Month: February 2020

I want to talk about what it is like to be hungry and eat, with and without Adderall.

Without AdderalL: I’ve wondered my whole life why I can’t eat like a normal person. I’m always hungry, it seems there’s never enough food, and I’ll eat until I’m overstuffed and still feel like I want more. Sugary things are beyond compelling. I jokingly refer to those frosted white cupcakes from the grocery store as crack, but it’s not really a joke.

If I ever wanted to lose weight, i would have to go into super strict diet mode. I could not have even ONE sweet. It was cold turkey or nothing. Food would have to be strictly limited and I could NOT make a SINGLE exception, or else i would just go on a total food bender, and six months later I would have gained all the weight back.

And so, I read a lot about it. I tried low carbing it for a while, and that worked the same way that going cold turkey on sugar and portion sizes worked – keeping myself from getting into a food bender.

The problem is that you have to eat! You can’t go completely cold turkey on food the way you can with cigarettes or caffeine.

Except there have been a few times in my life where I’ve been able to eat normal amounts of food, and that I haven’t been thinking about food except when I’m eating it, or I’m actually hungry. Those times have been times of transition and good stress.

Now I wonder if those times were times when life circumstances kicked my dopamine levels up. Life circumstances like breaking up with a bad boyfriend and starting a new job, or starting law school, or moving to a new city. I’ve always loved being in super crisis change mode because I just feel so… i don’t know…. normal and competent?

I wonder if the thing that manifests as a food addiction is just me subconsciously trying to boost my dopamine.

I know a lot of modern research indicates that people have weight set points that is very difficult to change, either up OR down. But it is also true of ME that when I am in good-stress-change mode I lose weight, and when I am in normal mode I tend to gain weight, and that gained weight is directly related to eating two candy bars and a large piece of cake every night for 6 months in a row.

When I’m in “normal” mode I feel like I HAVE to have something sweet. And I feel bereft if I don’t get it. And after I’ve eaten it I feel like I want more.

Adderall makes it so my appetite feels like being in good-stress-change mode, even without an actual good-stress change happening. The first few days on Adderall I really didn’t have much appetite at all. But after a few days I started feeling hungry again. Like, actual hunger. Not i-must-feed-my-addiction craving. And then when I eat, it’s good but I don’t feel like I have to take a huge portion, and I don’t feel like I have to eat everything in front of me if I stop being hungry.

It is really weird for me to leave food. Or leave coffee. Or leave an alcoholic beverage. But on Adderall it feels totally reasonable to just eat what I feel like and no more.

Part of me is thinking, HOW CAN IT BE that I would EVER not want more?

Like most of this stuff, I’ve always felt like my disordered eating is a moral failing. I don’t have enough self discipline, I don’t have enough moral power, my eating habits are immature (e.g., eating Marshmallow Peeps until I’m sick!), I should just choose not to eat that second cookie, or that third doughnut, or that fourth piece of pizza, and then not do it.

Now it seems like it was just fucked up brain chemistry this whole time? WTF is up with that?

Today I ordered a Starbucks breakfast sandwich for lunch, and I ate it, and it was good, but when I was done I was satisfied, and I didn’t wish for more food. And I didn’t even THINK about how I normally would be wishing for more food.

Right now I’m hungry, and The Mighty Sam is fixing hushpuppies and spicy sausage for dinner, and I’m totally looking forward to it. He just gave me a sample hushpuppy and it was delicious! But I’m thinking I’ll probably want just one sausage and a few hushpuppies and then I’ll be good.

Another thing is that I’m not feeling like i have to keep snacking on stuff right up until I go to bed. That’s really awesome because it makes it much easier to Sonicare and Water Pik my teeth before bed.

I wonder how many people with ADHD have terrible teeth. That will be another post.

This Twitter thread kind of blew me away when I first saw it last September.

“What’s your ‘OMG I didn’t know that was ADHD!'”

I retweeted it commenting that I thought about 75% of the replies applied to me.

Some of those things are:

• Leaving all the cupboard doors open. (also dresser drawers. doors, etc. And leaving lights on.)
• Bumping into things. not realizing it. Having weird bruises and scratches that you have no idea how you got.
• Falling down all the time. (This was actually one of the things that motivated me to get diagnosed. It’s no big deal to fall when you’re 25, but now? probably best avoided. And 20 years from now? A fall could kill me!)
• Leaving a trail of crap everywhere.
• Endless internal dialog (i thought this happened to everyone?)
• Getting overwhelmed because my hair is in my face.
• Going into panic/shutdown mode in loud environments or in large groups of people.
• Thinking that you should be able to do better, and thinking you’re a human dumpster fire failure of a human being because you can’t.
• Overactive bladder (wait, is this why when I’m hyperfocusing I can hold it for hours but when I’m bored or doing other things I have to pee, like, every hour???? YES).
• The way coffee never makes me hyper – I can drink a cup of caffeinated coffee right before bed and then go straight to sleep.
• Leaving half-full beverage cups everywhere.
• Having great ideas for new projects, starting a few of them, finishing none.
• Procrastinating.
• Dreading phone calls.
• I can make eye contact or I can hear what you’re saying. Choose one.
• Reading a page of text so fast that you have to stop yourself to go back and read a section that you accidentally skimmed over.
• Walking past something on the floor 100 times instead of just picking it up.
• Feeling super sleepy even after a good night’s sleep, and not being able to get up in the morning.
• Hating people who are making noise.
• Being easily startled.
• Not being able to stand talking over the TV or vacuum or any other noise. (I cannot STAND when the TV is on in one room and there’s music playing in another room and I can hear both. it makes me want to scream.)
• Making lists, and making lists of lists, and sub-lists.
• Thinking every car trip to every location takes 15 minutes.
• Everyone is SO SLOW. (I notice this especially when walking… i walk fast, and slow walkers make me FURIOUS.)
• Stacks of clutter.
• Losing things all the time.
• Not being able to hear people talk in a crowded room.
• Binge eating. Seeking stimulation by always having something to eat or drink.
• Having trouble distinguishing between right and left.
• Terrible handwriting.
• Trouble with depth perception.
• Being able to act calmly in a crisis.
• Spacing out while talking to people.

Things that people say they have, that I developed a system to keep from doing:

• Not doing laundry until i don’t have anything to wear, and then forgetting about it until it gets mildewy. I manage this by having laundry day every Sunday, and no other day. It also helps that the washer plays a little tune when it is done.
• Talking too loud, and blurting things out without thinking. I did this all the time when i was a kid but got in trouble for it enough that I manage to control it most of the time. But I still sometimes find myself talking too loud, and I blurt things out way more than I should.
• Forgetting things. Forgetting that you forgot things. This is why I have notebooks full of lists, why i send emails to myself, and why I feel completely lost if I don’t have something to write with and some paper.
• Forgetting to pay bills. I have signed up for auto-pays on everything I possibly can. The others I have put calendar reminders in my iCalendar. I’ve used a number of systems for keeping up with bills over the years.
• Trying a new system of organization, having it work great for three weeks, and then forgetting about it. I have developed my own system through trial and error over the years. I still forget to look at my list sometimes. Also I sometimes leave it at work and so I forget what I need to do when I get home. I would like to switch to something computerized that I could access from any of my devices, but I also need the immediacy of being able to just grab a pencil and jot something down.

Streamlining and simplifying is the real key to managing ADHD. Make things as easy as possible to reduce friction. Seize the opportunity when you start to hyperfocus. Use psychological tricks to make things more fun. Coffee.

A little trick that has really helped me get and stay organized is the Marie Kondo method of folding and storing clothes. My drawers (and The Mighty Sam’s drawers) are so much more organized than they’ve ever been. You can fit a lot of stuff in a small space, and when you open your drawer you can SEE EVERYTHING.

I love the Kondo method in general, but the precept that you have to do everything in a short time is not feasible when you have ADHD, unless you happen to luck into a period of hyperfocus right when you get started. But Kondo-ing your whole everything is something that will take days at least, and, for me anyway, hyperfocus is something that lasts a few hours. I can’t hyperfocus over a period of days unless there’s an actual crisis looming – like moving to a new place with a hard deadline.

Also – and here’s another thing I didn’t realize was ADHD until I read it on Twitter – if you have ADHD, things like house cleaning and de-cluttering take WAY longer than they do for a neurotypical person. A chore that takes a neurotypical person 2 hours will take all day if you have ADHD. So if you’re going to Kondo your house you’re going to need to do it little by little.

Lots of people in that thread were all, “omg, I think I need to look into getting diagnosed.” I didn’t say that, but I thought it.

Last night we went to see the 35th Anniversary Pee Wee’s Big Adventure tour, hosted by Paul Reubens, at the Moore Theater downtown.

We had a series of bizarre things happen, which is kind of fortunate for the sake of SCIENCE because I can compare what probably would have happened to me sans meds with how things went down yesterday.

Going to stuff downtown is always fun because parking is expensive, but public transportation to and from our neighborhood is pretty shitty outside of commute hours, and wholly shit but parts of downtown Seattle are getting really scary the past couple of years. And you know, if you drive you don’t want to be having a bunch of drinks, or if you’re me, even one drink! But also if you are stressed about about going out, even to something you like, you want to be able to have a couple of drinks.

But anyway, since Adderall seems to help with the anxiety I thought it would also make me not feel like I needed a drink to take the edge off. And that was true!

The first weird thing that happened was the parking. We parked at the Westlake parking garage because it was close to where we wanted to eat and also close to the venue. So we got in there, parked, found that the elevator was broken, found some stairs, found another elevator, and then came out into the mall security desk. Fortunately we decided to ask about how we could get back into the garage after the mall closed. We talked to a security guard who told us that we could just call the phone number posted on where we drove in and he would let us in.

I was very glad we stopped to ask instead of just assuming it would be open. But: the parking saga was not over.

We ate at the Buffalo Wild Wings because The Mighty Sam had a hankering for wings. And the setup there was weird. You order your food at a counter by the door, and then you find a seat, and if you want an alcoholic beverage (Sam did!) you have to go up to the bar, which is way in the back. You get a little vibrate-y device that turns on when your food is ready, and then you pick up your food also by the bar.

We talked about it and figured it was because in this part of downtown they probably had too many people coming in, ordering, and leaving without paying.

There was also a rigmarole about The Mighty Sam getting his beer – he couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to go, and then they started drawing him a tiny beer, and he told the bartender – If it’s going to take this long I want a bigger beer! He got one.

So that took a long time, and it also took a weirdly long time for our food to be ready. I started getting worried that our vibrate-y device was broken. But finally it did go off.

Then when we got to the Moore the line was over a block long. We had reserved tickets so I wasn’t too worried. But without Adderall I think I would have been stressing about it anyway.

we got in, got seated, and The Mighty Sam went to get himself a cocktail, but didn’t get anything for me! He put his drink down and obligingly went to fetch me something nonalcoholic. While he was gone, this really loud annoying drunk guy sat in the seat next to ours and talked loudly to some people sitting in the row behind us. I couldn’t tell if he knew them, or if he was just randomly talking to them. I didn’t really follow what they were saying but it sounded like they were not happy with each other. He was flailing around so much he almost knocked over Sam’s drink, which was sitting on the floor. I picked it up. that did get me feeling really worried and anxious. Fortunately he went away. A nice guy with a Pee Wee Herman doll ended up sitting in that seat. thank goodness.

The Mighty Sam came back and the movie started. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is so awesome anyway, and it was great to watch it with a theater audience who also loved it. Paul Reubens’s talk was also lovely. He just did it as himself, not as the Pee-Wee character. He’s funny and thoughtful and seems like a really nice person. I did have a few moments where I worried about the parking situation. And after a while I started worrying about how late it was getting. But I think I would have been about six times as anxious about those things without the Adderall.

When we got back to the door by the parking garage, and The Mighty Sam called the phone number posted there, he discovered it was disconnected! So irritating. But the key thing here is that I was irritated only. Because the worst that would happen is that we would have to take a Lyft home, and then come back in the morning to get the car when the mall opened, and pay some extra money for parking fees. But then The Mighty Sam found another number posted by the other side of the parking garage entrance and got hold of the security guy. Who let us in. And then we went home. And it was fine.

I would definitely say that Adderall helped significantly. It did not make me into a normal person. I still had worries and irritations, but they were nowhere near to the extent that they would have been without it. I was able to focus on the show and enjoy it without my mind racing everywhere, and deal with the inconveniences without losing my shit, or coming home totally wiped out.

Running multiple errands is hard for me. After I get two or three done, I hit the wall and I just need to be done. It’s kind of similar to what happens when I try to do things around the house: Everything takes WAY longer than I thought it would, and I get tired, and bored, and frustrated, and I look around and see how much is still undone, and I just have to stop.

Since starting Adderall I have been able to do things around the house without so much anxiety and tiredness. I have not been timing my efforts – i have no pre-Adderall data to compare new data with either, so I can’t really say if Adderall is helping me do things faster. .. time blindness means that in order to know how long something takes, you have to actually time it. And this is why I often time things!

It occurred to me this morning that Adderall might also help with errand fatigue! So I have compiled a list of errands to do today! And I will go out and try to do them and see how it goes!

Something else cool: Last summer when it was time to upgrade our phones, we decided to try Android phones for a change. They are cheaper than iPhones and we also found a Google Fi plan that was much cheaper than our old plan. It turns out that having Android phones is super disruptive because the rest of my world is still in Apple, so I couldn’t sync anything. We had decided to switch back to iPhones in March, after we paid off an unexpected home improvement thing (and I definitely need to write about that experience, because now that I know I have ADHD the way that went down and the huge amount of stress it caused me makes so much more sense).

We had been able to sell one of our iPhones back to our old provider but The MIghty Sam still had his old one. So, to make things nicer for me, he bought a new battery for it and switched me into it. So I now have an iPhone world again!

The thing with ADHD is that it is imperative that you SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY. Even with the Adderall I feel like I am overwhelmed by complexity. A few of my errands today are to buy some things to make my life simpler.

One of the things that kind of blew me away about ADHD Twitter was learning all these things that are ADHD things.

There was actually a specific thread about those things. Reading the thread was really enlightening for me. I’m sure as I go along I’m going to realize more stuff like this, but I wanted to start documenting them.

One thing about ADHD is that the name is really not very descriptive. People tend to think that ADHD is a thing that boys have, and that those boys are noisy and can’t sit still or behave themselves or do homework.

For me though, I think the biggest symptom and the biggest trouble is executive dysfunction. There’s a lot of good stuff explaining executive dysfunction on the intarwebs so I won’t try to describe it at length. It’s that thing where you’re sitting there and you know you have shit you have to do but you somehow can’t start doing it, and you sit there and panic and worry because you’re not doing it, and you think, if you just do the things you will stop worrying, but just the idea of standing up seems overwhelming.

So part of it is that, but part of it is just not knowing how to do things. One of my many adaptations was to figure out a way to figure out how to do things. So, with cleaning the house, no wait, that’s too big. So let’s start with cleaning the bathroom. But even that’s too big. Cleaning bathroom sink. OK, so then I go to the library or the bookstore (back when I was a young adult there was not much in the way of intarwebs) and find a book on how to clean. Or a magazine article, or something. Then I find out what cleaning products to use, what brushes to use, how to actually use each thing effectively. Also – how often to do the thing. How do people know how often to do things?

Doing a thing is so hard. Because you can’t just do the thing. You have to research how to do the thing, get the supplies you need to do the thing, practice the technique of doing the thing. And then you have all this stuff you don’t know how to clean up, because besides doing the thing you have to put all your tools somewhere.

But you haven’t even started moving shit away from the bathroom sink so you can start scrubbing. Because wherever you go, stuff just seems to pile up. And in your wake is a trail of dropped papers, keys, and shit you knocked over.

I want to start thinking about some of the positive effects of Adderall. It is really pretty amazing… I am starting to get a glimmer of what life is like for people without ADHD. On one hand, I wish I had been diagnosed a long time ago and I feel kind of resentful that it took so long to get a diagnosis, and that I had to freaking figure it out ALL BY MYSELF. On the other hand, I feel so happy that the things that always made me think that I was just a disappointment of a human being are NOT MY FAULT. And that they can be treated!

The very best effect of Adderall is that it has significantly reduced my reluctance to act. Like, when I get home from work I am not feeling resentful about doing the right-home-from-work chores that need doing. I just do them. Like a normal person. It’s totally cray.

The second best effect is that my anxiety has been reduced by about 75%. A big part of my anxiety is just knowing there are all these things I have to do and not being able to actually do them, which leads to worrying about all the bad consequences that will result because I haven’t done the things.

And something I noticed, that was totally bizarre but totally amazing… that thing where part of why you can’t do things, or dread doing things, because there is just so much stuff in the way and you can’t get to it? I have been so frustrated by just how hard it is to get things out of the bathroom cabinet. It’s dark, and it seems like there are always so many things in the way of other things. Yes. So on Sunday I did a smallish effort to clean the house – not huge, but just vacuuming and washing off the dirtiest stuff and cleaning the bathroom. And while I was cleaning the bathroom I threw a few things away. Then the next time I went to grab my water pik out of the cabinet it was EASY TO TAKE OUT. Because it was NOT tangled up in other stuff. And then when I was done and I put it away there was ROOM FOR IT. Because when I had been cleaning I somehow managed to make that little section of the cabinet tidy and un-crowded and didn’t even notice I was doing it. It was a tiny thing. But also a huge thing.

There are many things that the Adderall does not seem to help. Actually getting started on more complex things is still hard. I am still super easily distracted. Though it’s easier to focus in meetings I am still finding my mind distracting itself with things that are more interesting than the meeting.

I also want to start writing about things that I thought were character flaws, but are actually just ADHD things.

Like one thing I read the other day was that if you have ADHD it takes forever to clean your house! I have always been mystified by people who can clean their whole place in like a couple of hours. HOW does that happen? I start to do a cleaning session and, even if I manage to get myself started by mid-morning, I’m still less than halfway done by dinner time. The only reason I was able to do the mini-cleaning I did on Sunday was because (a) Adderall, and (b) I carefully limited the actual number of tasks I was going to do while I was making my to-clean list.

I started getting a migraine on the evening of Friday, 1/31. This is not surprising, given that getting my diagnosis was probably the biggest revelation of my life, and also had huge stress impacts. The whole thing felt like a giant uphill battle, and this has been a battle I’ve been fighting my whole life.

I spent most of Saturday in bed, nursing the migraine. I was afraid that it wasn’t a migraine, but rather a headache caused by the Adderall. So I didn’t take a capsule that day. Then I thought I should probably try to get used to the medication, in case it was a side effect that would diminish as I got used to it.

Sunday was a little better, but it was not all the way gone. We went to the Vangs for the second half of the Superbowl and also to drop Demi off for a week of dogsitting. I let Dragnhild know that I did get a diagnosis.

+++++++++++++++++

The next day I still had the headache. I did make it in to work since I had a couple of meetings I didn’t want to miss… and of course I hate calling in sick. But I did lay the groundwork for calling in sick the next day, in case it didn’t get better.

And the next morning I still had it, so I called in sick. I also had an appointment to look at my sore knee that afternoon, so i figured I would chill out during the day, then get the knee looked at.

Side note – the knee turned out to be mild arthritis. Can’t be fixed, but can be managed with PT, strength training, and substituting a low-impact aerobic activity for some of my jogging. So not great news, and I don’t have a PT appointment until early March, but I’ll sort it out then.

I was kind of worried, because what if this means I’ll have a headache forever?

The Sunday-through-Tuesday behemoth was a pretty classic migraine. One side of head, occipital bone, neck and shoulder pain, nausea.

One of the common side effects of Adderall is headaches. From what I could see on the intarwebs, it looks like there are two kinds of Adderall headaches: A whole-head super painful one, which I haven’t gotten. And a base-of-the-skull headache that comes on when the Adderall starts to wear off. And I do seem to be getting the base-of-the-skull ones a little.

I kept wondering if I should just stop it during the migraine, but I persisted.

The migraine did start to let up some on Wednesday and I was able to go to work.

I wrote this on 1/31/2020.

Day 1 on Adderall

I took the capsule at about 6:30 this morning.  I was pretty anxious about it… I am always worried about taking medications.  Like, I’m afraid I’m going to experience the worst side effects and maybe die.  Fortunately that didn’t happen.

I had been lying around in bed waiting until the last possible minute to get up to catch the last possible bus because I just didn’t want to do it.  All the effort I put into getting a diagnosis and taking meds, and then I don’t want to DO it.  WTF is wrong with me?

But I did, and didn’t really notice anything different for a while.

The first thing I noticed was feeling calm.  Noise from other cubicles wasn’t driving me crazy, like it usually does.  I noticed the underlying feeling of frantic-ness that permeates everything seemed to be subdued.

I was able to focus pretty well.  I didn’t have any meetings this morning, so I worked on getting my miscellaneous email tasks cleaned up and organized.  I actually did it too… my normal method of dealing with emails that are reasonably important but not urgent is to just put them aside and plan to deal with them later.  And then I don’t, and then they pile up.

I do have a system of keeping the email in my inbox until I finally deal with it, so that I don’t TOTALLY lose track of things, but I have so much trouble acting on the thought that I can just spend ten or fifteen minutes on this thing and get it done once and for all.  And then I have like 30 undone emails in my inbox.  Eventually I get to them, but often super late, and that looks shitty.  It also is a huge driver of my anxiety that I suck at my job and I’m going to get fired any second.

I cleared out a LOT of stuff today.

I was definitely less irritable.

When I did get to an afternoon meeting, I was able to focus and pay attention better.  Not perfectly, but it seemed like less of an effort.  It was also less of an effort to sit still and be quiet.  It’s funny to put it like that because it sounds like something you’d say about a little kid.  And it’s funny to realize, but I DO spend a lot of energy on keeping myself sitting still and being quiet.  Being quiet is not natural for me even though I think of myself as a quiet person.  I’m quiet because I used to get in trouble for being loud. And also, I was a school outcast so anything I said was ridiculed so I learned to be quiet because of that. But truly quiet and shy people are not like me.

Things that Adderall did NOT help:  Forgetting things, losing things, and knocking things over.  I did all three today, ending just a few minutes ago when I knocked over my glass and broke it.

Also it did not help with time blindness.  I still had to watch the clock to know (a) what time it was and (b) how much time was going by.

I did not seem to have any bad side effects.  I also was not jittery or wired at all.  The main effect seemed to be a sense of calm.

I had been worried that coffee would interact badly with it, so I only had one half-caff Americano this morning.  I ended up this evening with what feels like a caffeine withdrawal headache.  Which is why I’m having a little cold brew now.

I am feeling pretty wiped out now.  It was a big day.

I wrote this on 1/30/2020.

I went to a follow-up with the psychiatrist, where we basically talked about meds.  If you have ADHD, you are not producing enough dopamine, and there are two types of drugs you can use – stimulants like Adderall, and non-stimulants like Wellbutrin.  After some discussion I said I wanted to try the stimulant type.  If for some reason that doesn’t work for me I’ll try Wellbutrin.

In order to get the Adderall Rx I had to do a drug screen urine test and also an EKG.  Both of those came out fine.  I was kind of amused to read my urine test results. Look at all these drugs that I am NOT TAKING:

• Cocaine – NONE DETECTED
• THC (Cannabinoids) – NONE DETECTED
• Methadone – NONE DETECTED
• Opiates – NONE DETECTED
• Benzodiazepines – NONE DETECTED
• Barbiturates – NONE DETECTED
• Phencyclidine – NONE DETECTED
• Amphetamine – NONE DETECTED
• Oxycodone – NONE DETECTED
• Creatinine – 43.9 mg/dL (normal range!)

So I got prescribed a low dose of Adderall, the prolonged-release type which I can’t remember what is called, and I will start taking it tomorrow.

There were no specific injunctions against coffee, but they did say to keep tabs on how I feel.  So I think I will drink coffee sparingly tomorrow.  Maybe a cup of decaf before work and say a small cup of weak coffee at work?

I can’t believe it.

I feel relieved that I got a diagnosis, and also PISSED that I didn’t get one before now.  Also upset because, given my skill at masking, I can’t see how there’s any way anyone in my life would have recognized that there was something wrong with me. And I could have used some help.

Thinking about my school history and work history in light of my diagnosis should probably be another entry. Or a series of them.

I wrote this on 1/26/2020.

I feel like I’ve needed the past few days to just let it all sink in.  On Thursday, I got diagnosed with ADHD-Primarily Inattentive Type.  It’s so bizarre to have a name for what I have been struggling with forever.

It’s also funny to think about the series of events that led me to suspect that I had ADHD.  Because it started on Twitter, and specifically, it started with Cat Twitter.  I started following cat accounts in part because with so much horribleness in the world it was important to ensure I had some positive content, and Cat Twitter was what pointed me to some ADHD accounts, and specifically the webcomic that changed everything:  “How ADHD Causes Anxiety/How Anxiety Masks ADHD.”  And I just saw myself.  It was a mind-blowing moment when everything makes sense.

I’ll probably write more about how I started suspecting I had ADHD later but for this entry I just want to talk about how I got myself diagnosed.  It was both hard and easy.

The underlying theme that covered everything was the sense that no one would believe me – that everyone would think I was making it up and that I was really just being lazy and needed to try harder.

Making the initial appointment was a clusterfuck.  I have Kaiser Permanente insurance and the first time I tried to set up an appointment I got wrong information.  I called them on Wednesday, 9/25.  The first person I called to schedule an ADHD assessment told me I needed to schedule a phone consult, that it would be 40 minutes, and they wanted to do it that Friday.  I had a non-flexible work thing all Friday so couldn’t do it, so they told me to call back on that same Friday (presumably I would be able to get away from my work think for 10 minutes to do this) to set something up the following week, which would have been perfect because I had a staycation planned for that week.  So I called back on the Friday and they had no idea what I was talking about, but set me up with an appointment with a psychiatrist on 12/3, the next available appointmeent.  A long wait, but that’s how long you have to wait to get a real appointment I guess.

I asked for the whole day off.  I also scheduled a dentist appointment on that day, the afternoon, so I could justify taking a full day.

The 12/3 appointment was pretty short.  The psychiatrist asked me a few questions, talked about ADHD meds, and gave me an assessment form to fill out.  Part of it was for me, part for someone who knows me now (e.g. Sam), and someone who knew me when I was a kid (Dragnhild).  She also indicated that it was important to make sure that anxiety isn’t making me think I have ADHD when I don’t – anxiety can cause executive dysfunction.  She also suggested putting me on an antidepressant for the anxiety, but I kind of resisted that because I don’t think that anxiety is the problem.  I’m pretty sure that the anxiety is a symptom, not the main deal.

She said I should also talk with a psychologist and made me a referral.  She wanted me to get her the completed assessment before my next appointment. She said that with ADHD meds you have to do an electrocardiogram to make sure your heart can take it before you can get them prescribed.

So, I left that appointment feeling kind of hopeful, but after looking at the assessment I was afraid that Dragnhild might not be able to note my actual ADHD manifestations because I am so good at masking it.

I did talk to Dragnhild and she did not really think I have ADHD, which I expected.  She filled out the form and put “sometimes” on some of the symptoms.  Sam filled out his part of it but he told me he’s not filling it out based on what I feel or experience but on what he observes, and he thinks I am very productive. which I am, but I am so tired every day just trying to hold things together.

I went into the psychologist appointment (1/23, one week before the follow-up with the psychiatrist) prepared to be told I’m just lazy and making it up.  I also brought some stuff – the Pima webcomic, an article on signs of ADHD in women, and my college transcript, along with a hard copy of the ADHD assessment.  And I went in there like it was going to be a fight.

I told her about the anxiety, and that I thought my anxiety was just a manifestation of ADHD – that all the things I’m anxious about come from managing my ADHD.  I also said that I always thought that I would eventually get my shit together and not have so much trouble managing day to day things.  But I’m now 50 and I still don’t have my shit together.

And I told her that the Pima webcomic was the thing that blew my mind.  I showed her.  She read it, and then asked me to explain how each panel relates to my life.  And so I told her.

Time blindness:  I’m either late or wayyy too early.  Like this appointment:  I was 30 minutes early.

Being too loud, talking too much:  I always thought of myself as a quiet person but when looking back at my childhood I realize I was super noisy and talkative until I got in trouble or mocked for being too loud.

Losing things:  Yes, I lose things constantly.  I have so many tricks and workarounds to keep myself from losing things, but this didn’t stop me from losing my purple bag in Bartells the other day, or losing my cell phone in Costco like every month.  I also drop things all the time.  When the psychologist called me into her office I actually dropped my purple bag and almost walked off without it.

Told I don’t try hard enough – so I’m always exhausted.  The story of my life is being an underachiever.  I constantly got in trouble for not doing chores, or not finishing chores, or doing a half-assed job.  I’m exhausted at the end of every day trying to manage my life.

Have a  hard time re-organizing so I obsessively prepare for everything:  Wholly shit do I prepare.  I was able to do this in my Yellowstone County attorney job, but I miserably failed in [Neurotypical-Centric Agency] because I did not have any administrative support and I had too big of a caseload to be able to prepare the way I needed to.  Just thinking about this makes me angry.  If you could set up a job that was exactly the perfect way for a person with ADHD to fail, that would be it.

I always got in trouble for being hyperactive and clumsy – so I forcefully don’t move at all.  Yes, I do sit very still now.  I am still constantly spilling things, dropping things, bumping into things, and tripping and falling down.

Constant criticism for all my screw-ups make me fear rejection/criticism and so I became a people pleaser.

So I told her all of those things.  She asked about different parts of my life growing up.  I emphasized that my intelligence helped me to manage my symptoms.

Some of the things I mentioned:

• I started scratching my cuticles when I was REALLY young – I don’t remember not doing it.
• I was noisy as a kid.
• I was clumsy as a kid.
• I had trouble paying attention to things that were boring.
• I was able to finish homework in class so I didn’t have bad grades in grade school or junior high.
• I always was good at taking tests.
• I was constantly in trouble for not doing chores.
• I started getting – not exactly in trouble, but definitely frowned on in high school for not getting straight-As.  I got As in subjects I liked, and Bs and Cs in subjects that were boring.
• In college I almost flunked out my first year.  I brought my college transcript to show her. Year 1 was basically Cs, Ds, and not a few Fs.
• I rarely studied in college.   I got really good grades in the classes I liked and barely made Bs and Cs in classes that bored me.
• In law school I figured out how to study.  I made myself pay attention by taking crazy detailed notes, practically transcribing entire lectures, and also used colored highlighters to study my casebooks.  (I didn’t say this, but it helped that I was totally interested in most of my law school classes).
• I also didn’t say this, but I went to one of the supplemental/career advice sessions that they had, but was totally bored by it so I skipped all the other ones.  So of course I didn’t do any on-campus interviews for summer internships.  I had no idea that they were going on or that you had to sign up for them.
• I explained about how badly I did in the [Neurotypical-Centric Agency] job and how that contrasted with the environment at YCAO, where I did succeed.
• I also explained that I get really bored at meetings and I use note-taking and especially now a laptop to keep myself focused.

She also had me take this weird ADHD test where you watch a computer screen and you’re supposed to hit the space bar if you see any letter other than X.  It turned out I did ok on it, but it was excruciatingly boring. She asked what was the hardest thing about it, and I told her that it was super hard to pay attention.

But.  She told me I have ADHD, primarily inattentive type.  I have a diagnosis.  I do not actually suck as a human being.  I just have a different kind of brain.