Comment by kstrauser
4 months ago
I wish I could go back in time and drill this into my own head. I evolved a large set of coping mechanisms that let me get by alright without medicines. I was putting food on the table and a roof over our heads. Still, it took a phenomenal amount of mental effort just to get started with critical things. I'd have all my tax receipts scanned in and organize and just needed to make an appointment to send it all to my accountant, but I'd sit on that until the last minute. I knew it needed to be done. There was no reason not to do it. I wanted to do it. I was ready to do it. And yet, I couldn't freaking do it.
It was the equivalent of running a marathon carrying an 80 pound backback. Yeah, with enough work you can do it, but you're not going to be setting any records.
Stimulant meds have been lifechanging for me. I'm not magically doing more than I was before. Those coping mechanisms took me pretty far. It's that I'm doing it all without delaying them until they became emergencies, which is what it use to take before I could even get started. My life is so much easier and less stressful now.
I took that backpack off and how I can run the same race as everyone else. And you know what? When you've been practicing your whole life with an extra weight on your back, and you take it off, sometimes it's surprising how fast you can go.
In before "of course it's easy, you're on meth!" Yeah, that sounds reasonable if you know nothing about ADHD. I've talked about this here before, but Aderrall has no noticeable stimulant effect for me at all. I feel a good cup of coffee much more than my daily meds, which is to say, not a lot. It doesn't give me extra energy or alertness or anything else. It just tells my brain, hey, did you know you're allowed to get started on things before they become emergencies?
Late diagnosis here (38 when diagnosed, now 42)… I agree with everything you said. I had an amazing set of systems and coping mechanisms in place to get through life without realizing I was playing the game on hard mode. In retrospect, the signs were all there my whole life but I just hadn’t had the realization.
Now that I’m medicated (methylphenidate), I still lean on those systems but they serve me very very well. I remember details much better than I did, but don’t always remember them long-term. The note taking system and habit that I developed years ago is now… supercharged because I am so much better about keeping good notes.
On the coffee/meds thing, I agree. I don’t get a buzz from the medication the way I do from coffee, but before my diagnosis I was drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee every day just to stay focused, with the associated buzz and jitters. I still have a cup or two of coffee in the morning, but drinking anywhere near as much as I used to is pretty much unbearable.
Wow I could have wrote this exactly excepy for a 1 year difference in diagnosis.
It's hard to reconcile with how difficult it was previously. Life on hard mode is a term ived used too. I try to think that it was all to make me stronger for the second half of my life, but I still regularly wonder what could have been.
One of my favourite lines: “I could solve differential equations all day long, but I couldn’t remember to pay my phone bill”
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Also with you (both) on this one in pretty much every way too. I'd justify hard mode that I loved challenges (and I did, just not always in the right areas).
I try not to look/think back too much - I had (sort of still have) a very successful career but the costs associated with getting there were and are still being paid for.
Getting treatment and therapy has really helped improve my ability to be present, though still such a battle.
> I took that backpack off and how I can run the same race as everyone else. And you know what? When you've been practicing your whole life with an extra weight on your back, and you take it off, sometimes it's surprising how fast you can go.
The way I've always described this to people is that before, in order to get started on anything I first had to bang my way head first through a solid brick wall. It was painful and unpleasant and an absolutely absurd amount of effort. It didn't matter if the thing I was trying to do was "a load of laundry" or "build a shed"... same brick wall. That's pretty crippling in day-to-day life.
And then once I get through it I wasn't in the clear. The first interruption, the first unexpected thing that came up... was another brick wall I had to bash my head through.
The medication doesn't take away the walls, but what it has done is turn them all into drywall. I still have to bang my head through a lot of walls, but after decades of going head first through brick walls everything just seems _comically easy_.
I really wish someone had identified this sooner so I could have gotten treatment earlier. I'm grateful my life has gone as well as it has. I don't have nearly as many things to look back on with regret as other people that were diagnosed late in life. It does suck to realize that everything really didn't need to be so difficult. And some habits and coping mechanisms that allowed me to function aren't exactly healthy for me or those around me, and those are hard to unlearn.
Wait... Do I have ADD? I've never thought so, because I have three close friends who do (diagnosed and medicated), and they've never described it like this. And, like, they're always starting things they don't finish. I have massive trouble starting things, just like you describe, and have built (effective, I'll point out) systems like sibling commenters describe. This whole thread has bent my brain a bit.
I found out I had ADHD because I was catching up with a friend who had been diagnosed since I last saw them. They'd been seeing a psychologist, taking medication, and generally addressing it. They were describing their experiences, strategies they had developed prior and now recognized, and others they were working on with the psychologist for addressing challenges, etc.
I spent the entire conversation essentially going "Wait, what?! That's not normal?" and "Wait, what?! That's a coping strategy, not what everyone has to do to get through their life?".
Called my GP, told them my concern, they referred me to a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist asked me a bunch of questions and was like "Yep, you have ADHD. You have, naturally for someone your age, developed a lot of coping strategies, but those are also consistent with ADHD." and sent me back to the GP to start medication.
So, do you have ADHD? I don't know!
I'd suggest doing some reading about ADHD symptoms, about other people's experiences, and if a lot of it feels really relatable... maybe talk to a medical professional about it. If you do have it, even if you're coping successfully, there's no reason life needs to be as hard as it is.
I had that kind of a revelation right before I started the ball rolling. My kid has ADHD, and I didn’t “get” it for a while. When they described things like you mention, I assumed that was the way it was for everyone. I was completely shocked to find that no, it’s not, or at least not to that degree.
Well, huh.
(Similar story with asthma. I was training for a marathon relay. My doc asked how that was going, and I said it was fine, except you know how after a mile or so, you get cotton mouth and tunnel vision? No. No, they did not know. And that’s how I ended up with a pre-run inhaler, and immediately shaved a minute off my mile pace. Holy crap. Not everyone feels like they’re dying mid-run? Why did no one tell me?)
Does it mean you DON'T have ADHD if you get a stimulant affect from Adderall?
No. Brain chemistry is complex and different stimulants hit different people different ways. It took like 5 medications to find one that didn’t make me feel like a tweaker.
Originally diagnosed as a teen, was put on Adderall XR and it made me feel like an empty shell every day I took it - stopped taking it after a few months, figured the diagnosis was wrong. Last year after realizing many of my struggles in my adult life indicated I did, in fact, have ADHD, I went to my primary care provider and...well, duh, I do have ADHD. Started taking lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse) and, while it doesn't magically make many years of learned habits vanish, I can actually function like a normal adult, or, as another poster in this thread said, I can get shit done without it being an emergency (or something I'm inextricably interested in that would immediately cause me to go into hyperfocus mode.)
Hell, caffeine barely does anything for me if I'm not taking my meds - I could pound energy drinks and go to bed 30 minutes later. Meanwhile, unless I have built up a tolerance, nicotine would give me a legitimate rush, and I unknowingly self-medicated that way for years (though it was substantially less effective).
The human brain is funny, it doesn't matter if you're ND or not, different stimulants affect people in wildly varying ways.
Similar experience here. I usually take the weekend off from the medication. Sometimes it serves as a reminder of what it was like before.