Stories of an ADD Adult

I’ve been off the Ritalin for two months now. I get distracted like crazy and often just can’t get myself to work.

I have been unbelievably creative, though. I have been painting and making things during every free moment. I never realized that I had such a strong creative spark. I wonder if I am more creative now than I was before I had taken any meds.

I keep starting new projects and leaving everything unfinished, but I feel more comfortable with it now.

Haven’t posted in a while now. I tend to start projects all the time and then forget about them soon after.

I’m going to try to get back on schedule! Don’t worry, I won’t give up.

Sometimes it feels like time is warped. My mind starts to wander away from my work, and the next thing I know, half an hour or more has already passed.

The effect is exaggerated when I have the internet at my disposal, ready to distract me at any moment. If I stop to look something up online, before I know it, I’ve spent half a day surfing the web.

I feel like my mind travels to outer space and back.

The web surfing example I mentioned is probably pretty common for people with and without ADD. I’m sure people without ADD would also say that their minds wander sometimes. But I feel like without medication, my mind is foggy and spaced out during 90% of the day.

The more I put off finishing my work, the worse I feel.

I hope it gets better.

Starting right now, I’m giving myself exactly 20 minutes to get as much done as possible. I’ve had enough of my bad ADD habits and really need to challenge myself to complete some work.

When I feel well-rested, I concentrate much better than when I’m tired.

Don’t underestimate the effects that sleep has on concentration. A severe deficit in sleep can make anyone appear to have ADD.

It’s hard for people with ADD to get enough sleep. Often, I have so much to do, and I still get distracted. It can leave me with no choice but to stay up late to finish things.

When staying up late to finish things becomes a habit, though, it can eat into concentration severely. So I try to avoid it.

I had left a needle on top of a piece of fabric, in the middle of my living room. I was thinking that I would pick it up later.

And now it’s gone. It is lost somewhere in the fibers of my carpet. I know I will find it sometime soon by accident, walking around the house barefoot. It will hurt.

That was a dumb decision for me to make. I have realized that having ADD makes you do dumb things sometimes. I was going to pick up the needle, but I got distracted and decided I would do it later.

Distractions. They make it so easy to do regrettable things. I would never have done something like this had I taken my medication. I also might not have slept so well, on the other hand.

Children with ADD/ADHD and adults with ADD are pretty similar. This is probably surprising to most people, including doctors, but it isn’t surprising to those of us who are adults and who have suffered from ADD/ADHD throughout our own lives.

It seems hard to believe that the adult ADD diagnosis is so new. I can’t imagine how doctors and researchers could have believed for years and years that all children with ADHD would grow out of the illness by the time they reached adulthood. To me, that’s completely absurd.

You can’t just suddenly wake up one day and discover that your concentration and attention span are suddenly normal. It takes practice, coaching, and/or medication to get to the point of being normal.

I always hoped that one day I would grow out of my restlessness and lack of focus. Once I knew about childhood ADD, I was sure that my symptoms would be gone by the time I was an adult. I was sad to discover that the myth wasn’t true.

I haven’t gotten any work done all week!

I know it’s because I haven’t been taking my Ritalin. I don’t want to take it anymore! But it seems like I have no choice if I don’t want to get fired.

Why is life so hard?

“ADD moments” are how I refer to those times when I get up to do something and then completely forget about it.

I just had a particularly funny ADD moment. I was buying something online, and I had to get up to find my credit card. My credit card was in my purse just six feet away from where I was sitting.

Instead of going directly to my purse, I got up and walked out of the room and into the kitchen. I wasn’t hungry or anything, so I just walked aimlessly. Then I wandered into the bathroom, where I had nothing to do either. Finally, I walked into my bedroom. I looked in the mirror and thought, “That’s good, I’m not getting too fat,” and then I walked out of the bedroom and back to the living room/computer area again.

In the living room, I noticed that my plants were dying. One of the things about ADD is that you always forget to water your plants. So I went back to the kitchen to get a glass of water for the plants, and a funnel since pouring can be kind of messy.

Forgetting that I was going to water the plants with it, I took a sip from the glass of water. “Ewww, it’s warm,” I thought and immediately realized that the glass of water wasn’t intended for myself to drink. I then noticed the funnel in my hand and knew I had to water the plants. So I went over to water them and succeeded.

I brought the glass back to the kitchen, forgetting the funnel on the windowsill. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be getting my credit card from my purse!

I hurried over to my purse and found my wallet, and I returned to my computer. There, I took out my credit card and finally completed my online purchase. I was so relieved that it didn’t time out. It’s such a pain to have to start over when you’re buying something online, forget halfway through because of ADD, and then return to find the purchase timed out.

As soon as I finished the purchase, I went to blog about my ADD moment, knowing that it was genuinely good writing material. And as I was writing, I looked over and saw the funnel on the windowsill. “Should I go and put it back in the kitchen?” I thought. “No, I had better finish my blog entry first,” I said to myself, trying to avoid another one of those funny but aggravating ADD moments.

I have an unfortunate history of getting bad performance reviews when I have worked for companies in the past.

It makes me especially resentful because I try harder than anyone else. I stay long hours to get the work done, and I feel like I care more about my work than other people. I think I also have a gift of enhanced creativity, which my coworkers often notice, but never my boss.

Companies measure performance in terms of results, and I guess that I just don’t produce results that are as good as the results of other people. I can’t figure out why.

Is it because of my ADD? Partly, but I don’t want to blame it all on ADD. Some of it must come from myself.

I know that my mind tends to wander during meetings. I can’t always pay attention, even though I try, and sometimes I get put on the spot. When I’m put on the spot during one of my daydreaming moments, I get caught not paying attention.

I know that I get distracted by little details. I try to see the big picture, but it’s hard when all the little details are so interesting. Maybe I see things that others don’t see. Maybe I just have more hope in certain little things that my manager can’t understand.

I know that I’m disorganized. My email inbox is a mess. Sometimes I lose emails and forget to reply. Sometimes I miss appointments, which is much worse.

I know that I’m hopelessly late to meetings. I plan to be there 10 minutes early, but I always end up walking in late and disrupting.

Finally, I know that I have trouble socially. Often I have trouble keeping up a conversation because I get distracted and my mind wanders. I lose interest in what people are saying, not because I am selfish, but because my attention span is so short.

Kelly mentioned in a previous comment that movies have been hard to concentrate on. I can completely relate to that because I have had a hard time following movies ever since I was young.

A few factors make movies hard to follow for the person with ADD or ADHD:

Movies involve lots of plot twists, to make things interesting (though it backfires if you have ADD and can’t follow what’s going on). I would always space out at one moment or another, only to discover that I had missed a crucial part of the plot.

It’s also hard to follow who’s who throughout the movie, especially when there are many characters. I would always mix up characters who looked similar, because I never really paid enough attention to identify distinctive details about each character.

Finally, movies are just too long for someone with ADD. I used to always get restless after the first half hour or so. Now I’m a little better at watching movies and can last longer, but not too much longer. It’s funny that watching movies is like work for me when it’s simple pleasure for the average person.

The hardest part of going to job interviews was trying to answer the thinking questions. Thinking questions are basically the questions that HR people like to ask in order to see how your thought process works.

I froze up during many of those thinking questions and just couldn’t answer them. If the same exact questions had been written on paper, and if I had been alone, I’m sure I would have been able to answer them easily. If the same exact questions had been asked informally and casually by a friend, I’m sure it would have been no problem to answer them.

The problem was that so many thoughts were going through my head that I couldn’t focus on what they were asking me. It looked like I was either dumb or just didn’t know how to think.

Suffice it to say that I didn’t get accepted to almost all of the jobs that I interviewed for.

I saw an advertisement on TV just now for Focus Factor. Apparently it’s a supplement you can buy at any drugstore or online without a prescription, and it’s supposed to help you focus.

Sounds like a stimulant. Well, let me know if you have used it, and whether it has helped you. I am curious to hear about your experiences!

I am probably the most understanding person in the world when it comes to ADD and ADHD, so don’t worry. You can email me privately at cassandra@addadult.org if that’s easier for you.

High school is probably one of the roughest periods of life for a person with ADD or ADHD. It is when the amount of homework assigned each day rises sharply, to the point that it becomes difficult for most people and unmanageable for the ADD/ADHD sufferer.

I was so overwhelmed by homework that I became significantly sleep-deprived. Not out of stress, but out of desperation to finish each assignment. If I didn’t cut into my sleep, I would never finish my assignments and therefore never pass my classes. I was no perfectionist; I merely tried to earn passing grades in each class, because it was the best that I could do.

The sleep deprivation only made the ADD worse. The less I slept, the harder it became to concentrate. Sleep deprivation was really the last thing I needed for my ADD, and it made studying feel like torture.

I loved reading when I was young. I would go to the library and check out tall stacks of children’s books. I won prizes in all the children’s reading challenges, because I loved reading so much.

Then what happened?

As the books became longer, I lost interest. My favorite books were the ones that could be finished in a single sitting or two. Anything beyond that and I wouldn’t be able to finish the book.

Around sixth grade, I completely lost interest in reading for pleasure. That was the time when people started reading thick young adult books. I could not finish books more than a centimeter thick. I sometimes had to read long books for school, but it was grueling and I always grew tired of the plots before finishing those books.