Adult ADHD Blog

Archives: September 2009

ADHD Skeletons in the Closet

What's life with adult ADHD like? Well for starters, my mind is like a 250-pound woman who is sluggish and needs to shed the weight.

The apartment is suspended in the air on the 16th floor of one of the ritziest zip codes in Gotham. The one bedroom feels like a palace compared to the trailer park in the 'hood, spacious, with a grand view of expensive high rises. The doormen know my name and ask me if I need any help with the groceries. I shake my head "no" and wonder why they ask. What do they want from me? It is a sublet and temporary, and I fear that I will be spoiled. How does a cat go from Sheeba cat food to the generic dried sort? I don't know.

The Sensitive Guy and I spent the entire weekend together, and he observes that I am different and says it in sort of a complimentary way. He says I am funny and I make him laugh. The things that come out of my mouth--the impulsivity that is a trademark of ADHD--make him smile and I feel, for the first time, appreciated. He is referring to my thoughts and vocabulary, which run freely like wild mustangs. Within the words and thoughts there is always a spark of color. He says that I am a natural writer, talented, gifted, and that I am creative, something that he isn't. I wonder if it is possible that I've hit the love jackpot, but it seems too good to be true.

I hid the last few Adderall pills in the drawer when he arrived, and made sure that the books and magazines related to ADHD were tucked away in the closet.

The sensitive guy is a machine when it comes to rattling off numbers and dates and factoids, and I am completely lost. I hide my boredom and the seeming inability to listen. He is well read and turns to books as solace or escape, and in the meantime I struggle to read a passage in an article and understand the meaning. I do feel retarded at times, as if my mind is like a 250-pound woman who is sluggish and needs to shed the weight.

The Sensitive Guy and I did very little this weekend, and time seemed to have retreated into the sidelines. We basically nestled in the penthouse, holed in and glued to the couch. We did not leave to eat and noshed on snacks. I've noticed that he seems to lose track of time, and that he's noted several times that he feels like he's always in a rush. Could it be that he suffers the same fate as me? The truth is that I am scared shitless about someone seeing through the shield. What if they see my warts, and realize that I am really a disorganized person who is half genius and half mess?

The friend tells me that I should continue to see where things go with the suitor. There is no commitment with the Sensitive Guy, and in many ways I find myself unconsciously pushing him away because I feel I'm not worth it, I'm not good enough--that at the end of the day, no one would want a woman whose thoughts and interests drift, and who carries around a lot of piles.

Dodge Ball in Cubicleland: The Struggle to Organize with ADHD

An adult with untreated ADHD lands a position that demands of her multitasking and prioritizing. The whole thing is laughable, and I wonder how I will survive this job.

I feel like a fourth grader in gym class all over again. I can see it so clearly in my mind when I close my eyes. I am standing against the wall clinging on to dear life as an entourage of classmates throw rubber balls at me. I try to dodge, duck, and avoid a travesty, and it is exhausting. I run around in a circle and wish I were an iguana, so I could shed my tail and run away from my predators—in this case, a new job.

The new job feels like a constant series of fires that await putting out. The He-Boss barks commands to my bosses non-stop. Although a hierarchy exists, in the end there are only two tiers, the He-Boss and us serfs. We all suffer under his wrath and what is clearly the signs of someone very unbalanced. Like I said, maybe he suffers from attention deficit disorder (ADHD).

He works 24/7 and the messages fly from his BlackBerry way past midnight. Does this guy sleep? When I come into work there is never a dull moment. I brace myself for multiple projects, a barrage of emails and phone calls, and I feel like an Octopus on roller skates—totally out of control.

I have relapsed back to bad habits including acquiring more notebooks and organizers. I will walk into a pharmacy, a bookstore, a stationary store, and reach for a legal pad, a Mead notebook or the Mercedes Benz of notebooks, aka the Moleskin. I will start a To Do list on the pad, the notebook, in Google calendar and in Microsoft Outlook, and before I know it, I've missed an appointment with a colleague, a source, a professor. I sigh and pinch myself and tell myself I'm a Fuck Up. The trouble of keeping a balanced schedule. Therein lies the vicious cycle of being a high-functioning ADHDer. I am my own worst critic and for the rest of the day I end up looking like Eeeyore the depressed donkey from Winnie the Pooh.

The good news is that the boss recently told me that my counterpart—the woman around my age who seemed to hate the job from day one—quit and is moving to another city with her boyfriend. Although this might mean more work for me, I relish feeling needed. When the workplace is chaos and someone quits, and someone else gets laid off my own flaws are less visible. By the basic economic rules of supply and demand, I can survive on the job for now even though, without proper management of the ADHD symptoms, I continue to feel like I'm being pounded. Everyone is too busy trying in this all-hands-on the-deck mode, and it gives me time to seek help. From the verbage of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," lifeline please.

I turned to an ex-boyfriend yesterday, who discovered my disorder by stumbling onto this blog. He's a Silicon Valley-entrepreneurial-type, an Ivy Leaguer, who operates much like a Richard Branson in his own right. He was the one who went through the clutter in my life and organized them into potential piles, and suggested that I get a manila folder for each.

After being thrown another pile of tasks, I texted the ex and asked him if he had time to chat. He texted back and said I sounded kind of frazzled, and he hoped that wasn't the case. I needed his advice on how to handle super-multitasking. "I hope that I stay afloat," I wrote. "You have the wind at your back now, Jane," he texted back. "All you need to do is chart your course." It gave me a brief and perhaps false sense of hope that I'd be fine in a job that is clearly all about prioritizing and multitasking. They might as well have asked me to balance their books. The whole thing is laughable. I am always forced to face my greatest fears.

ADHD Commitment Phobics: When to Press the Panic Button

Like countless other adults with ADHD, I’m drawn to the chase—and quick to misread signals in a relationship.

Once again I feel like I am spinning wheels when it comes to love. The new suitor, Sensitive Guy, is a tough read, although he says things that are obvious. The words aren't matching the actions.

On one hand, he has proclaimed his love for me. He burst into tears after we watched "The Time Traveler's Wife" together, and then again during his latest visit, when he said that, when he sees me, he sees a future that he's always wanted. It is the dialogue of Nicholas Sparks novels. He assured me that these were tears of happiness, yet the voice of reason chimes in, "When it's too good to be true, it is just that."

His gifts to me are as practical as they come. They've included a bottle of Tums (for those late-night dinners), a box of roach bait for the former apartment, and a bottle of hand sanitizer.

He's brought me to baseball games—which he loves—but he has yet to see the pool where I swim. There are hints of promises—meeting a friend, showing me the kind of homes that he loves, bringing me to see his workplace—and yet he really hasn't followed up with action. The sister says that such friends and lovers are NATO (No Action, Talk Only).

And yet I am drawn to the mystery of the unspoken, of everything unsaid. I am still drawn to the chase. How can one proclaim love for someone, and not follow this up with something certain? Why is he not asking me if I am dating other people, why doesn't he seem jealous when I mention other men who I am meeting up with, why isn't there a sense of possessiveness? I know I should focus on the new gig, but my mind inevitably shifts to pipe dreams, and wondering where I stand with the Sensitive Man. Am I being played?

It bothers me a bit that he so easily loses track of time or seems to disregard it when we talk. "Wow it's almost 2 a.m.," I'll say, though he seems to not understand the meaning of this. We end up chatting three or four hours into the wee hours of the morning, and I feel like a dead bagel when I wake up.

A bad sign was when he wanted to keep the souvenir cup from the wedding that I attended with him that had a lipstick smear on it. I am not a cup, I thought. I told him he could have it, so that I would once again be the placater, and to stop his tears.

The friend, Danielle, says I should hold onto him, but date others, too. It seems like good advice when love seems so tentative.

ADHD Relationships and Reading Cues

The psychotherapy and medication for adult attention deficit disorder take a back seat, while the personal life reaches new heights.

The Sensitive Guy is a chatterbox. Every other night he calls and we are on the phone three, four, sometimes five hours (and I am the adult with ADHD). Time flies, and he laughs and listens to everything I say. I wonder if it is because he's lonely, I mean he just moved to a new city, new job, and there's the pressure of studying for the boards. I feel like I am clothed in a veil of uncertainty with him. The overall feeling is that he's interested and yet is moving at a snail-like pace when it comes to commitment.

The bottom line though is that I am terrible at reading social cues. I wonder if it is the adult ADHD that is the cause of this, and the real reason why I feel the urge to turn to the stepmother or a friend for a second opinion. The ADHD treatment has taken a back seat since I started the job. The bottle of Adderall is empty and I've skipped on several ADHD group meetings.

I've been on cloud nine—on a bit of a honeymoon—and it seems like luck has turned around. The father returned from a trip to Asia a couple of weeks ago, and said he visited the big Buddha in Hong Kong. He kowtowed to the Buddha, and shook out a fortune from the incense can and it said, "Good luck for the rest of the year." I told him that half of the fortune was his since he did the shaking, but he said it was completely mine.

Looking back, it seems amazing that I've escaped the trailer park in the 'hood, and now have an apartment in one of the best neighborhoods in Manhattan. The 10021 zip code sits pretty, even if it is a temporary sublet. The apartment materialized through a friend, who pointed me to a middle-aged woman who spends most of her time in another state. The apartment is suspended high on the upper floors—the view at night is breathtaking and brings a single word to mind: Gotham. I've never had my own place in a two-doorman building, and the idea of an elevator vs. a walk-up still doesn't seem real.

But for the first time I am sleeping in my own apartment in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in Gotham. I fret and fear that the other shoe will drop, but then I stop myself. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and enjoy it. 10021 here I come.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Surfaces, and Chef Goes from Bad to Worse

Is is really true that adults with ADHD can't separate themselves from their emotions?

A crazy chick, one perhaps even crazier than this chick with ADHD, exists out there.

As you’ve been reading on my adults with ADHD blog, about two months ago I found a new suitor, Mr. MD (yes he’s a full blown doctor), one who I’d put in the category of pseudo-serious. There are the buddies with benefits, there are playboys, and then there is marriage material. He falls into the latter. Mr. MD is in his late 30s. He’s a good catch, over six feet tall, kind of old fashioned, still writes letters (the sort with stamps), and he actually bought a plane ticket to see me race my last open water swim. He invited me to a good friend’s wedding as his date.

And yet he has a crazy ex-girlfriend. Over the past month the woman has been calling me but not leaving messages, and texting and demanding Mr. MD’s new phone number. He apparently lost his phone, changed his number, and, somehow, she has his phone and his entire contact list. The texts have turned south and Fatal Attraction-freakish. “Please be advised that Mr. MD does not want biological children” was the last one. After I got over the chills, I laughed. I mean, who said that I’d be able to handle children anyway? I am such a ditz. I can barely get my schedule and bags in order. It would take me an entire morning to pack for an added human being. So I laughed: If he really doesn’t want kids, so what?

Nevertheless the mystery behind the insanity of this ex-girlfriend keeps bugging me. Why are men so weird? Why do we need to play these games? The other day I exploded at the Chef. He wants me at his beck and call for a drink in the bed, and the one time I want to stay over, he says to me, “Tonight isn’t a good night, I have to get up at 4:30 tomorrow.” “You’re such a jerk,” I said. “You’re selfish, do you think that I want to be up at 4:30?” I badly wanted a drink. On the New York sidewalk, we bickered, me being the drama queen and he, looking annoyed but not surprised. He’d seen such drama before from the many other women he’d dated. He basically turns off when he doesn’t agree with something. “So today I have a bad day, want to talk, want a drink but you’re too tired or busy for that. It’s always on your time. Even as a friend, you suck,” I said.

With that statement I’d proven my initial thesis that men and women can’t be true friends, and that I should never, ever have stayed over in the first place. I should have never slept with him. Thank God we hadn’t gone to fourth base. I exhaled, angry tears surfacing. “Can’t we do this another day?” he asked. “I don’t have any money on me, I have $5.” I forgot the remaining banter except that I said, twice, “OK, if we’re friends, just friends, then I’m not coming up again.” For a second I thought I saw fear in his eyes. He was like the naughty kid in the class who acts up, and wants to see if I will really tell him to sit out in the hallway. He was daring me, and now I knew I’d have to follow through. Taking a step back I could see how ridiculous this looked. The guy is a dozen years older than me and he’s telling me that he’s having a bad day and can’t afford to buy a beer. Who’s the woman here? Now, backed into a corner, I walked into the air-conditioning oasis at a Starbucks and stewed. “I apologize,” I said, when I surfaced. “For what?” he asked. “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself,” I said, and it was true.

As hard as I tried, I was not able to divorce myself from my emotions. I feared losing him as a friend, whatever that meant. I feared sticking with someone who is interested (Mr. MD). I’ve known the Chef for two years and I could not just say goodbye. I’m a kind-hearted person, perhaps to a fault. They say that about adults with ADHD, but I knew that I needed to somehow say goodbye. I’d passed the dark seasons where I needed someone’s shoulder to cry on.

We’d agreed to get together again. If I go he’ll buy a drink and we will hit the sack. I need to stop this, where are my principals. We sat at the Starbucks and drank small iced teas, and then he said he had to leave and that we’d get together soon. I nodded and gazed out the window, thinking deeply about actions and consequences. “Sure,” I said softly, but the inner voice continued, “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself. I made a mistake, not a huge one but one that I was paying for.” I needed to do the Nancy Reagan thing on Thursday and just say no.

A New Friend, A New Man

The new man has accurately and affectionately observed that I am a big-picture girl, but how can he not see my flaws or the scattered ways of adult ADHD?

I am wrapping up week two on the new job now, and, already, I feel, well, like I am flaming out. The problem is that the head honcho probably has ADHD himself, but because he's so high up on the totem pole, all of us underlings kind of smile, nod, and placate the guy, and then scatter when we have our first chance. I am somewhat protected from this for now, since I am located in the Gotham branch, while the headquarters are out in the 'burbs.

That said, I have a counterpart: a girl around my age who is also based in the Gotham office. I already sense an odd tension with her, in part because she shrugs and doesn't give clear directions on tasks that we should be dividing up. I told the father last night that I tend to get along with women who are at least a decade older than me, with kids or a husband. I have a history of butting heads with my compatriots, counterparts, or whatever you'd like to call them.

Despite the insanity at work, things are going well with the new man. We have been seeing each other for two months, despite his moving to D.C. He took the bus to see me this past weekend, and we hung out—caught a ball game, had pizza, watched TV back at my sublet apartment. He says that he's never met a woman like me—there’s something different about me that he can't explain. He says he loves my way with words, these little flashy and catchy phrases that I come up with that make him laugh. "You're so creative, and you don't even try," he says.

There is admiration, respect, and a bit of awe in these compliments, and since I've spent much of my life—including my dating life—being criticized, I am taken aback by this tsunami of compliments. "Jane you're great," he says. "Everything you do makes me happy." He is a doctor, a math whiz, the sort of person who buys a gadget or a piece of furniture, reads the instruction manual, and swiftly assembles things. He calls himself a workhorse, and he has accurately and affectionately observed that I am a big-picture girl.

I sometimes feel like I am in a dream. How can someone not see my flaws, my forgetfulness, the scattered ways of my conversations? The poor guy ends up apologizing half the time when we talk and says, "I'm sorry, I'm all over the place." Little does he know that I am the culprit. I am the one leading him into tangents and changing topics and tunes, but he's so in love that he doesn't see the holes yet.

Not Again: A He-Boss Emerges

A new job, a new boss (who may also have ADHD), and déjà vu on the first day.

After nine months of a hiatus, I found myself in the land of the employed again. The shift was sudden, and I joked to a close friend yesterday that if I'd known that layoff land would someday end, I would have taken a real vacation. (It's almost funny how humans are; I never really believed that I'd get a real job again.)

The job is a shift too, or should I say, a Tarzan-like swing into a new profession. I have gone from intrepid Sherlock Holmes investigative journalist to what the journalists call "a flack," a public relations/communications monkey who is a mouthpiece for a university. I've sold out, gone to the dark side, and entered the world of academia.

The president of the university, as I quickly learned, is the male version of the she-boss in The Devil Wears Prada. He's a big-picture guy, full of grand ideas and goals. I have a feeling that he's well paired with worker bees, but would clash horribly with his clone.

With despair and a sigh, I've already discovered that we are clones of each other. I am the younger female version of him. I had a sense that it was going to head south when I met the guy. My new boss, a seemingly laid-back housewife type, gave me a clue before the he-boss made his entrance. "Don't try to impress him," she said. "He hates that."

Well, I think I did the complete opposite. While I smiled and flashed my dimples at him, I also hammered him with a few hardball questions, pretending that I was still the reporter. What was the school's long-term strategy? He rattled off what seemed like an endless laundry list of tasks that he wanted me to tackle, of goals that needed to be achieved.

I feverishly scrawled down notes, my exhausted mind running on pure adrenaline. My faux smile started to fall apart, and I wondered what I should do next. Someone mentioned that he'd been a professor for years before becoming an administrator. I felt like an unwilling participant at a very long sermon followed by a marathon confession.

Silence. I looked around at the other people in the meeting, my boss and others who reported to the President. How did they get these tasks done, how did the guy keep track of all of these things? Well, he does have a quartet of secretaries and doesn't even know what public transportation is. Word in Cubicleland is that he'd never taken a subway in his entire life, and he had homes all around the world.

After he finished, the he-boss clasped his hands together and said, "Well, Jane, you and I are probably two of the happiest people here today." I smiled but I could feel the skin around the smile tighten like a noose around the neck. At that point I knew that I'd met my match, the male version of me, perhaps a fellow ADHDer, except he has an entourage of secretaries, maids, butlers, and a chauffeur. What have I gotten myself into?

I looked down at the legal pad packed with the gazillion things that he wanted accomplished. "So any questions for me?" he asked. I moved my lips around, the smile was still there, but fast fading. "No, just that I'm very excited to come on at such an exciting time, I mean wow, wow..." I said. The four or five other people at the meeting, including my supposed supervisor, looked a bit pale. Were they OK? Maybe he's right, we were the two happiest people here today or the only happy people.

With that he clasped his hands together and turned his attention to someone else at the table. "I want to speak with you about..." His gaze totally shifted and I followed the other meeting attendees in a single file out of the office. He did not look at me again or say another word; it was as if I were invisible. The instant I left the room, I could feel myself exhale. I did not realize it until then, but I had been suspended in a freak-out state for about an hour or so. The air felt like it was being sucked out of that room, and now I could finally breathe again, however brief it was.