Randomness

ADHD Is Weird, Man

So part of the reason I'm writing this is to test my brain the other part is because maybe somebody out there who happens upon this can leave their own ADHD advice if they had similar experience to their meds at first. Being an old fart and having social issues, I don't do well in joining new groups so finding a facebook group to join isn't going to happen. I mean I joined a social anxiety group years ago but could never get over said social anxiety to post. So there's that. But Wattpad is kinda like that old friend you lose touch with but when you meet up randomly 30 years later it's like you were always together.

Anyhooo....I grew up in the 80s and 90s which means I didn't grow up with ADHD really being a thing. I mean it obviously was, it didn't just magically appear in society, but back then you were considered a trouble child, retarded, or other such cruel names. I mean hell my dyslexia didn't get caught until college yet my aunt just showed me art work I made as a kid where I literally wrote my name backwards when I signed the back of it. I was doing things like that on a regular basis and nobody thought maybe there was something wrong with me? But I digress.

I don't remember much of my childhood because my depression after my mom died has kind of blocked much of my memories from me. So I couldn't sit here and say with any certainty that some of the issues I'm dealing with these days were there back then, but I'm still struggling with wrapping my head around the idea that I have ADHD. I don't know why either because my journey the past 2 years has been to fix my mental health and I have strongly felt my issues went well beyond anxiety and self esteem issues. So It has been me pushing for the additional tests to figure out whats going on in my mush brain.

To me ADHD has always been that cliche kid bouncing off the walls unable to sit still, screaming and yelling like a crazy person. I'm kinda the exact opposite of that. If anything I'm too sedentary. Hyperfocus is my struggle because I can get so focused on something I lose track of everything else. Sure I bounce my legs constantly when I try to work, but I just always chalked that up to a nervous tick. Just something I have to do. Back when I was talking to my therapist about what I should get tested for she asked me if my leg bouncing was something I did to exert energy. It isn't. It's just this compulsion I have to do and it was never something that was an issue until I started my new job where when I work in office I have to share a cubicle. How embarrassing is it that someone asks if there's an earthquake and you just have to answer no it's not, it's just you bouncing your leg? okay more funny than embarrassing, I still laugh at that, but it does kinda sum things up. My leg bouncing was just something I did and never hurt me so what did I care about it?

Then I go in for the ADHD test and it's basically just me sitting at a laptop hitting the space bar every time I see a letter that wasn't X. I still can't rationally tell you how the hell that diagnosed anything. Yet it diagnosed me with Inattentive ADHD. Queue me and my anxiety promptly reading up and watching youtube videos on the matter. And so much of it does strike true with me and apparently some of my autistic like traits can also be explained by Inattentive ADHD. But it's still just so weird to me. My brain is just having a hard time wrapping itself around the idea.

It took some pains and drama that I won't go into, but I finally got my first dose of medication. I started it and...well...it did not go well. I only made it 3 days on Adderall before I had to message my care team and try to change things. It was like my head was weighed down with rocks, I was extremely exhausted yet I couldn't sleep the first night, and I just felt like my focus was even worse. I have the same feeling when I take Claritin and other allergy meds but I told myself it was just  side effect so I wanted to wait it out. But when I returned to work after the first weekend on it (I had started it Friday morning) trying to work through it was the worst possible feeling.

Thankfully it was a slow catch up week after having end to end deadlines to meet so if there was a week to feel like total crap, that was the week. Still I knew by lunch time I couldn't wait out the side effects of adderrall. I tried to google what I was feeling but it was actually really hard to describe. The closest I could find to someone else having similar issues was calling it Zombie brain. It still doesn't quite fit how awful I was feeling, but it was close. So I messaged my care team and the nurse and I agreed that I'd try to cut the pill in half and see how that went. I did that for a day and it was a slight improvement but not by much.

When the nurse called back the next day to get more information to share with my psychiatrist she actually suggested they might want to try to increase the dose. Took all of my strength not to give a f*ck no. I mean I was on a nothing dose of 5 milligrams and it was kicking my butt. There was no way in hell I was going to increase it. I was still willing to try and wait off the side effects but I really needed to be functional for work. I'm thankful I can work from home and only actually spend 2 days in the office currently but it was dangerous for me to be behind the wheel of a car like that never mind having to think and put together graphics and marketing proposals for clients.

Thankfully the psychiatrist agreed that Adderall probably wasn't right for me so she changed my prescription to Concerta. I took that for the first time today (hence me testing my focus while trying to write whatever the hell this is... journal entry? Blog? Whining? Meh) and it took a little longer to hit me but I still feel weird. Right now it feels like a functional weird (I'll know once I sit down and try to re-read this and see if I'm making any kind of sense) so it's not like the Adderall and thus I think I can live with this and hope it evens out once it's in my system. But I feel kinda...floaty? I don't know how to describe it. I seem to say that a lot when weird things happen to my body. A gift I suppose.

The side effects did say drowsiness is a side effect so maybe this is just my version of drowsiness. So far I have noticed I'm not as up-down as I usually am. Granted it's laundry day so what up-down I have done has had purpose, but I've actually been able to sit down and watch TV for a bit and not suddenly remember something randomly I need to do that I totally didn't need to do. And I've been able to sit here typing this monstrosity without also thinking "wait, no, I need to randomly go to my bathroom for no reason what-so-ever instead and if I don't go into that bathroom for this random, not needed thing, I'm going to obsess about it completely"... let me tell you those moments are so fun. Especially when my brain decided I needed to get up to put chapstick on my lips when I had just put chapstick on moments earlier.

But medication and side effects aside ADHD is still weird because I don't know what I'm supposed to do to help me with it. My anxiety I've learned my coping skills so I know when I start to have my panic attacks I know to focus on my breathing and thought stopping. But with ADHD? Do I just force myself to sit still when every urge in my body is telling me to get up and go get that random thing I don't actually need? When I start to bounce my legs do I push my hand on them to keep them from bouncing?

Rationally I know these are things I'm going to talk about with my therapist so I'm trying to remind myself of that but again, anxiety brain, it always insists that I need to work this thing out right now. God forbid I wait and get used to it and celebrate my small victories in the mean time. It's just all so new to me and growing up in a world where this wasn't considered a thing probably keeps me so behind the times where now neurodivergent is a thing with an actual name for it and it's not weird or abnormal. Where as when a kid and I know I did stuff that was weird I was ridiculed for it, now people are more like "oh yeah, I have that. Here's how I cope with it" and that feeling is so nice. It really is.

I really don't know if I'm making any sense. I'm probably going to re-read this tomorrow and wonder where the hell this word-vomit came from. But yet here it is in all it's glory.

So if you have ADHD, how did you cope with it when you first got the label?

And yay I sat here and typed this whole thing without getting distracted even once! Now if only I could do that with a story and get back into writing. How I miss how much fun writing was for me. When did that stop and how do I get it back? Oh right it stopped because I let my "I suck" moments get the better of me.... Ok bunny, you can stop now and go be productive because this randomness is getting a bit too random now.

Woo!