There are many other pages I have looked at on the web. I think I have looked at all of them and they're starting to blend together. I have also read the seminal book on ADHD Driven to Distraction--which i found not so useful because it seems to me to be mostly about hyperactivity and impulsivity. And I have made a list of other books I want to get on women's ADHD: Understanding Women with ADHD by Kathleen Nadeau and Barbara Quinn, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder by Sari Solden, ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau. But I have also done a lot of thinking. Suddenly finding out that there's a description of you as a child in the DSM -- listing all of the things that you always thought made you a freak--it's unnerving.
And it's validating. And terrifying.
It's unnerving because all this time you've been going along thinking you were a tad dysfuncitonal and it turns out you were the poster child for what's defined in the DSM as a pathology. It's terrifying because ithe literature lays out the typical life trajectory associated with this pathology: quite smart child, tests above average, spacey but bright, forgetful of things like her lunch and her keys, doesn't connect well with other children, does well in school until she's faced with a task on which she has to pay attention, starts to do poorly, her self esteem--already bruised by alienation--starts to plummet, she fights to do better but is criticized for not applying herself, has trouble organizaing her thoughts, this makes college a bitch college, so often she drops out, jumps from job to job, has trouble with relationships, has trouble achieving goals, sees life as series of failures and then dies. OK, they don't say the "then dies" part. But they don't finish the story either. They leave it with job problems and the relationship thing but it's easy to fill in that blank.
But it's also validating. I've read stories which have turning points where the protagonist suddenly sees himself clearly for the first time. Such moments have always seemed, well...if you spend your life with yourself can you possibly be that inobservant that you've never really seen you? Apparently I've never really seen me. Or I never really knew me. Things that never made sense suddenly make sense. The things that I've always struggled with that seeemed like they should have been easy--reading, paying attention to lectures, understanding directions, developing English paper thesis statements, recalling trivia -- turns out my brain style doesn't automatically allow me to do these things. It is not laziness. I am not a loser. I just don't process information in a way that makes these tasks possible.
But then i'm back to terrifying. If these things were the result of laziness, then all I had to do was get my ass motivated and they would be fixed. If they're the result of pathology, does this limit what I"m capable of? My guess is no, that perhaps I have just been swimming upstream, that I've developed coping mechanisms on my own but that I could learn a lot about how to progress faster. This is exciting. But there's another scary part. Bear in mind I haven't yet been diagnosed. What if they tell me that I'm wrong? That I might think I'm the poster child for Primarily Inattentive ADHD but really I'm just a neurotic looking for a scapegoat for my problems? What if they tell me I'm just not applying myself? This would be very upsetting. Now, I know I said not but a few sentences ago that were this the result of laziness, then i could fix it by getting off of my lazy ass. But then we're back to self blame, self hatred, self doubt. It is my fault that I am this way. For a few days, for the first time in my life, I've been able to think differently: it's not my fault. It's not necessarily a pathology, but it appears I have a style--a serires of traits--that make certain parts of life difficult. "It's not my fault" has been one of the most freeing thoughts I've ever thought.
So the next step is diagnosis, to find out if this is me. Tonight my therapist suggested a few people to get in touch with, a psychologist/learning specialist, the NYU clinic, and a psychiatrist wth an ADD focus. She seemed to think the first person would be a good place to start, someone with her finger on the beat of things one can do about adult ADHD. I am scared but I will move forward.
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