Stories of an ADD Adult

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.

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.

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?

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.

One of the most well-known examples of hyperfocusing in an ADD/ADHD child is with video games. Mothers and fathers often tell the doctors of their children, “He can’t concentrate on his homework for more than a couple of minutes, but put him in front of a television with a video game pad in his hands, and watch him concentrate for hours.”

It wasn’t true for me. I couldn’t concentrate on video games. I didn’t have a video game console of my own, but I often had a chance to play Nintendo at my next-door neighbor’s house.

I would play for a few minutes, but then I would lose interest. At that point, it wouldn’t make a difference whether I was winning or losing in the game. I would stop caring about the game entirely. I would be thinking about other things, and everything would seem more interesting than the dull video game.

I suspect that clumsiness is an ADD/ADHD trait, even though it is not officially recognized as one. I have seen so much overlap between the people I know who have ADD or ADHD and the people I know who are clumsy.

I was one of the clumsiest children when I was young. I would spill every glass of juice, milk, water, or other drink, guaranteed. I was bad at sports because my coordination was poor. It would take much more practice for me to become good at something, than for anyone else to attain the same level of skill.

My parents were extremely clumsy too. They still are, but that’s another story.

I think my clumsiness was a mixture of forgetting what I was supposed to be doing and thinking about other things. I had too much going on inside of my head at once.

My elementary school had Study Hall right after school. In Study Hall, everyone was supposed to work on their homework for an hour.

I usually squandered away the time, instead of taking advantage of it. I would really try to do my homework, taking it out every time and getting ready to do it, but keeping my mind focused enough to actually complete any of it was a problem. My mind wanted to think about everything else, from thoughts about earlier in the day to observations about the children in the room.

By the end of the Study Hall period, pretty much everyone else was done or almost done with their homework. I, on the other hand, was still at the beginning, even though I had struggled and it had not been fun.

In elementary school, we were often assigned to write short stories. I would start by thinking about the assigned topic, just like all of the other students.

However, my thoughts about the topic would lead me to other thoughts, and those other thoughts would lead me to thoughts that were even more unrelated.

The time would pass, and other children would begin to hand in their assignments. I would notice and become worried, but soon afterward I would drift off into new daydreams.

I knew my mind behaved differently from everyone else’s minds, because no one else had this problem. But that was all I knew. I had never heard of ADD, ADHD, or probably even the words “attention”, “deficit”, or “disorder”.

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.

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.