Granted in the grand scheme of time periods where I don’t blog… this is pretty short.
I was doing on of my favorite things today, cruising the adhd subreddit, and I cam across a post about how people with ADHD, like yours truly, don’t do habits. They do streaks. This was like a lightbulb coming on inside my little brain. It made so much sense. I am really good at starting something, going hard at it, and then just stopping. For no reason.
Now I know. I don’t need to think about it in terms of building a habit, instead I need to work on increasing my streak. Now I just have to figure out how to get a streak going for things I don’t like doing. But that is a problem for another day.
While I was thinking about streaking snort my mind wondered to a weird thing my brain does. As is common with a lot of people with ADHD I am not always great at remembering things. Out of sight out of mind is very real for me. I don’t put things away because then they are gone forever. I don’t read text immediately because then the notification goes away (I did recently learn that you can mark things as unread in iOS, which has been a game changer for me), and I don’t remember peoples names.
This hasn’t been a huge problem for me because I am charming AF and can usually fake my way through things. But it does make me feel bad. Not the names so much but other things about my friends. Birthdays are one that really bothers me, how do you ask someone who you have been friends with for 20+ years what their birthdate is? Especially when they always remember yours. It is a weird anxiety that I have but I just push it down (which is totally healthy and won’t cause problems later). I know that I need to just ask people and then put it in a calendar, but then I have to remember to ask people.
I have taken to thinking about my ADHD as having an outdated system that has a bad habit of installing updates, failing, and reverting to a previous back-up overwriting things I am supposed to remember. I used to write things down a lot, but for some reason when I write it down it is out of my brain and unless I find where I wrote it down I won’t remember it anyway. The one trick that works most of the time is telling Sarah to remind me.
I think this works because the one person I never want to disappoint is Sarah. My brain doesn’t remember that I asked her to remind me, it just knows that it is important and that Sarah is involved. So it writes that immediately in memory. One nice thing about this is Sarah doesn’t have to remember it or remind me. My brain is like SARAH NEEDS US TO RECALL THIS INFORMATION, YOU ARE AWAKE NOW, HERE IS THE INFORMATION. It doesn’t always work but when it does it is nice.
The only advice I have for anyone who has ADHD is that you have to figure out your brain and what works for it. A lot of it doesn’t make sense to non-ADHD people because, let’s face it, it doesn’t make sense. My business partner knows that he can lie to me about due dates for projects, tricking me into getting the work down sooner, and I won’t get mad. I told him to do it. And the best part is, when he does it I don’t even think about how he might be lying. My brain just thinks, LETS GET THIS DONE.
This year (or maybe two) have been a bit of a shit show for me health wise. I have been diagnosed with a stupid chronic illness that limits me physically at times. I am a very physical person with hobbies and fidgeting so it has been a little hellish. One of the positives has been that I have become more introspective on my mental and physical health and have been trying to find things that work for me. This has been positive overall but it also makes me mad at times because I don’t want to hurt all the time or feel trapped in my anxious brain or not be able to recall things easily.
What it really comes down to is I want an easier mode to life. I want to be able to get up off the couch without groaning. I want to have someone tell me something and recall it easily when I need to. I want to use a goddamn planner for more than a day. But, alas, it is not meant to be. So all that I can do is do the best with what I have. I remind myself everyday that I have a wonderful support system, a great career, and cats.