn't move. What was it that made it so difficult for him to get this small chore over with? He looked at his watch. He had just under half an hour to get the bills to the mailbox two blocks away. Suddenly galvanized into activity, he dug furiously through the piles. In minutes, he had the bills he needed, a checkbook, and a pen. Now that he had the checks written (though not entered into the register) and the envelopes sealed, all he had to do was find some stamps. Scrounging through his top drawer, he found three. Wow, and he only needed two! He bounded out of the front door, jogged three blocks, and dropped the bills into the mailbox with minutes to spare.
Ambling home, feeling a mellow feeling of relief and calm, Ed asked himself a question that most people with AD/HD ask of themselves quite regularly: "That wasn't so bad. Why didn't I get that started earlier?" Although this is asked as a rhetorical question, there is a very good answer. The stimulation created by the deadline creates enough dopamine to get the odious task done. It's as simple as that. This is one of the ways in which medication is often helpful, because it raises the level of dopamine enough to get started and to complete the job. But there's more to this than just a need for medication....
Then it goes on to say that some people become almost literally phobic about certain tasks due to repeated bad experiences doing these difficult things:
...even if you have pretty effective neurochemistry, even if you have learned new skills, even if you have a clear understanding of your problem, you still have the buildup of years of experiencing failure and pain....Naturally, then, you want to avoid that situation....
This, my friends, is why my line count is in the crapper. It's why I can't concentrate on my work. It was only very recently (in the past day or so) that I began to recognize my need for the stress of an approaching deadline, and reading just those few pages in the book was like a lightning bolt to the brain. I'M NOT CRAZY.
I.
AM.
NOT.
CRAZY.
I'm so grateful for the wonderful support I have received from my friends and other loved ones and from the competent clinicians I tracked down on my own behalf. My ADD diagnosis in August started me on a journey that I really am only just now beginning. I'm so happy, I could dance; and so heartbroken for the years I've lost...I could curl up and weep. A little understanding and compassion can make all the difference in a person's life. I am still learning what it is like to not be judged for my "failings." Being relieved of all of those metric tons of others' expectation is a feeling I can't even describe. I feel so alive. I feel so worthy of being alive.
