I don’t write about this much because I still don’t know how I feel about it, but I got diagnosed with ADHD last year, in my fourth decade here on planet earth. It followed the classic story of “undiagnosed person masks for decades through anxiety and sheer force of will, but eventually it stops working.”
The way in which it stops working is that things just feel… harder. Medication helps, but you soon learn that it doesn’t help enough, and figure out that you have to start learning how to support your brain when it doesn’t want to play ball. Now, finally, I’m exploring what might work for me.
Externalize your thinking.
Create routines.
Break tasks into smaller ones.
Protect sleep and exercise.
It’s perfect, actually, for a person with ADHD, because solving the problem becomes pretty interesting, and interesting things are easier to do than uninteresting things (at least, until they’re not interesting any more). The risk, of course, is that it becomes the distraction itself.
An annoyingly and beautifully effective thing is to just write things down. To write down what you’re thinking, and what you need to do, and to keep breaking it down. Get really specific. Make it really tiny. Write everything down and look at it. You don’t have to keep it. Throw it away after.
I’m wondering, now, if writing down my progress with figuring this out will be a useful thing, too. Maybe not here, but maybe here sometimes. I think I just want to work through it. To know what I’m trying, what what worked and what didn’t. To just sit with it for a minute; for a moment.
Not what I planned on writing today, but I sat down after a day that felt long again and realized that this has been on my mind for weeks, and will be on my mind for weeks more. Months maybe. A lifetime, perhaps, but hopefully not. I think I just needed to write what I hadn’t written, or something.