Category: journal

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adhd — i live in a world where shoes magically move

after i told the doc how the alarm i’d set to take the second dose of ritalin tended to help me make sure to eat lunch and refill my water bottle but didn’t always translate ALL THE WAY to actually taking the pill even though it said to, he switched me to the generic for Concerta. it’s basically time-released ritalin.

at first, it was giving me a bit of a rush late in the afternoon, cheeks flushed and a bit tingly and a bit euphoric. so i guess that’s when its dosage maxes out. now, i’m not getting much effect that i can feel.

it’s been a complicated time to try to evaluate things. primary side effects i was told to watch for are blood pressure and anxiety increases. but i EXPECT my anxiety to be high right now. ex-to-be moved out two days after i switched the medication. i suddenly have a house that GLARINGLY needs rearranging. it’s start of the new fiscal year at work, so we have lots of just the kinds of tasks that cause me issues — boring, glorified data entry, where waiting on a webpage to load tends to lead to pinging off-task.

and… i still can’t tell if the drugs are making much of a difference or not.

to the extent there’s an effect, it’s more like being able to -see- my tracks than being able to intervene and keep myself on task yet. the Family Circus comics where Billy makes a giant circuit of the neighborhood between the school bus stop and home — i feel like i live in that now. i’m still not aware as i do it, but i can answer the “what happened to the time?” question after the fact more often now. the laundry basket abandoned with wet clothes isn’t a mystery. “oh, i remember: i was taking the clothes out and started musing about whether the door screening the washer/dryer serves any purpose, and before i knew it i was off looking to see if i still owned a screwdriver.” i don’t know yet if the -noticing- is sufficient to start retraining my brain, or if a higher dose will transform it into being able to Just Say No to the intruding urge to multitask inappropriately. but it’s frustrating.

somehow this heightened awareness of how i meander from point A to point B led to a fit of empathy for all the people who have to deal with me on a regular basis. for my parents, who i assume at some point were faced with this seeming mix of high ability in a lot of areas and total incompetence in some that are kind of key to maintaining everyday life. they gave me a lot of tools, and figuring out which ones actually serve purposes and which ones are just camouflage is a new task i’ve given myself. (example: notes! i always take notes, that’s what “good” students do! turns out, when i think about it, i rarely to never look at or study notes later, but note-taking keeps me awake when my brain is at risk of passing out from boredom. understanding MY real purpose for them is freeing — now there’s really not much need to ponder whether they’re legible or not or if they give a good record of what’s going on unless i’m actually expected to write up details of a meeting for others’ consumption.)

and realization: i’ve traditionally lived in a world where stuff… just moves. unmedicated, i DON’T generally have the ability to retrace and figure out how my shoes went from a designated spot that they belong to someplace else. is it any wonder that i’m a little extra-aware of the amount of cognitive smoothing i do? that i probably put up with more dissonance than most people? I LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SHOES MAGICALLY MOVE, and where i assume that i did it but don’t have the time to worry too much about when or why. (i fixate on shoes now, since the recounting of how painful it is to watch me take off shoes and tell a story by ex-to-be was a major spur to SEE this lens pre-medication and finally seek treatment.)

so tldr: i’m a bit frustrated with the state of my brain right now, i think things might actually be harder than they were when i could just live in a world where time mysteriously disappeared sometimes and objects moved seemingly of their own accord, but it’s opening all kinds of new insights. and even if this is the best we get, it’s certainly worth the journey.

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ADHD musings

i had an appointment with the psychiatrist this morning, so i’ve been trying to self-evaluate a bit. i haven’t caught as many “executive function” errors on the Ritalin, but compared to the Strattera, i feel like there are more zone-out days where i get to late in the day and have no idea what i did. strong sugar cravings in the evening on it and trouble remembering to take the afternoon dose got me switched to the time-release version, the generic of concerta.

in more dots that connected this week… when i went to see In the Heights with a group, several people commented that they’d had a little trouble sitting through it. one friend actually brought knitting, which very minorly annoyed me — i LOVE movies at the cinema, and i especially loved seeing movies in France where the respect for the art is such that i vividly remember hearing the gentle pop of opening a can of soda because no one was talking and their snacks tend to be quieter. that ability to sit doesn’t seem compatible with the ADHD stereotype, right? but i started looking around on the internet… and saw lots of reports of “yeah, movies are fine AS LONG AS I’M INTERESTED.” and it clicked — when i’m at the cinema, something’s compelled me to pay. what happens when i’m NOT interested? i used to inform the spouse when i was feeling a bit tired that it was a good time for an action film so i could “sleep a movie.”

this — understanding hit that my brain’s reaction to boredom ISN’T to get up and rove like the hyperactive variant. i’ve slept through A LOT of class in my lifetime, and even struggle in meetings sometimes. in undergrad, it was so easy to blame bad sleep hygiene… and it WAS a lot worse. but i wasn’t up late at night socializing, i was doing my homework! but… losing so much time during the days doing who knows what. but now that i think about it, even when i was in junior high and high school, i uncontrollably fell asleep in classes.

which led here:

“We all have seen “theta wave intrusion,” in the student in the back of the classroom who suddenly crashes to the floor, having “fallen asleep.” This was probably someone with ADHD who was losing consciousness due to boredom rather than falling asleep. This syndrome is life-threatening if it occurs while driving, and it is often induced by long-distance driving on straight, monotonous roads. Often this condition is misdiagnosed as “EEG negative narcolepsy.” The extent of incidence of intrusive “sleep” is not known, because it occurs only under certain conditions that are hard to reproduce in a laboratory.”

https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-sleep-disturbances-symptoms/

as an adult, i’ve generally avoided the embarrassment of falling over by hyper-engaging… i was the administrative assistant sitting in the meeting to take notes, and i’d start asking questions and interacting when it wasn’t terribly appropriate. this approach was PERFECT for phD classes, but answering every rhetorical question and acting like class was supposed to be a conversation really stuck out when i had to take one class that was a mix of undergrads and economics master’s students. since COVID, with virtual meetings, i’ve gotten in the habit of doing my “boring” work during meetings and telling myself i’m more productive that way.

how much time have i wasted, half-believing that i honestly COULDN’T function once i lost long-scale interest in physics and half-believing that if i’d just tried harder it would’ve been fine? or with the dissertation? i don’t expect medications to fix it all, and if i’m honest i don’t regret too hard that i didn’t ever tie up loose ends and get the degrees even after the feeling of vocation leaked away, but knowing that there’s something in my brain chemistry that has major explanatory power and whose patterns can be better understood feels big. like maybe it’s not so necessary to carefully limit ambitions and convince myself that i never wanted things anyway when they start to seem out of reach.

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PUFF

i rarely walk by a bird without stopping to talk… or stalk. i was not previously aware, though, that if you startle this fine gentleman here (a mockingbird, i do believe), he will FLOOF UP. like so.

i laughed, which i suppose is not the comforting, accepting response i want when friends put me on ridiculous-looking defensive behavior…

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hello world!

mid-divorce, i realized that the domain name that i registered for playing around is connected to him. as much as i’m not sure i ever needed one in the first place, this is a very inexpensive bit of closure to arrange.

narrative. peripatetic. therapy. errata. air.

who knows what drives the need to publicly disclose, but here it is again. as i tried to think of an encapsulating theme for things i wanted to ramble about, i was getting a lot of æɹ sounds.  punch errative into google… no such word, but erration is an obsolete term for wandering or roving.  perfect.

i very much miss the days of blogs and livejournals. i don’t think i’ll go out of my way to disguise myself here, but i’d like to keep it anonymous enough to require a little work if you’re matching it up to the meat-space me. maybe i’ll even make a list of code-names… that’d be fun, right? i’m mid-divorce, recently diagnosed with ADHD. i made it through all but the dissertation of a phD in public policy, now work for local government. current frequent interests include a camera (i’m not sure i’d call it “photography” just yet, that implies more knowledge and discipline), books, medications and meditations, dancing, films where nothing much happens, reckoning with the COVID-suppressed desire to travel again, my old house and what to do with it, music… “steady interest” isn’t really me, either, though; i dabble.

anyway. hello, world.