I always blamed my lack of social skills, inability to organize time or possessions, and inability to pay attention to small details on the fact that I was raised by two mentally ill parents. My mom is a compulsive hoarder, just like the ones on TV. I grew up in a house filled with trash. If I tried throwing any of it away my mom would yell at me and punish me so badly that I stopped trying to clean up. My father is paranoid and he wouldn't let me go to my friends' houses to play because he said I'd get sexually molested by my friends' fathers or older brothers. My parents wouldn't let me bring anyone over to my house as a child because the house was a mess. So I grew up very isolated and never really learned social skills.

So I chalked all these things up to being an "adult child" of seriously mentally ill parents.

But then I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI.

Now, I've been diagnosed as a lot of things since I was 13. (I'm 25 now.) The longest diagnosis that's stuck with me is bipolar disorder. But now that I'm stable (I've been in a relationship for over a year, I get my bachelor's degree on May 6, etc), my psychiatrist is saying that I might not have been bipolar in the first place. She's saying that the abuse and trauma I suffered as a child could have mimicked the symptoms of bipolar disorder.

(I am a living example of why you should ask a child some questions about what's going on at home BEFORE putting them on powerful psychiatric mediation.)

So...I've got a lot of diagnoses. Bipolar. PTSD. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Personality Disorder. ADHD-PI. My diagnoses are different depending on if you're talking to my psychiatrist, my therapist, or my general doctor. Psychiatry is far from a perfect science.

But out of all the diagnoses I've ever had, ADHD-PI makes the most sense. ADHD-PI makes more sense the more I read about it.

And I know this may sound twisted, but I'm glad there's a possibility that my problems with organization, social interaction, and attention to detail could be due to ADHD-PI rather than due to the abuse I suffered while growing up. If all these things are due to ADHD-PI, then I can find a community of people who experience the same things i do. I don't have to be alone.

I found this site when I Googled "social skills for women". I'm glad I ended up here. I hope I can find tools to help me deal with life here, and that I can possibly help other people by sharing my experiences and knowledge.

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