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.