I'm a happily married adult ADDer who went undiagnosed until I was 46 years old, some 15 years into my second marriage. That was 15 years ago and the memory of how that positive diagnosis felt is still vivid. Relief? No. Not even close. Joy? Sorry, No. Disappointment? Well. We're getting warm now. I had suspected that ADD might have been behind the struggles with procrastination and time management that had plagued me since my childhood, but I had always entertained the hope that someday I would be able to find a way to not be that way. That hope evaporated the day my diagnosis came in. It was my fault all along. I was a misfire. There would be no ways around it for me to discover. I was looking to that diagnosis to free me but instead it broke my heart. But that was then, this is now. I'm still a miswire, and as powerful as a well-regulated diet of Concerta with an anti-anxiety chaser can be, it still has no effect whatsoever on my inability to feel time moving around me, but the disappointment has finally faded.
Oh yeah (squirrel!!)-- did I mention that I was happily married? Well, I am and when my lights finally came back on, she was still here. We all know how difficult we can make things for people we really care about. I did my best, and in the beginning she had a really hard time understanding how this guy she loved so much could be such an ass, and was not shy about sharing her feelings. But apparently she was so sure that she was right in choosing me over all the other guys who were in orbit around her, instead of bailing she started reading, and one day I came home to her sitting in the middle of a pile of paperbacks and magazines. She looked up at me and said: "I owe you such an apology-- you really are this way, aren't you?". I sat down with her and we started talking and haven't gotten close to stopping yet. But golly, Robert, that's all well and good, but is there a point to be shared here? Well, Yes there is. I kind of skipped over the part where we each had to step off of the bridge railing and let the bungee cord do its job, and that was really the most important part. A relationship with a card-carrying adult ADDer is hard work for both parties, but it will be the best ride you ever took as long as you both figure out how to respect and trust each other as deeply as you respect and trust the bungee cord.
Wow. I feel 40 pounds lighter now. Thanks for listening!
Robert
Thanks for sharing!
Submitted by 1Melody1 on
♡ Great to read your story.
Ditto!!
Submitted by GD on
My story is identical to yours. Thanks to my wife's detective work and the internet, a diagnosis of ADHD was a no brainer (ironic term). She put all the pieces together - the inattentiveness, the unfinished jobs, not following up on things, always defending the ADHD, the list goes on as you well know.
So the easy part is identifying the ADHD, the hard part is mitigating the behaviors. I'm 68 years old, been married for 44 years and, needless to say, I have some pretty well worn paths in my brain that need to be rerouted. So every day takes a conscious awareness of exactly what it is I'm doing and is it helpful or counterproductive.
On the upside, when someone with ADHD becomes hyperfocused on something, it WILL get done! lol So, I work with the tools I have now and try to build on that. When you have ADHD, every day is an adventure.
Thanks
Submitted by oldrobp on
Thanks for replying, GD -- these days of social isolation for the good of humanity have made it extra easy to start feeling like I'm floating out here all by by myself . You're right about how important it is to be consciously aware of the things you're doing and why you're doing them and not something else. Hyperfocusing is a double edge sword -- more than once I've pulled off something really cool while completely forgetting to clue my wife into exactly why I chose that moment to take out the kitchen wall or paint the bathroom bright orange. I can't figure out why someone as patient, beautiful, understanding and loving as my wife gets so irritated when she knows that eventually it'll all make sense, but if conscious awareness and communication will allow us to skip that part of the process, I'm all for it <grin>. Seriously, though, once my wife and I started getting good at communicating and I accepted medication, diet and respect for ritual as my new best friends, the chaos became a lot easier to manage. I have to admit that I was resistant to medications at first, not from lack of trust in the science but from fear of the unknown - what if the cost of civilizing the randomness was a dull brain? It was a waste of worry, fortunately. Once we got the dosages tuned it just got a whole lot easier to keep the puppies in the box during times of too much input The meds did something else I can't quite identify but that caused my 2 daughters to start referring to them as my "Nice pills". a completely unexpected side effect that was worth the price of admission and then some. To your upside observations, 2 thumbs up! The beautiful thing about hyperfocusing is that it looks and acts just like relentlessness and tenacity but isn't nearly as tiring. These are good times for ADDers in the job world too -- we come pre-equipped with all the tools you need to succeed in the digital world, we just need to take a little time to figure out how to manage them. Who'd have thought?
Thanks for sharing
Submitted by seriously_confused on
I read your story, thanks for sharing. I'm curious what sort of diet you switched to and how you learned respect for ritual? TYIA
I didn't choose any
Submitted by oldrobp on
I didn't choose any particular "diet" . We had moved my wife's cancer and stroke-ridden mother in to spend her last bit of time with family and because she was diabetic my wife did some self-learning and began cooking foods and meals that helped lower her blood sugar levels and insulin needs. As it turned out, the food she learned to prepare was really good, flavorful and satisfying and just from enjoying her cooking the extremes I had always experienced started mellowing. Seems my geek diet of Doritos, Pepsi and doughnuts was a little too sugar heavy for my adult metabolism. Or maybe there was some other aspect I haven't thought about. The great part was that I tricked myself into a diet change I had resisted for 25 years by eating home-cooked food that tasted good. Who'd have thought? Respect for ritual started out as a collection of old habits from my Navy days that made it easy to organize my closet and dresser contents so I didn't have to be distracted from waking up and getting to work on time by having to choose every single item I was going to wear every single morning of every single day of the rest of my life. I knew that one good distraction would lead to another, ad it was already hard enough to get moving. So I stopped trying to be fashionable and adopted a "work uniform" -- clean blue jeans, polo shirt, white athletic socks and briefs (lots of socks and briefs so I don't have to search for mates when I should be getting dressed), gave each clothing item a permanent home that I could see and reach easily and started dressing in the dark. ADDers are easy victims of the tyranny of choice. The incredible relief that brought me opened me up to hyperfocus on my entire wake-up to bedtime journey and to ritualize any area, from the front porch pocket-pat (I know I have everything by the jingles) to the "it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood" hanging up of the jacket and Changing of the Shoes in the evening. By making little rituals involving homes for objects and things like that of the background tasks getting through a day requires , instead of feeling enslaved by procedure I found myself enjoying a lot more freedom to let the horses run, as my wife calls it, with a lot less collateral damage to have to clean up afterwards. The secret to avoiding getting trapped by rituals can be found in the philosophies of your local Highway Department. Traffic rules are the strictest rules ever implemented (stop signs can be put anywhere they're needed but it is a hard taboo to even consider painting them green) but they apply at a very low level, low enough that nobody feels trapped or controlled by them and everyone enjoys far greater freedom of action because each driver has absolute faith that every other driver respects the rituals in the same way. You can devote precious attention to proactive hazard avoidance because you aren't busy trying to second-guess the driver in front of you at an intersection -- there are only certain things the rituals enable him to do and you can count on him only doing what the rituals allow. I know that's a major oversimplification of what actually happens in traffic, but I think you get what Im saying -- Anyway, thanks for asking -- I hopew this has been helpful :)