A nice thing about my current incessant need to note everything down is that I get an accurate sense of when and what stuff happens to my life when I get too busy to process my experiences. For example, I have a clear record of when I was recently diagnosed with ADHD. By recently, I mean last month.
While I’ve been writing my thoughts on it down on my personal Facebook timeline, I’ve not had the chance to write about it for my blog, which serves as my more public, non-stream-of-consciousness repository for what’s going on in my brain.
(You can follow me on Threads for the more stream-of-consciousness stuff, my blog posts are a bit more filtered and edited for clarity.)
Anyway, back to ADHD. I’ve long suspected that I might have it thanks to its growing popularity on social media and my own experience living with Dante, who was diagnosed with ADHD about a year or so ago (this was my pre-noting-down-everything era.)
It took a while before I got properly diagnosed. I was suffering from depression and anxiety prior to my assessment. My psych explained that ADHD is hard to diagnose when in the midst of dealing with the other stuff. After she determined that I was already in a clearer frame of mind, I was finally able to get tested. Unsurprisingly, I did have ADHD: specifically, the inattentive variant.
I honestly did not know what to do with that information at first, and looking back at my original FB post, I pretty much said the same thing a month ago. It took me some time to decide to read a book about it, Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté, which was recommended to me by one of my FB contacts.
Reading through the book brought me to tears because, for the first time in my life, it felt like I finally had an instruction manual on how my brain works. It took me some time to read it in its entirety because my July has been insanely busy.
I’m only properly processing what I’ve learned now that most of my events and commitments are done. So, I’m going to try to list down what I’ve gathered so far about how I operate based on what I’ve read (not just from the book) and what I’ve experienced:
- ADHD is a chemical imbalance in the brain (more on this here). It is widely believed to be hereditary, which means there’s a good chance that either one or both my parents had it. I have no idea which: my mom exhibits similar behaviors to me, but it might also just be advancing age. My dad died when I was four so I have no way to tell if he might have had it, but he was the more creative of my parents (at least, that’s what my mom keeps telling me), and creativity is one of the hallmarks of ADHD brains given their propensity for curiosity and connecting ideas.
- ADHD can be exacerbated by a lack of attachment with parents: something that is key to developing emotional self-regulation and proper individuation. This aligns with my experiences as my mom was mostly busy with work as I was growing up. With her being the lone caregiver and provider, I had no other sources of good attachments, which could explain why I gravitated towards friendships over family in my teen years, through to adulthood. Perhaps I was looking for ‘parents’ in my friendships (which also explains why I prefer more mature men as partners: people who can take care of me while also giving me enough space to be my own person.)
- ADHD is a developmental delay, which means it’s not a lifelong condition, or at least it’s a much more manageable condition given the right tools and environment. One essential component of a ‘proper environment’ (that links back to healthy attachments) is the need for people that can provide unconditional love, care, and understanding. Another component is having plenty of time and space for the ADHD brain to play and process and individuate. As for tools, routines of preferable behaviors help a lot. In my own experience, having and protecting my morning routine helps me with self-regulation. My practice of journaling every morning and building more good habits on top of it has been helping me immensely.
- The ‘inattentive’ part of my ADHD means I can be both hyperfocused and extremely distracted, which lines up with my inability to multitask when my brain is focusing on something it deems important, and with my scatterbrained-ness when I’m faced with too much stimuli. Managing the latter is more about managing the available stimuli, which means when I need to focus, it really helps to shut everything else down (my phone notifications are now mostly limited to delivery services). Setting boundaries and priorities is something I’m still working on, as well as learning how to say no and being okay with potentially disappointing someone when I do.
There’s probably a lot more I haven’t mentioned, but as is the nature of my brain, I’m starting to get distracted from writing this post, which probably means I need to wrap it up.
I’m still learning more and more about ADHD and how I can ‘live my best life’ with it. I know that all that I’ve been doing so far has been helping me out a lot: journaling, notetaking, routines, healthy relationships, and perhaps oddly, working on GeekFight. But more on that later.
Before I bid you adieu, I would be remiss to not mention that everything I wrote about ADHD is based on my interpretation and memory of what I’ve read from Maté’s book and other sources, and my own lived experience. In no way should this blog post be used as a tool for self diagnosis. If you’ve read this far and suspect that you might also have ADHD, please see a proper medical professional. I’m just an artist trying to make sense of the chaos of my own mind.
And with that, I shall go on my merry way. I have shit to do and art to make.
xoxo
Caroline
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