My raising suspicions

How to receive and process the possible diagnosis of being adult with ADHD? I’m on the topic again while still more or less tenderfoot and lacking proper examination 🙂 I haven’t made any progress with the research yet, but after the appointment on March 17th, things will gradually get underway to investigate ADHD suspicions. What’s funny in advance is that I take the positive diagnosis for granted, and on the other hand, if I’ve understood correctly, I guess I’ll never get that kind of final yes/no certainty. February 8th, in “My shameful superpower” article, I already described myself and how I relate to ADHD. There I roughly listed the headings of where my doubts appear. Listening skills, hyperenthusiasm, stucking to review the whole, difficulty in reading, lack of sense of time, difficulty staying still and sometimes dealing with disappointments. Now I thought in this post I’d share some more specific examples from the last few days! What kind of situations have I had and what has been painful or amusing about them. How does this sound? Would you give a diagnosis in the end…

Flood of expression

Last night was a hilarious, energizing one-man comedy from my beloved partner’s point of view. We laughed really hard again. I went to her place for the evening and night. We have lately been seeing each other less often on weeknights due to illnesses, among other things, so I had so much to say that I was really excited to tell it all. I told her about some of my website technology insights and at the same time I already had a couple of other must-tell stories in my head. The end result was an impatient hand-waving stuttering, eyes glazed over, and nothing really came out! We are used to laugh about these things together, and fun it was! Maybe these are the harmless and positive symptoms… Next task was to search and start a streaming series for us to watch before sleeping. That was, as usual, my duty of honor and I did it after more than 10 minutes hassle, after I had first adjusted the bed to a harder surface, arranged the bedside table and clothes, set 6 alarms for the morning, checked Instagram and, on a whim, Bing’s search engine optimization report, and browsed the free time calendar.

Obsession on wake-up alarms

6 alarms? Yes, that’s right! I have a habit (obsession) of setting multiple alarms so that I don’t snooze or end the only alarm in a dreamy state and sleep too late! In practice, I have 3 alarms on both my watch and phone, about 15-20 minutes apart, all with varying exact minute numbers. And this gets worse: The minutes need to be set in such a way that if the snooze interval is 10 minutes, the wake-up times don’t exactly match that 10-minute cycle. It can’t be 6:10 and 6:20, but for example 6:07 and 6:21! On top of all that, this preparation is pretty useless when I wake up with back pain, like this morning, after five. I’ll probably write more about other little obsessions, like straightening objects, later.

Everything at once

Before my “show” at home tonight, I edited the blog to be bilingual (to enable world conquest!), which has been ongoing since the weekend and is now almost ready. No end in sight nor logic in order. I started adding functions, such as changing links and page templates, but simultanously had a thought that I had to get the translations of the articles moving. Opened Google Translate and created a duplicates of old articles. Many editing pages open on different topics and it was hard to remember what I has changed in each window and whether there was anything unsaved in them.

Impatience

Impatience: Yesterday it happened again that even though I realized it would be make sense to create a backup before the next changes and it would only take a couple of minutes, I was on fiery coal and couldn’t bear to interrupt the next adjustments. This time no damage was done, but a couple of times for the same reason I have had to restore the site to a previous version. In fact I’ve done almost everything two or three times and reworked it into smaller pieces, which has been instructive, but it takes so much time that others can’t really understand it.

Packing and preparing

It was again difficult to decide what to take with me when I left home to my love. This time, the situation was made much easier by the fact that I can’t do sports yet, so a couple of bags remained unpacked. Comfortable home clothes, smart devices, chargers, hygiene products, medicine? A work laptop just in case? Now I managed with one day bag. Normally, aimlessness when it comes to sports options means that I dig out and pack swimming trunks, a gym backpack, a padel racket, running shoes, a jacket and a few other items in the trunk of the car in case the activity in question is selected for the evening’s schedule. Plus a shirt, jeans and sneakers in case we decide to go out to eat, for example! These scenarios usually come true with a probability of <5% and we live about a 7-minute drive from each other!

Inefficient mornings and immersion

I got up for breakfast over an hour before everyone else today, and while drinking coffee, I read and wrote. In the end I noticed I’m alone at the table and everyone else is ready to go to school and work. I still have half an hour of morning chores to do before work starts! 🙂

Just being totally immersed in editing the blog shows that the hyperenthusiasm to social media has taken over again and other things from my balance are lacking. I’ve been putting off exercise due to illness and the flu, which has made the situation worse. I’m looking forward to catching up with life again by the end of the week…

Separating work and freetime

I’ve also been forced to do my work remotely for several days already due to the flu. Early yesterday morning, I was struggling on which computer to open first. I was moving the mouse pad and chargers around and wondering if I would have time to read the newspaper and my own emails or starting to work faster. I didn’t manage to make coffee and eat breakfast all at once yesterday either, but instead wrote a few work emails and then when my thoughts calmed down, I started making bread and brewing a new batch of coffee. Well, I finally managed to concentrate on my work without any wandering thoughts.

How to live with these

Are these phenomena normal? Do they only occur when I’m tired or stressed? Not really, because they happen all the time. Unlike someone who’s used to it, I can’t judge what’s exceptional and what’s just part of my nature. Exercise at least helps me take things one step at a time and brings me peace. Planning things on my calendar is part of the fight against new impulses. Maybe in the end, all that will be left is the small-scale everyday wandering and fidgeting that’s part of me.