Stories of an ADD Adult

From the time I was born, I was a daydreamer. In preschool and kindergarten, I remember spending much of the time daydreaming. The teacher would be talking, and I would have no recollection of what she (I had no male teachers yet) was saying.

My social skills were rather poor. I was naturally a shy little girl. Compounded with my shyness was the fact that I preferred playing with toys over playing with other children.

I remember getting in trouble often for breaking the rules. It wasn’t that I was purposely disobedient; it was more that I didn’t understand the rules or even know that they existed.

One day my kindergarten teacher had a talk with my parents. I didn’t realize what was going on until she told them that I was a good student but refused to follow directions. I was confused and wondered how they could possibly be talking about me, since I had no memory of the accusation. I think that I just daydreamed so much that I didn’t notice when I was being given directions.

I will admit that I’ve felt kind of lost so far blogging about my ADD. I have so much to talk about, and I just haven’t figured out where to begin. In the first few posts, I kept rambling and ended up having to edit those posts significantly.

I guess my approach reflects the fact that I have ADD pretty well. Being all over the place at once, having a messy, unclear direction, etc. Consider yourself lucky if you didn’t see the original unedited posts.

Now that I’ve cleared my throat, I’ll turn on my headlights to help guide me.

Well, what I know at this point is that I want to talk about my experiences. There are a lot of lists of ADD or ADHD symptoms out there, but those lists can feel very two-dimensional. I hope that I can give you a real picture of what ADD has been like for me, and I hope that my writing comes out more naturally.

The average person loses his or her personal belongings sometimes, but not as frequently as the person with ADD or ADHD.

In many cases, the person with ADD or ADHD loses items regularly throughout the day. Sometimes, despite great effort to maintain a system of organization at home or work, items get misplaced as if he or she had never made any effort to be organized.

Losing things can be a nightmare, especially when the things you lose are books from the library. This happens to me frequently, always by accident.

I try to keep my library books on a special shelf in my living room, but somehow I always end up bringing books to other places and forgetting about them.

My mind is constantly all over the place. Usually, I hide it enough so that people don’t notice. I put in extra effort to make up for it.

When people do notice my problem, they think that I am lazy, just “slacking off”. They think that I do not try hard enough, when in reality I am constantly trying harder than anyone else.

Do you have ADD or ADHD? Well, don’t worry if you do, or if you think you might, because I am an adult with ADD and have been able to improve my situation greatly and to use my ADD traits to my advantage.

I intend to use this website for the following:

• telling the world about my experiences
• posting basic information about ADD
• sharing my random thoughts and feelings about ADD

and possibly other things, but I don’t know for sure yet.