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Living With ADD/ADHD

Is It Easy?

By Ruka GilbertPublished 3 years ago 21 min read
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In short, no. But then again, living with any sort of a disability, mental or physical, isn't easy, regardless of what anybody thinks or says. But I'm not here to talk about any of those, My fight is with ADD/ADHD. Let me explain something. Living with ADD/ADHD, myself and others like me, constantly fight with ourselves to stay focused, dealing with mental exhaustion and hyperactivity, and thinking about a million things and nothing all at the same time, trying to do all this with or without medication. Medication makes it manageable but by no means easy. Without medication, it's even worse. On top of learning how to change and adapt to our ever-changing world, you have to learn and adapt to your ever-changing mind. Eventually, you learn how to manage things without the medication but you will never have a handle on it. At least this is what is happening to me. Confused? Well, keep reading and I'll explain.

PART 2: My Early Life, At Least What I Can Remember

I was born in the early 90's, born to a young, loving mother who did not have it easy. See, I came about from her boyfriend at the time who no interest in marrying her at all, would have rather spent money on drugs, not diapers so he up and left her one day with only a mattress to sleep on at 6 months pregnant. After I was born, she had help rasing me from her mother and her brother. When I was about 8 months old, she ran into an old friend from high school who fell in love with me, later falling in love with my mother. At 18 months old, they gave me a sister, and 3 months later, they were married. From the time they got together, he was my dad. My biological father was in my life for a while so he was Daddy A and my dad was Daddy B. (No names other than my own are being used here). As I grew, I was definitely very active and pretty independent. When I got into school, I was a fairly good kid. I did what I was told, did my homework with little to no pushback, got good grades, and good comments from my teachers on my report cards. This happened thru most of my school career but what lead my family and my teacher to realize there was something up with me was when I was in first grade. My teacher noticed I was having a hard time sitting still during class, and when I did sit still, I was drawing or reading, a common distraction for me throughout my whole school career. I couldn't focus on anything in class because all I wanted to do was draw, color, or read. One day my teacher gave us a coloring assignment to do during class. Several minutes into the assignment, my teacher came to check on me and found me under my desk. She discovered that I had not only colored what I was supposed to on my paper but that I had kept going. I had colored on my paper, onto my desk, down the legs, and was now down under my desk, coloring on the floor. I had gotten so focused on coloring, I just couldn't stop myself. See, that's a symptom of ADD/ADHD, hyperfocus. It's not just the hyperactivity or being unable to pay attention, there's so much more. My biggest problem was that I had all three. I couldn't focus on things I should have been and when I did focus on something I wanted to do, like this coloring instance, I would tune everything out and just be completely focused and lost in my own little world. So if my teacher had come up to me or called my name and asked what I was doing at this time, I didn't hear her. I had no clue she was even next to me until she reached down and tapped my shoulder that I snapped out of it and I realized where I was and what I had been doing. I instantly felt really bad about what I had done, I didn't mean to do it, I just couldn't stop. My parents were called in and we had a meeting with my teacher who explained what I had done and what had been going on with me. It was recommended that I should get tested for any sort of a learning disability. So a few days later, I went to the doctor and got tested. Now, this was the 90's and there weren't many females who had been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD so there was still not a whole lot known about being present in females. Any or all testing had been done on males so finding it females was still a fairly new concept. So, me being about 6 or 7 years old at the time and being told I had a learning disability was a new thing, to me and to my parents. I didn't know what it all meant. All I knew was that there was something very different about me and I was being put on medication for it that I had to take twice a day. Getting on the medication changed things drastically. I could sit still in class, pay attention to what the teacher was saying, and could focus on my homework when I got home. About a year after I was diagnosed, at the age of 7, I gained a new baby brother. A couple of years after my diagnosis, I went to what I think was a child psychiatrist which was supposed to help me learn what I was going thru and how to handle it. That did not last long. I just remember going once or twice and then it stopped, I'm not sure I ever knew why. I know this is long, but it is non-fiction after all and it may seem kinda boring at times but trust me, when this done it's going to be very informative. I think those of you reading this will have a better understanding of this and able to deal with those you may know who have ADD/ADHD or even have a better understanding about yourself if you have it.

PART 3: New Things Coming My Way

The summer before I turned 10, we moved. It was a new state, a new school, new people, and a new doctor. So many new things came with that move, it was a lot for me to handle all at once. In third grade, I had finally gotten down to taking my medication once a day. So I could start at a new school on the right foot without having my new classmates thinking there was something wrong with me for having to go to the nurse every day after lunch. At least that's what I thought anyway. Let me explain. With my ADD and being on medication came tics, things I would do subconsciously, that I truly had no idea I was even doing until someone pointed it out. So let me tell you why I thought I was going to start off on the right foot here. Well, here I was, this new kid not just from another school but a new state as well, coming in at the last year of elementary school with all these people I had never met and had never met me, so they knew nothing about me. The only people who probably knew about my diagnosis was me and my teacher because that was all who needed to know at that point. Now she was wonderful. I admired her greatly and she was a great teacher. I should add that even from the time I was about 7 0r 8 years old, I had always been boy-crazy. Not that it really matters but I made a complete idiot of myself at 9 years old in front of all my new classmates, one of which was a really cute boy. I walked up to the teacher, thinking I was doing a great thing by saying I was new and I had no idea where I was to sit. My teacher pointed to the only empty desk in the room and I felt really stupid. Here I was, my first day in class, one empty desk, and I had introduced myself in front of everybody. Of course I was new! So was everybody else! I still berate myself to this day about it.

Anyway, moving on. Remember how I mentioned I had tics? Yeah well, hold onto that for a minute. Here's where it comes into play. As the year goes on, some girls in the class noticed these weird things I was doing and it spread around the class. I had a few people in the class who were nice to me and who I considered friends at that point. I was grateful that the kids in the other classes in my grade didn't know about my tics because I was being picked on enough by my classmates because of these tics. At the time I had a best friend and a best guy friend and they were great. Later that same year, I ended up accidentally insulting my best friend and we never spoke again (long story) and I am still best friends with my best guy friend going on 18 years now. That cute boy I mentioned I had embarrassed myself in front of? Oh yeah, no that little schoolgirl crush didn't take long to develop at all and it was long after that that people noticed it too. I tried to hide it for a long time, even though I switched seats with someone one day just to sit next to him as a reward for doing something good in class and he asked me all day about it. Well that same day, the two girls who kept picking on me about my tics, asked me about my crush and stupid, naive little me thought they were being nice and I told them the truth. I instantly regretted it because they ended up telling everybody in the class and luckily the guy was out doing a chore for the teacher. When he came back in though, the guys in class who were his friends all ran up to him and told him I had a crush on him. I turned red I was so embarrassed. So the rest of the year, I was picked on for my tics and my crush. The joke's on them though because for a week he called me his girlfriend and I got over my crush.

That summer, we moved, again and again, I had a new school, new teachers, and new classmates to get to know as well as a new schedule to get used to for the school day and for my classes. It was very different for me and once again, my boy-crazy self went wild and found the hottest guy in school. Bit of a side note here: I once found a picture where someone had written that those of us with ADD/ADHD, our brains go so fast trying to find things that make us happy, releasing dopamine, that when we find that dopamine-inducing thing, our brain hyper-fixates on it, like an addiction or an obsession. So trying to let go of that hyper-fixation is extremely hard because to us it is an addiction: end side note.

Well, when I would get a crush on a good-looking guy that's exactly what would happen. And that's exactly what happened with this guy too. To this day, I am still really embarrassed about it when I think about it. It got to be so bad that the whole class knew about it and I was made fun of because of it. Pretty sure his friends teased him about it too, I will never know because I'm pretty sure he still hates me. He never really acknowledged the crush, he just tried to ignore it, and either he or his friends did little things that just added fuel to the fire. This crush was really, really bad, so bad it went on for 3 and a half years. I moved after being in the same school with him for 2 years, but it was just a new school, not just new people. There were already people there that I knew from elementary school which was helpful. The rest of the time was pretty low-key, thankfully. Still had issues with my teachers because, during my free time in school, I spent it in the library getting books to read. So when I was bored in class, I would read, and my teachers would catch me reading instead of paying attention to what was going on, and they would get upset with me because they thought I wasn't listening to them. That's the thing though, even though I was reading in class, I could still hear what they were saying. They couldn't really get too upset with me because I would do well on my assignments and my tests, which proved to my teachers that I, in fact, was listening to them. I remember one meeting with my teachers and my parents and my science teacher at the time, looked at me and said "Sometimes I look over at her during the lessons and she's looking down at her desk instead of up front at me. You're reading during class, aren't you?" I nodded my head and replied, "Yes I am." I read a lot in class because it helped keep my mind focused on one thing while I was listening to the teachers teach us the lessons. It helped me to focus and learn what I needed to even though I was taking my medication, I have always been better at multitasking than most people because I could do several things at once and people would ask me how that was even possible. It still is incredibly handy.

PART 4: High School! What Joy

That guy that I had a really bad crush on and how my brain just hyper-fixated on him? Well, in order for me to be able to break free from that, something pretty big has to happen involving said fixation. With the last guy, him calling me his girlfriend for a week was enough to break the fixation. This one, however, had not done anything of the sort. So in this case, here is the big thing that broke this one. So, my high school and his high school were playing a football game against each other one night, and I figured that since he had been on the football team in middle school, there was a good chance he was going to be in high school too. Taking this chance into consideration, I went to the game to see him. No other reason to see him other than just to see him so I could have my fix, so to speak. Boy, did that ever end up being a bad idea! I watched him play the entire game, talked to a couple of people who I knew and that also were friends with him who had gone too, and then after the game, I waited on the side of the gate where I knew his team would leave thru, talking to a friend of mine who was teasingly flirting with me (Long story short, he picked on me but thought he could do so by telling he liked me and wanted to go out with me, at least I think that's what he was doing, I never really figured him out). The guy I had a crush on walked towards me, saw me, stopped a few feet in front of me, and kissed his girlfriend, a girl I had hated in middle school because I was jealous she had him and I didn't. And that was it, the big event I needed to break free from my crush on him. I was crushed by a crush. It hurt so much at the time but honestly, I am so relieved it happened. Had it not, who knows what would have happened to me then, I just know I would not have ended up with him because I was not his type. He liked pretty blonde girls and that wasn't me. But let it be known that I learned from that mistake.

The next year, things were different. I was wearing out, getting tired of being the good girl, tired of working so hard to mentally fight myself every day to stay focused, to do well in school, and to make everyone proud of me because of how well I was doing. Trying to keep up with everyone else's standards for me as well as my own was exhausting. Even though I was still on medication for my ADD, I was still battling myself. It only helped so much as I got older and even though my doctor kept upping my dosage every year, it wasn't enough. In the winter of my sophomore year, three of my classmates were in a tragic car accident where one died on impact, one died before the paramedics could get there and the third made it out alive but in a critical state. This has relevance, trust me. That's when things were noticeably changing for me. From being mentally exhausted from my battles, add on being made fun of for the littlest things, and now add on this loss that affected the whole class, I was burning out, and fast. My change started out small with my grades dropping in classes except in those I actually liked, then it got more drastic. I stopped wearing so many colors and started wearing way more black, and I started wearing black makeup. By the start of my junior year, I had changed completely, I went goth. I had even started going by a new name amongst my friends and teachers, Ruka, and I was happy again. I was finally happy with who I was. I was completely burned out and had stopped working so hard in my classes I didn't really have a whole lot of interest in. The classes I actually enjoyed, such as any of my art classes, creative writing class, parenting or child development, I actually did really well in because they were my favorites. I loved my history class but I couldn't focus enough to do well because I was a senior in a class full of juniors and they were all loud and disruptive which was incredibly distracting for me. So when graduation came around, I just barely graduated with mostly D's. But I had graduated.

PART 5: And Now!

Graduation didn't really change much for my life. I was finally free from school and from teachers not really knowing how to handle someone like me, no matter how hard my parents or I tried to tell them. I had such a hard time in school, with all the teachers not really understanding me, not getting the help I needed, and just not having a good experience altogether because I had been made fun of so much. So with all that in mind, I had things I had wanted to do in life, I had a plan in mind for my life but all the bad experiences I had had in school, held me back and stopped me from continuing my education. It wasn't all bad, in the end though.

6 months after graduation, I moved back to my home state, volunteering most of my time at an elementary school, helping out in the library where my grandmother worked. When the school year was over, a few months later, I went on to work at a theme park I grew up going to. I met a great guy who I became fast friends with and 6 months later, we started dating. I got off my medication at the age 21, was in and out of different jobs due to bad coworkers, bad environments, or just a bad career choice entirely. We moved in together in 2015, 2016, we got engaged and 6 months later we found out we were expecting a baby. Scared and excited at the same time, we were both thrown through a loop. But we fell in love with that little jumping bean from the first time we saw it on the ultrasound. A year after our engagement, we welcomed a tiny, healthy baby boy, and we were beyond happy. In October of 2019, we, along with our 2-year-old son, our friends, and our families, celebrated our wedding after having been together for 8 and a half years.

See, I inherited my ADD from my biological father and there is a 50/50 chance that my son inherited it from me too. Watching my son grow and learn things, I notice things that he does that I did as a kid, too. He can't be tested until he's 6 so, for now, we just have to wait until then and try our best to work with his symptoms, and manage as best we can. It's not the easiest thing in the world to be a parent with ADD and having a child that could possibly have it as well. I love being a mom but handling a wild child who is mentally is possibly very much like me, is very challenging. I am still learning things about myself and how to handle them but I am also learning the same things about my son and have to handle them differently because of his age. It's hard to tell what he does is related to his age or the ADD.

PART 6: In The End

Just before the pandemic hit the US, I lost my paternal grandmother, and it hit me very hard. I mean I had lost people before, but this was way harder. This had been a woman who had embraced me as her granddaughter even before my parents got married. She loved me like her own family, even though she didn't have to. I had a close connection to her and when she died, that connection broke and I broke down. After her funeral, I went into a deep state of depression and still tend to go in and out of depression.

Let me see if I can list the rest of what I deal with. On top of my inability to focus, I deal with depression, I'm a messy person and I try to clean things but whenever I try to clean things, my mind goes, "clean this, then this, then this, then that, that those over there and, this too." And then I get overwhelmed and have to stop. So sometimes I just leave things messy because I'm too overwhelmed to clean it. I think of a million things and nothing at the same time, my mind moves a million miles a minute, it takes hours for me to get to sleep due to insomnia, I berate myself constantly when I screw up and if I continuously screw up in the same day, I get upset at myself and get depressed. I still like to read and be creative, so I hyper-focus on my writing, my drawing, coloring, or cooking. Sometimes I irritate people because I say things faster than people can process things because my mind works faster. So I have to stop myself from talking sometimes so I don't irritate people. I have mood swings when I'm working on something, I worry about everyone and everything all the time, I am very easily distracted, I get bored easily, I am very forgetful, I am very impulsive and have trouble making decisions and when I do make decisions it takes me forever to reach a final decision because I am forever second-guessing myself. Sometimes I have high energy and just want to go, go, go, other times I just want to be lazy. When I get bored, I don't really want to do anything but be left alone. There are many more that I deal with but they are hard to put into words.

Anyhow, I hope this was informative for you to read and helped you understand yourself or someone you know that has ADD/ADHD. If you know someone like this, be patient with them. If they seem distracted, check on them and see if you can help get them refocused. If you can't, work with them to find a way so they can stay interested and stay focused. It's not easy for us to stay focused and sometimes we need help.

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Ruka Gilbert

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