How I love my ADHD

[Hominid711]

Since my diagnosis with ADHD I have naturally been thinking a lot about how to integrate this new discovery into my past, present and future views and have noticed that having the explanation for many things alone has helped. So I've been quite positive about the "new me" but also the old one since they are in essence identical.

This got me wondering what people most appreciate about their ADHD, treated or untreated. There is a lot of accessible information out there pointing at the advantages of ADHD and why "we" have survived evolutionary processes despite selection favouring neurotypicals.

I - as well as many of us here have already expressed - also personally wish sometimes I had been treated earlier (or treatable up to 50 years ago) but it is simply a fact that this was not possible then.

So the best thing for me is looking at ADHD favourably and count my blessings. I do love quite a few aspects of it such as the excitement curiosity brings, the joy of changing train of thought and creative thinking, the thrill of hyperactivity and impulsiveness when it is possible to indulge in it, the fun I can have with people letting it flow, the popularity, the way it seems to select what's good for me, the empathy it has made me develop etc.

What are your opinions and experiences?

Let's think positively for once and share.

[Gettingittogether]

I hear you and don't disagree that ultimately self-acceptance is healthy.

I'm not on the celebration end of ADHD right now, because I keep discovering ways it hindered me. But yes, there are--if you are lucky--some gifts that can come from it. I can connect in conversation two topics that others see no connection between.

I can generate lots of ideas. Again though these gifts are also curses.

I am more of the view that I can give myself credit for trying my best pedaling up hill against this condition. Giving myself compassion for my struggles is important.

BTW: ADHD runs in my family and I've seen the health toll it takes. Living a long life requires a lot of precise and persistence attentiveness to our health. Requires making and getting to all kinds of appointments. I've seen relatives die early in part because of the condition. Sure, these relatives had great qualities and strengths for sure.

I'm not just convinced that their great qualities had to do with ADHD.

[Hominid711 in reply to Gettingittogether]

Thank you, Gettingittogether, and thanks Laura and writer35. I am sorry and feel with you Gettingit, and I am all for hearing and helping - and you've helped me with your advice as well - with our losses, regrets and worries. Sorry also for your relatives who died too soon, and yes, mortality is unfortunately up with ADHD vs non-ADHD and I can imagine it contributing in big parts to a premature multifactorial death.

I just also wanted to share some hopefully uplifting thoughts on ADHD between ourselves. Thinking outside the box means looking at pro and con, A and B, C, F and Z.

and I am also someone who - like you - has lived a bit/through it without knowing this was due to a chemical peculiarity.

So I believe it may help us to look at Z as well as A with its compassionate listening and sharing of our struggles.

Additionally, as a doctor of 30 years, often admittedly more needed and used as a poor substitute for social worker, counsellor or simply maternal shoulder to cry on, I found it worthwhile, AFTER listening, to point out to the doubtful and stricken their obvious inner strengths, their live/residual resources and generally the good things I can see. There may not be anyone else doing it.

Using the surprise element, with people generally receptive and hearing it from someone society and culture still tells them to listen to they almost always hold their heads up higher when leaving. Who knows, it may just be enough that day to get them some respite. If not a bit more.

It worked for me when I was down, starved of good thoughts and begging for help.

I know of course many of us are older and many in caring or other positions of responsibility, some as ADHD spouses and relatives, so, please, don't feel patronised.

Like all of us I've had my struggles, also the torment and torture of despair as I often couldn't even bat at this monster of all feelings, never mind beat it, with many episodes of the deepest depression against which I had NOTHING even to just lean on to keep me standing. Unpredictable ebbs and flows of anxiety were constant companions from as young as 6. By day the fear and fact of schoolmates' rejection, of failing and of my parents' scorn, the need to be up there, achievement soon meaning inescapable pressure, my first ever school report stating I was too slow, my notes a mess. By night recurring horrors of standing on isolated narrow ledges in a vertical, vertigo-inducing wall of pillared stone, dark fog, nothing else but a bottomless abyss below.

Later, after repeated cycles of 7 to 9 months each of this, suddenly one blissful day recovery, over time the light receeding in a cloudy sky of boredom and endurance of a live not mine, punctured by maternal mood swings, my father's occasional but scary rage, and worry and gloomy thoughts of the future, when at last I discovered there were names, and more: what I had thought of as a doled out life and fate was an illness. There was prospect of treatment, anxiety flares and depression always looming close by could be brought to a stop, the relief of the actual first antidepressants, the repeat and eventually the decision to never stop them again.

I feel indebted to the sciences and pharmacology and to the many clever people choosing to further it for developing these pills and for continuing to publish reassuring evidence (non-truths exist but can be exposed).

Therapy has always been there as an additional option (I had a couple of sessions in my twenties, brought to an end by an unavoidable move, then a whole tearful year of it 20 years ago), and yes, in being able to afford it I feel both, lucky and duped in having had this impossible possibly neurodiverse, possibly PDed mother (or else afflicted by both or another beast entirely) whom I worried about, tried to make smile and feared more than the exams in med school and who ultimately may have been why I made it.

Be it as may, this constellation supplemented my desperate determination to save at least that damned degree at a time everything else was going to pot.

I still remember and benefit from what I learnt during that year of psychotherapy. Like a ghost my therapist lurks in the shadows to appear at times and speak.

Having experienced the relief and thrill of coming out of these dark, hopeless, almost death-like (I imagine it so) states, especially when I not yet knew there was medication i.e. in my teens and early 20ies, surviving them and feeling equally bruised and wiser, I never doubted that I can, again, feel and be different, and I instinctively and mostly subconsciously always strove to get back to that jubilant, joyful, life-embracing me. Over the following years and decades I learnt that the traumatised brain (traumatised by depression as well as what lead to it) can unlearn and put trauma on the back burner, learn new stuff, then feel more equipped to let happy thoughts in and banish those circulating bad ones, and that this process is something I can actually MAKE happen. I do not feel bad for having chosen antidepressants pretty soon when I felt grey gloom slowing to settle, I knew once on the up I could help myself to and utilise my resources and surround myself with people who loved me.

I also know however that permanently miserable people aren't popular so had another powerful motivator to gather momentum of my recovery.

I cannot change the past but I am no longer a hapless sapling in a hurricane, so to speak, but rather a small but sturdy willow in the wind. And I am sure that ADHD helped me looking at life in that way. It gave me an analytical spirit to accept stuff I couldn't change, yet a lust for life and curiosity to see what I could and then taste it all. This trust in my instincts giving me positivity was bigger than anything. I would not let it be killed off or fade. I was shy by nature but became a warrier by ADHD. So I believe.

For me, after death comes nothingness, not paradise or rebirth.

I know what I need, what my therapist would say and the answers to questions she ultimately would lead ME to answer.

There is also the endurance I learned to develop over those awful, bitter, uphill battles, the effect that over time, oscillating between unhappiness, bliss and calm but boring sameness mountains became hills and I got fitter.

As one thing leads to another, genetics, brain broth and less-than-ideal parenting not something too uplifting to think about and analysed back top and front anyway I will not let go of feeling good.

And in the end, if I must because they've taken me off Elvanse, I fake cancer and go onto Morphine.

[Jozlynn in reply to Hominid711]

Thank you for all of this!

[writer35]

Yeah, I view my ADHD as neutral to positive because learning about it has helped me to change my life to work with my brain rather than against it.

But I have a lot of privilege and flexibility to do that. I run a consulting business that I can do almost completely from home, I set boundaries and won't schedule calls late in the day ("waiting mode" kills me!), I have a partner but no children so my schedule is mostly my own. But before all of that, I was traveling 75% of the time, running on coffee and booze to get my brain its dopamine hits to keep up the long hours, my RSD kept me from pushing back on my boss or clients who were asking more than I could give, my physical health was declining from the stress, all of it. Phew.

Anyway! I love your list. The things that I like about my ADHD are - justice sensitivity and emotional empathy, which can be challenging AF but I wouldn't trade it in; webbed thinking and creativity; hyperfocusing and being in flow frequently; and loving learning and interests and novelty - I'm rarely bored.

Thanks for offering this reflective question!

[Laura3456]

I dont really view ADHD as a negative in itself. Its just the environment in which we have to operate that makes it negative.

I love the caring and sensitive nature of many ADHD people (especially inattentive), the deep curiosity, the "hyperfocus" (which i appreciate can be a curse but for others is the key to achievement), the differential and creative way of thinking.

The world would never develop if everyone was and thought the same! Its interesting and not surprising to me that many people that really make a difference are not neurotypical.

[Girlkitty39 in reply to Laura3456]

I appreciate your uplifting perspective on the empathy that in many cases accompanies AD/HD. In my case, it has made me thru trial and error, a good listener, ive always been interested in people but ive had to learn some social skills of asking open ended questions, not interrupting, and verbally showing I appreciate another persons answer while at the same time paying attention. Its a juggling act for sure. I hv trouble w written and verbal directions so i try to ask more questions, and One on one is easier than meetings but i have deep conversations. And ive made not numerous but healthy and strong neurodiverse friendships. I esp love when I meet some1 who has ADHD also and we can free associate and interrupt and pick uo trail again in a very creative and flowy way. That is a true tho rare joy bc not every one is comfortable enough to share their challenges and whole unique lovable eccentric neurodiversity. Best wishes.

[New-Diagnosis]

Really appreciate this post! I'm newly-diagnosed -- at 56, and it's been tough to be positive while in the process of re-assessing my past with this new understanding of how ADHD has impacted me. I agreed with all the positive mentions so far. Keep them coming.

[Jozlynn]

First of all, I absolutely love that you've approached this topic this way, Hominid711. I am actively working to help others learn how to view what's positive about being ADHD. I was diagnosed at the age of 50, and for me it was absolutely life-changing for the better. For one thing, I really value the fact that I no longer 'don't understand' what's going on with me when I struggle with something. Simply understanding it has removed an aspect of fear for me (I honestly thought I had early-onset dementia before diagnosis). Another is that I now know that if I truly invest the time into learning how to work with my particular "brand" of ADHD, I can focus on and make use of the strengths that it provides me, as well as come to a type of acceptance about my "weaknesses" (EVERYONE has them - whether NT or ND - we're human!). This isn't to say that I just love being ADHD and all things are sunshine and roses, but having an explanation, learning to accept certain things about myself, and focusing on what I can genuinely call strengths, has truly brought me out of a self-defeating spiral of constant negative internal dialogue. No, I do not fit neatly into the neuro-typical world, but I no longer care. I'm actually proud to be called neuro-diverse. I have no desire to live a Stepford Wives-like life and fit in just because that's what's expected by society. I am now able to simply say I'm different in yet another way from what is considered mainstream and expected. I've always fought against those ideas anyway, though.

I do want to say that I fully understand that everyone's experiences are different. For me, although it's been hard and an uphill battle, I've chosen to focus on the ways my life is better for not only understanding myself more, but the ways in which I can take the characteristics of ADHD and make them work for me. For instance, I've started my own business doing something I love - being a virtual assistant to people with ADHD. It's become my passion to help them find a way to overcome the overwhelm, as well as help them accept themselves. I know it's hard, living with ADHD, but I've decided that I can either focus on the difficult, or I can focus on how to make it work for me.

[Hominid711 in reply to Jozlynn]

Thanks Jozlynn, encouraging and generous as always, I'll respond with more time tomorrow. Thanks also, KarlaJo and you all. I'm glad you feel OK and it's great to hear your stories.