My First Therapy Session

Well, I guess it all started when I watched a YouTube video, at least, that's when I first got the idea that I might have ADHD, I was only watching it as research for a book I was writing and the video was something along the lines of an ADHD test, I started keeping score just for fun but about halfway through the video after answering about 20 questions and all of them I agreed with I started to wonder about myself, everything sounded like what I thought everybody did but the way they were being asked made it sound unreasonable like, normal people don't do this even though I thought it was normal, so I started questioning myself and taking it more seriously, because there were a lot of things that I connected with like, for example, I always start these giant tasks that I'm super excited about and I plan them to within an inch of my life, so I'll go full throttle on a 10 year plan and I'll work forwards and backwards and collect 20,000 steps and ideas of how I'm going to get to this goal and I'm so invested in this planning process and then as soon as I'm finished the plan and I've reached my goal on paper I have absolutely no interest in actually achieving that goal but, again, I kind of thought everybody did that because people go on and on about creating to-do lists and I don't know how you create a to-do list unless you have 1000 steps on that list and then as soon as you look at that list it's super overwhelming and where do you even start, I'm so horrible at to-do lists I won't even attempt them anymore because they literally stop my entire life, I'll write out 100 different things that need to be done and they need to be done today, right, but once you see it all looking at you, how do you know where to start or what order to go in? it feels so overwhelming so I'd rather not have the to-do list and just get on with my day and besides, when you have a to-do list, are you supposed to do it in order? because when I start to work on something I end up doing, you know, a little bit of project A and then I move on to project B and then I move on to the dishes and then I make my bed and then I come back to project C and it all goes in this lovely flow and it works for me but it's not one step to the next, I never finish one thing before starting another, is that what you're supposed to do? I understand that some people do that, but I didn't realize that “normal” people do that, I thought it was just kind of do what you feel like doing in the moment when you feel like doing it, isn't that normal? I guess not, but anyways, I watched more and more videos after this one and realized that I do a lot of things that are stereotypically ADHD like, for example, an obvious one is I'll walk into a room and totally forget why I was there but it's OK because I'll get three or four things done while I'm in that room anyways and then I'll remember I actually have to pee so I'll go to the bathroom but probably end up washing the bathtub while I'm in there and, you know, maybe forget to brush my teeth but that's OK too because I'm just going to have a coffee in a minute anyway, followed by another 10 coffees throughout the day which I also found out is kind of an ADHD thing, I started drinking coffee when I was probably about 13 years old and I've never stopped but it doesn't seem to affect me, I can chain drink coffee all day long and I don't get the jitters and I can drink it right before bed and it's not a problem and I've learned that caffeine gives you this dopamine kick which helps to actually level you out when you're ADHD which is so interesting to me because it's backwards for most people, but that's kind of off point, some of the other things that came up in the original video that really made me think about my personal circumstances are really odd things that I never even noticed I do until it was pointed out like, for example, when you're making eye contact with a person in order to understand what they're saying to you, do you look at one eye or both eyes and if you look at both eyes, how do you do that, look at two places at once? I always just kind of switch between both eyes because I'm never sure which one to look at and I told my mom that this is how I always talk to people, just kind of looking from one eye to the next and she looked at me like I was absolutely crazy which I guess suggests she doesn't think the same way and she doesn't worry about which eye somebody is looking in and then she ended up saying, “well I guess I usually look at their mouths” and I realized I do look at lips when people are talking too, it's only when I start to think about making eye contact that I have to figure out which eye to look at and then from there I also realized that I often don't even look at a person's face, I'll look at their clothes or I'll pay attention to what their hair is doing or what their glasses look like on their face or, if I'm watching a video, I always watch TV or videos with subtitles because I have to read it or nothing sinks in but if I'm reading what they're saying it all makes sense because I can follow along with the words and I always assumed that I'm a person who likes to read, so that makes sense, but I guess it really helps me focus on what's happening, but I don't really watch a lot of movies or TV anymore, just a lot of YouTube, and that's another thing that I've learned is somewhat ADHD about me because I used to watch a lot of TV, well, growing up I watched a regular amount of TV because I was regulated by my family but when I moved out on my own I realized that I would binge on TV and I couldn't stop myself, I really have no off button, I'm very much an all or nothing person in all aspects of my life but if we're talking about TV and movies, I would start one and then, ok, Netflix is the bane of my existence because it would just keep playing! it would play the next episode or it would suggest another movie and I would just watch it and my life would be eaten away by binge watching TV even though I’d be laying there on my couch thinking about all the other things that I should be doing and sometimes even going to work, I used to do that with video games too, I distinctly remember multiple times when I got sucked into a game and ended up calling in sick to work and I've done that with books too, oh my goodness, when the Twilight books came out I read them all cover to cover and didn't sleep for days because I bought them all at once - I waited for the series to be done and then I just read and I didn't stop reading and I didn't go to school and I didn't do anything but I read in bed, I got so invested! and that’s another thing my mom thinks is really weird about me is that whenever I read a book series, I have to start from the beginning every time, so if a series has like, 15 books, when the 15th book is released, before I can read it, I have to go back to number 1 and read the first 14 again and I do this with any series that I like and I love books series', I’m absolutely devastated when a book series that I’m invested in is over, like the Outlander books, I think she’s on book 9, these are big books, I think I started reading when I was, I don’t know, 15 years old or something, and every time a new one of these giant 500 page books come out I have to start from the very beginning again or else I literally can’t read the next book, it’ll drive me crazy, and I’ll do this for any series even if I’ve just read them like, for example there’s this other series I love that has lots of books but they come out more frequently and they’re easier reads but let’s say I read the whole series and I end up on book 10, that’s the most recent book, and book 11 comes out a month later, I’ll still start from the beginning again and re-read the first 10 even though I just read them a month ago I just can’t do it any other way, but getting back to the point, I make these rules for myself and when I realized that TV was not only taking over my life but really causing major depression in me because I would become part of these people's lives and I would watch, say, a drama and if you watch one episode of a drama a week it's not a big deal but if you watch 8 hours worth of a drama, imagine watching Grey’s Anatomy for 8 hours, there's a lot of emotional stuff happening and I internalize that all in a single day, it was not good for my mental health and I was having major problems so I stopped watching TV and I stopped watching movies and I said I can only watch something if I'm with another person so, if I visit my parents or if I'm on a date or something like that or if my girlfriends want to get together and go to a movie which doesn't happen anymore but if it were to happen I'll allow myself to watch it under supervision but I cannot be trusted to have Netflix of my own so I haven't had a television in, I don't know, probably 10-15 years just because I don't need one, I know I can get Netflix and such on my computer but I just pretend that I can't because it's literally dangerous to my life, so anyway that's just one thing that I've learned is also kind of ADHD but it's also pretty good example of how I make rules for myself to help navigate my life because, like I mentioned before, that I'm kind of an all or nothing person and that goes for everything in my life, so if I'm in a fitness mode I'll be all about fitness and I'll work out every day and all the other aspects of my life take it back seat to me being fit or if I'm in a work mode I'll work 16 plus hours a day and I love this when I'm in the zone, that is all I want to do so it's not a hardship on me except for that, you know, all the other aspects of my life aren't getting attended to but, depending on circumstances it's usually OK, I also do it for things like eating so, for example, I'm now a vegan and I went vegan probably close to six years ago because I realized that all the animal products I was eating were pretty much the worst, I would spend $80 on a cheese and deli meat spread and eat it all myself in a single sitting so, not only completely unhealthy and anti-nutritious, but also really expensive and bad for my bank account and I would go buy a package of bacon and eat it in one day, I have no off button! I would start and then I would finish and then it would be over so I realized that's probably not very healthy and I'm usually quite a health conscious person so I didn't want that in my life and I found that it was easiest to just say no to all animal products than to try and say ‘oh well, you can have organic chicken breast but you can't have pepperoni,’ because I know I am not going to live up to that, it's a very slippery and quick slope from chicken to pepperoni and then it's all pepperoni bacon, there's no middle ground for me but on the flip side saying no is super easy and I'm very happy and healthy, I get my protein, I know I'm getting all my vegetables, I don’t feel that I’m missing out, I get way more variety in my diet and I do better cooking and all of that kind of stuff so it's all-in-all awesome, but it's still an all or nothing situation and I’m not really in control of that, there's no middle ground in my life at all and it’s the same with alcohol - I only drink beer or wine, I don't drink any other alcohol and I find that if I'm out at a party or something and I have a beer in the afternoon, I have a very hard time stopping later if I'm having fun, not because of the alcohol, but because of the fun and the adrenaline, but as soon as I'm no longer with people I have no interest in continuing to drink and I'm not ever drinking to get drunk, I actually hate the feeling of being drunk, I'm really only drinking for the social factor and the taste of the beer itself or when I’m at home by myself I have a rule where I'll drink a glass of wine every night but I don't drink anything else and again I'm not drinking to get drunk I'm just drinking because I really enjoy the experience of wine but it's an all or nothing thing because I can't have wine once a week, it just doesn't work like that for me, but I did go an entire year without drinking anything at all and was completely fine and I do that occasionally just to be sure I’m not an alcoholic or dependent on my beer or wine but for me, for normal life, I just decide that I'll drink a bit extra when I'm with friends which happens not very often these days especially with COVID but I'll also allow myself to have like wine every night, as long as it's only 1 glass I feel like that's fine because there are these rules that I set for myself, I first learned about the rules because many years ago I found this podcast by Peter Shankman, I can't remember the name of the podcast now, Faster Than Normal, I think, and I found it super fascinating at the time though I had zero idea that I may possibly have ADHD but I found the podcast fascinating and I listened to it, of course, in a binge listening way and the whole premise of the show is Peter Shankman has ADHD and he considers it his superpower and he interviews other people who also consider ADHD their superpower but they discuss ways that they use coping mechanisms and devices in their life in order to function at their highest potential and I always remembered this one episode where Peter Shankman was talking about how he used to spend so much time trying to figure out what to wear every day and he finally just said, “you know what, I'm a jeans and black T shirt guy and this is what I'm wearing for the rest of my life,” and that saved him hours a day and that stuck with me like you wouldn't believe! I used to have a bit of a shopping problem, I had this giant closet which 10 people should have been able to fit their clothes in plus I had one of those wide dressers plus I had one of the tall dressers plus I had two end tables and I always had laundry everywhere so I had enough clothes to outfit a small nation and I'm not even really exaggerating, it was insane, and yet every single day I would go into this minor panic attack because I couldn't find anything to wear, I felt like nothing was appropriate for that day and I would end up wearing basically the same thing over and over and over again so when I decided to sell everything and go travel, which I’ll come back to in a minute, I decided, well I'm just going to have to downsize because obviously I can't carry everything in a suitcase but what I'm going to do is just get a certain amount of yoga pants and a certain amount of T shirts and then in different seasons I'll have to get a certain amount of, say, sweatshirts or tank tops, and I'm going to get them in only black, white, or gray - that was another tip from the podcast because you can do laundry so easily if everything is just black, white, or gray, or if you have one color that you pick as long as you don't have to worry about cross-contaminating colors, it makes life so easy and you never have to think about what you're going to wear or what you're going to match because everything automatically goes together and I've been doing that since I started traveling and it was one of the biggest game changers in my life, so yeah, I don't know that I'm spontaneous exactly but I make split second decisions so, for example, many, many years ago my boyfriend and I, we were living together and we broke up and I said I was going to keep the apartment for a variety of reasons but then I realized that the rent on that place was more than if I were to buy an apartment and have mortgage payments and so as soon as I realized that, literally 5 minutes later, I had called my friend who's a mortgage broker, the next day he had set me up with a realtor and within a couple weeks we were looking at places for me to buy and it was right over the Christmas season so it took longer than I wanted it to but by February I had picked a place and bought it and I moved in on February the 15th and it was so exciting because one of the things that I've done my entire life is change my room all the time, or my house or wherever I am, I have to reorganize it all the time because I need it to feel like a new space and I get really bored with it and kind of anxious if it just stays the same too long so I was really excited to have my own apartment that I owned and could do whatever I wanted to, so immediately I ripped cupboards off the wall and tore up the floor and all that fun stuff, and I tidied it up enough to be livable but I was way better at demolishing than I ever was at putting it back together so five years later some of this projects were still not finished but, I would say monthly, one of the rooms would change, I would either switch my living room around or change up my bedroom or reorganize my kitchen cupboards or whatever, it's just an example of another thing that I'm told is quite ADHD, a little personality quirk, which I find interesting because, again, I thought everybody did that I don't understand people who just put things one way and stay like that but my mom is totally like that, she hates change and she doesn't like anything to change ever so we're different in that sense, but going back to the whole traveling situation, in March one year I was talking to a person I know in the UK who's a giant business guru and he was having a get together workshop type thing and he asked me if I was going to come and I was like, oh my gosh I'm so in debt, no, I can't just fly off to the UK and he asked why not and the way he said it made me wonder, well why not? and all my excuses went out of my head and a week later I was on a plane to England, it was my first international travel, well, outside of North America, and while I was there I was given a lot of ideas about the kind of stuff I was doing, freelancing on the side and my career, and I realized it wasn't really what I wanted to be doing anymore so I got back and it worked out that within a month or so my career of 11 years gave me an out where they were willing to shut my division down, so I could have stayed with the company but I also could have left, so I took the opportunity to leave, I left my job and instantly decided I was just going travel the world which is something I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was a kid I've always been a big reader and one of my favorite things to read has always been about different countries and cultures and adventures and stuff, I've always been a really adventurous person in my head but in real life I never was, all my friends would go on vacations and the idea of going somewhere for two weeks and then having to come home sounds like torture to me so I never wanted to do that but I always said, when I have an opportunity to travel I'm going to do it, but in a way that I don't have to come back, like I can do it on my time how I want do it without needing to come back for a job or family or whatever, so I was all of a sudden at this place where that was potentially a reality, my career was over and I went home and I talked to one of my friends and, this is probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life but I found a new home for my pug who was literally the love of my life but I found her an amazing home and I'm sure she's more happy there than she was with me but anyways, then I sold my condo and I went travelling and this all took about a month and a half I think, that decision process, and I left and spent three years traveling the world, going to all these different countries and I would still be doing that if it hadn't been for COVID, I was in Costa Rica when COVID became a really big problem and one of my girlfriends texted me one day and saying, “they're closing borders you have to get home!” so I was on a plane back home within 24 hours of that phone call and I've been in my hometown ever since which is cool because I get to spend a lot of time with my grandparents and I haven't really been able to do that in the past 20 years because I lived in a different town from them so I see them every day now which is amazing, I get to hear all their stories and I'm really grateful for the time that I get to spend with them but at the same time I feel like a caged animal, as I'm sure everyone does right now, but regardless it's only been in this time that I've considered maybe I do have ADHD so I've been watching and watching more videos and I'm on TikTok now which is probably not wise because I lose hours a day to it but I find these accounts and they compare ADHD brains versus neurotypical brains and every time I watch them I think, oh my goodness I thought everybody did that! I watched one recently where this guy was talking to his friend about his thoughts and how for the ADHD guy his thoughts just don't stop which I kind of felt was obvious - how do you not have thoughts? I mean, you might not have the same thought forever but you have a different narrative running in your brain and it never stops, I don't understand what it means to not have thoughts happening like, is it just, I don't know, I feel like that would be the end of your life to just have your brain stop producing thoughts, it doesn’t really make sense to me, I didn’t think that was possible, I really didn’t think it ever happened, I thought the only time your brain would stop thinking was when you’re dead, but I guess, for some people, I don't, I don't know, I don’t know how it happens but I guess they can just stop thinking about things and that's normal for some people, and I saw another one that, again, I thought everybody did this, but say you’re starting a task and you decide, I'm going to start that at 7:00 AM in the morning, OK, and then it's five after seven and you accidentally didn't start on time, so you make another time that you're going to start like 7:15 or 7:30 or even eight o'clock and you plan to start at that time instead of starting right now because you can't just start at a weird moment in time, like six minutes after 7, but then if you accidentally go over that time again because you're distracted by doing something else during that waiting period then you have to reset that timer again and start at 9:00 o'clock instead and I thought everybody did that, I don't know how to not do that, it doesn't make sense how to not be this way, I guess I theoretically understand the idea of ‘you just start’ but I don’t think I can physically just start – I don’t get it, I can’t do it, I don’t understand and there are other things that I've found only through diving deeper now that I’m intrigued, like, for example, I'm a bouncer - my legs are always bouncing, I'm not really a fidgeter, sometimes I touch my face a lot or I play with my hair a lot but I'm not a fidget-spinner kind of person but I do bounce a lot, I'll be sitting in my grandparents kitchen and they have this giant grandfather clock and I'll bounce so much that'll make the clock go off and then I have to apologize it's this big thing but because of that I was researching one day and I discovered that restless leg syndrome is also sometimes linked to ADHD, or not necessarily ADHD but it's a dopamine disorder which ADHD, as far as I understand is, is also a dopamine disorder, and I get restless leg syndrome so bad at night, I literally wake up in the middle of the night and start doing yoga because my hips are in agony and I need to stretch them, it's not just moving them, some people say that just walking around is good and it helps but I feel like I want to pull my hips out of their sockets in order to stop like the weird ache in my bones that I don’t know how else to describe and apparently that's also like an ADHD thing or a co-morbid symptom so I found that interesting and some of the more serious stuff I've learned that is that personal relationships can really be impacted by ADHD, which I find makes me the most sad because I’ve often felt that I'm a really terrible friend because when I lived in Victoria we had girls nights every week and I was always on top of that and I was often the one getting everybody together and I always felt this really tight connection with my best girlfriends but since I started travelling, I don't forget about them but I don't keep in touch with them, it's really, really terrible because I think about them all the time but for some reason the idea of sending emails or texting, it's so easy, and sometimes it really is easy and I just write email and I can't wait to get a reply from them but sometimes it causes me such anxiety, I start to think, OK, I’ll email but then they'll reply and I'll be waiting for that and then I'll have to reply again and I feel like it's swallowing my whole life because I have to send this one email and it becomes really difficult to maintain these relationships even though I truly want to and I miss my friends so much and, what’s that noise? It’s been half an hour already? OK, so…where do we go from here?