![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've been feeling a little blue the last few days, or morose, or mopey, or down in the dumps. I think this is partly hormonal but partly because I'm feeling especially frustrated with my executive dysfunction again, after a talk with my sister about how we might persuade my mom to see an adult ADHD specialist. My mom's is much worse and much more clear-cut than mine, though. I don't know if a doctor would think she warranted medication or not, especially as she is retired and all, but there's never been a time when it wasn't a problem in her day-to-day life and for the people around her. So I'm pretty confident that she at least won't have any difficulty being diagnosed.
I, on the other hand, probably would, but I've been chafing more and more at my inability to create functional strategies to work around my own executive dysfunction in recent years, but my symptoms were always highly atypical.
Not only was I never hyperactive, I never garnered any negative educator feedback for inattentiveness either. I was so bored that from about age 8 I read from 1-2 novels per day more or less every day of my school career until ~12 (and that just marked a division where some classes sometimes required my full attention so that I could rarely actually start a novel at school and finish it before school was over; sometimes they took days in middle and high school, because the dominant paradigm in advanced courses at that time and place was to give as much busywork as possible). But I also did all my schoolwork: I could usually put the book aside briefly to do each assignment (often before the teacher even got her momentum explaining it), and then pick the book back up again. It also wasn't all that difficult to get my attention when I was reading - I didn't have that thing my mom does where it's like she can't hear you. Personally, I would put this down to anxious hypervigilance, because I hated being at school and didn't relate to the other people there, but I clung to the books even when my surroundings were being threatening enough to make it difficult to concentrate on reading; the books were a shield and connection to my identity and the world outside the school, creating an extremely inconvenient counterphobic coping mechanism that still makes my life difficult now, since I feel a near-unavoidable compulsion to read fiction when I'm too anxious.
You can see that I was extremely inattentive, since I was usually paying more attention to my reading than to my surroundings, but I didn't have any trouble in school - on the contrary, I was a compulsive overachiever. And I never had enough trouble managing time and tasks that I completely failed at it until I moved away from home, because my parents acted as sort of gentle executive function coaches. (I have to have like four separate alarms to space out the tasks I have to do to get ready to leave the house in the morning as an adult, but as a kid - and I mean, also through most of high school - my dad did all of that. He would provide gentle repeated reminders for each one, while often making lunch for my little sister and sometimes bodily dragging her out of bed.) Even with that help though, I had a couple of spectacular nervous breakdowns before high school was over, which I uniformly got through by eventually dropping the rope on some particular asignment or other (at my mom's repeated encouragement). (That's how I got a B in one high school class, because I got a C on the exam: I was crying hysterically and my Mom told me I didn't need to be any better at Algebra 2 than I already was and I should absolutely not study it at all and I listened.) Anyway, I've investigated books and articles and all kinds of resources about adult adhd on and off for years and I'm still not sure if I have it (or just some other sort of extremely life-ruining executive dysfunction).
I decided before I moved here, to Pargas, in summer 2019, that when we settled in and I eventually got a new GP I would bring up the idea of getting ADHD testing. But then the pandemic happened, and for quite a long time the idea of going to teh GP for non-urgent checkups of any kind seemed ludicrous. In fact, our local health services aren't overburdened right now, and depressingly, going to the health center is one of the few indoor activities you can do and be assured everyone around you will be masked. So perhaps I should have a go at that, even though the pandemic is definitely not over. One terrifying task at a time, though. Right now the most urgent terrifying task is dealing with the employment bureau again (I still think it would be less terrifying to just try to get a job without them, but I do trust that my career advisor is wiser than me on the subject). Of course, executive dysfunction is making this terrifying task more difficult too.
I, on the other hand, probably would, but I've been chafing more and more at my inability to create functional strategies to work around my own executive dysfunction in recent years, but my symptoms were always highly atypical.
Not only was I never hyperactive, I never garnered any negative educator feedback for inattentiveness either. I was so bored that from about age 8 I read from 1-2 novels per day more or less every day of my school career until ~12 (and that just marked a division where some classes sometimes required my full attention so that I could rarely actually start a novel at school and finish it before school was over; sometimes they took days in middle and high school, because the dominant paradigm in advanced courses at that time and place was to give as much busywork as possible). But I also did all my schoolwork: I could usually put the book aside briefly to do each assignment (often before the teacher even got her momentum explaining it), and then pick the book back up again. It also wasn't all that difficult to get my attention when I was reading - I didn't have that thing my mom does where it's like she can't hear you. Personally, I would put this down to anxious hypervigilance, because I hated being at school and didn't relate to the other people there, but I clung to the books even when my surroundings were being threatening enough to make it difficult to concentrate on reading; the books were a shield and connection to my identity and the world outside the school, creating an extremely inconvenient counterphobic coping mechanism that still makes my life difficult now, since I feel a near-unavoidable compulsion to read fiction when I'm too anxious.
You can see that I was extremely inattentive, since I was usually paying more attention to my reading than to my surroundings, but I didn't have any trouble in school - on the contrary, I was a compulsive overachiever. And I never had enough trouble managing time and tasks that I completely failed at it until I moved away from home, because my parents acted as sort of gentle executive function coaches. (I have to have like four separate alarms to space out the tasks I have to do to get ready to leave the house in the morning as an adult, but as a kid - and I mean, also through most of high school - my dad did all of that. He would provide gentle repeated reminders for each one, while often making lunch for my little sister and sometimes bodily dragging her out of bed.) Even with that help though, I had a couple of spectacular nervous breakdowns before high school was over, which I uniformly got through by eventually dropping the rope on some particular asignment or other (at my mom's repeated encouragement). (That's how I got a B in one high school class, because I got a C on the exam: I was crying hysterically and my Mom told me I didn't need to be any better at Algebra 2 than I already was and I should absolutely not study it at all and I listened.) Anyway, I've investigated books and articles and all kinds of resources about adult adhd on and off for years and I'm still not sure if I have it (or just some other sort of extremely life-ruining executive dysfunction).
I decided before I moved here, to Pargas, in summer 2019, that when we settled in and I eventually got a new GP I would bring up the idea of getting ADHD testing. But then the pandemic happened, and for quite a long time the idea of going to teh GP for non-urgent checkups of any kind seemed ludicrous. In fact, our local health services aren't overburdened right now, and depressingly, going to the health center is one of the few indoor activities you can do and be assured everyone around you will be masked. So perhaps I should have a go at that, even though the pandemic is definitely not over. One terrifying task at a time, though. Right now the most urgent terrifying task is dealing with the employment bureau again (I still think it would be less terrifying to just try to get a job without them, but I do trust that my career advisor is wiser than me on the subject). Of course, executive dysfunction is making this terrifying task more difficult too.
