Stories of an ADD Adult

If you work with someone like me who has adult ADD, there can be some challenges but for the most part it’s a workable situation. In some cases it can even be a better-than-normal situation, surprisingly.

I think that if the coworker is taking medication for his or her ADD, you won’t have any real problems with their distractability. The meds make such a huge difference, transforming the most distracted person into someone who is generally focused on their work.

You might have problems with the coworker’s impulsiveness, irritability, anger, and frustration. Those are common parts of the disorder. As someone who has struggled with these traits, I can say that they will come up from time to time. The meds also help with these though, in particular the irritability.

If your work has a creative or decision-making aspect to it, working with someone who has ADD can make things interesting for the better. People with ADD tend to come up with unusual, often random-sounding ideas. Your strange ideas are also more likely to be supported and believed in. That is because people with ADD tend to be less inhibited in their thinking.

If your work is administrative or requires a lot of planning and organization, it can be difficult to have a co-worker with ADD. The best way to make things go smoothly if you’re sharing planning & organizational duties with an ADD person is to try and handle more of the detail-oriented parts while letting him or her handle more of the person-to-person interaction or the thinking & deciding parts.

I’m not saying that this is exactly what you have to do, but it’s more of my list of suggestions if you’re already having a hard time working with your adult ADD co-worker and want things to go a little more smoothly. But if things are working out and you’re doing exactly the opposite of what I suggest, there’s no reason to change them.

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.

I can’t believe I’ve been able to keep up this blog for so long. I start so many projects but have a hard time keeping up my interest in each one for more than part of a day.

My house is a mess because there are materials from unfinished projects all over the place. I rarely wrap up my work and clean up when I’m done working on a project.

Instead, what determines whether or not I am done with a project is distraction. It may be in the form of another project that I’m in the middle of, starting a new project or task, or even just wandering off. When I get distracted, that’s the end of whatever work I had been doing previously.

I don’t like being distracted from projects, and I try not to get distracted. I try to see how much I’ve accomplished every five minutes in order to keep me on task.

Inevitably I end up getting distracted and beginning something else. It happens every 10-15 minutes when I let myself work on projects without paying attention to the clock, and every half an hour when I’m conscious of time.

I was watching one of the Strattera videos where they mentioned this exact problem with focusing on projects. That’s what inspired this post, really.

Yesterday I had to drive to an appointment. My mind was feeling cloudy, and I knew I would have trouble watching the road, so I took one of my Ritalin tablets. I’ve been trying to avoid taking Ritalin, but in this case I knew the risk of having an accident was too strong.

I swallowed the little tablet before leaving home. Then I drove off. I noticed that while my concentration was improved in a much smoother way than it had been the previous day, when I had drank a cup of coffee containing a high dose of caffeine.

Since I haven’t been taking much of my Ritalin lately, I figured that only one tablet would be enough. And I was right today. It boosted my concentration just enough to help without overpowering my own abilities. It was sort of like having training wheels.

I felt pretty confident while driving and did not come anywhere near having an accident. Which is the opposite of what happens when I don’t take Ritalin or anything else before driving! Usually I have a few “close calls” and almost end up hitting someone, only to be saved by my very quick reflexes.

There has got to be some connection between having ADD and being a creative person.

I always notice that I’m much better at brainstorming than other people. I come up with all the random, odd ideas that end up getting used.

I hope I’m not sounding too egotistical here. I am just being honest. It’s the truth.

I think that people with ADD tend to be more creative because they allow so many distractions into their thoughts. Most people would just tune out all distractions and focus in on the main topic, which limits creativity. People with ADD can’t tune out distractions, but it’s not always a bad thing.

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.

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.

Most of my friends got their driver’s licenses the day they turned sixteen, or soon after. Definitely by seventeen, at least.

I, on the other hand, waited until I was 23. I had wanted to get my license sooner, but I was afraid because my concentration was so bad. It seemed like I would never be able to drive because I just didn’t have the focus and attention span for it.

I finally had to get my driver’s license when I was 23, because I was out of college and looking for a job. I needed to be able to drive myself to job interviews. It was terrifying to drive, but at least my medication helped.