Thursday 11th January 2024 – Today was supposed to be the big day. I had a plan, one I spent days allowing to coalesce. This was a regrouping of sorts, a delay by any other means, because at one point I was already on a roll, with a clear but undocumented sense of vision and direction. I allowed myself to be momentarily startled and caught off guard and that was, typically, all I needed to forget half the plan and second guess the rest into oblivion. Why? Because after publishing my first post (which was meant to be on a completely different topic but then hijacked itself and declared its own manifesto, I made the mistake of celebrating on my personal Facebook account.
“I just did X!” says I. “Still a long way to go! I’m so happy. Definitely not ready to share, but happy”.
I’m coming to realise that a normal neurotypical (NT) person would feel nothing but complimented and enthused by a couple of friends completely ignoring the ‘not ready to share’ bit and blatantly asking for the link, and I felt those things too, although at the same time it felt exactly the same as prodding my infantile inner people-pleaser with a sharp stick. NTs might focus on early interest as flattering and encouraging and kind and generally a good sign of things to come, whereas my first problem, besides feeling incredibly misunderstood and exposed by their possible misinterpretation of non-existent subtext, was trying to come up with jovial, warm and unique ways to say “err, no.” The more I prevaricated around that, the more a nasty little foot-stamping fantasy arose suggesting shouting at people to “bleeping read the bleeping post and stop treating me like my boundaries don’t bleeping exist” ie the scorched-earth option, could be the easiest way out.
I do know they were being genuine, and kind, and complimentary, and I do know I am so lucky to have friends like that.
But.
All at the same time, this surprise outcome and my lack of prepared response (okay maybe just my lack of preparedness full stop) felt deflating, isolating (because I don’t understand my friends and didn’t predict this and am therefore a rubbish friend myself) and mildly traumatising. These simple acts of friendliness triggered brow-furrowing levels of fear and anxiety in me that completely blocked the creative flow and sent me back to the drawing board, in fact, sent me scurrying off to create, recreate and triple-check multiple drawing boards, for days.
Executive Dysfunction
NTs look at the external manifestation of my internalised meltdowns, and call them laziness, or at very least, procrastination To be fair, on the surface this one did look exactly like three days of intense Netflix addiction and doomscrolling. Internally however, (entirely due to EFT tapping and other strategies that stopped me wanting to quit altogether) it felt like my brain was a Doctor Strange Magic Multiverse app on Windows 95, a frequently frozen, blue-screen-of-death version of knitting together, reordering and sifting a myriad possible universes (topics, tones, angles, and purpose (what, who, how and why) within the Adult ADHD niche), running actions and outcomes, good and bad, testing voice ‘A’ for audience ‘A’ etc, and every other permutation down to voice ‘Joyful anarchy’ to audience ‘This needs an intervention’ or voice ‘Powerless people-pleaser-puppy’ to audience ‘Go chew a brick’.
The title of the above section was originally Spades and Shovels, which made complete sense to my brain when I was writing, but I appreciate that no garden tools were actually in the story and this will confuse SEO engines as well as normal people. It’s only a section header, it only indicates ‘new bit’ to stop this looking completely interminable. It doesn’t matter whether you see spade and shovel as two names for variations of the same thing, or whether you know that one needs care and regular sharpening while the other is flimsier, less effective and also more of a blunt instrument. I am a walking pick-and-mix of analogies and metaphors and I talk in terms of contrast and connection, never about the subjects but about the feeling of the twist between the two. Neither the ground nor the roof, but what it feels like to be on the middle rungs of the ladder. It is the only way I can make sense of the world. That too, I am grateful to finally learn, is ADHD.
Here’s what (else) you need to know about ADHD brains in this sort of circumstance:
We mask.
We mask. Not consciously, not unnaturally, but as ingrained good manners. This, at least, is a coping strategy developed from the outset in order to fit in pleasantly with those we value, and to keep us safe.
Masking is not at all selectively dishonest or secretive, it is selectively defensive, protective, diplomatic (although heaven knows we’re not known for diplomacy), and discrete. I’ve just shown you how weird a mind can be and still get a woman through a happily bumbling, mostly employed life all the way to 60 before diagnosis, without any outwardly noticeable disasters. Plenty of learning how to sob silently behind a cubicle door, but meh, life. After a while we only ever let a facet of our true selves shine once it feels absolutely safe to do so, and I say we because social media has allowed me to witness how many thousands applaud when someone else says the same.
I say ‘only ever’, and I mean ‘deliberately’. There are obvious momentary exceptions in my own life where I have accidentally overshared and then dared not stop oversharing in case it made it obvious that I a) care, and b) hurt, and generally wanted the ground to swallow me up.
Regarding trauma and ADHD, people continue to argue whether this level of trauma is what causes ADHD, or whether the trauma is what comes from a childhood of being mostly unacceptable (mostly all the time), with no clue why, due to already being different. I was planning to do a whole post on the nature vs nurture debate and why it is always both in a self-compounding vicious circle that also influences and is influenced by generational evolution and gene expression, but, as above, I slept on a bed of anxiety and decided that, for now, I’d just sound too puffed up in my own self-importance. Here are my 18 Reasons why ADHD is not so divergent as many think.
Either way, as fairly broad spectrum aka changeable personalities, it is rarely safe or polite to be out and about as an obvious walking self-contradiction, however easy that would be. It exhausts others and increases the sense of rejection and isolation, not to mention exclusion from situations where we would be an absolute asset on another day. We get enough of that as kids thank you very much. Consequently we develop entirely different arenas in which to politely let ourselves be:
- technical
- intellectual
- practical
- empathic
- challenging
- cheeky
- religious
- strident
- goofy, etc
Trying something new, and we are addicted to trying new things, puts us in a difficult situation and heightens the sense of danger or at very least confusion if those worlds threaten to overlap. Worst case scenario we risk a public hanging of sorts, a joint venture in ridicule and rejection. Obviously nobody can please all the people all the time, however ADHD adults lack the resources to settle happily into one preferred group and stay in the safety of that. We might be hypersensitive to possible rejection and shame, but we have this inability to stay away from the clown outfit.
Having spent an entire blog post journaling a critique of what the bleep my mind was doing on the sofa for four days in a prime example of Executive Dysfunction, here at last, is what I meant to say when I wrote the first line.
Are you ready?
This morning I had a plan. Our two small dogs had other plans, specifically finding a hole made by a fox under the neighbour’s six foot tall fence at the back of our property, and disappearing through it. And then going silent. We got them back twenty minutes later and I spent the rest of the morning furiously cutting back Russian vine and brambles to give us human access to the hole and any chance of patching it. And now its 4pm, because as everyone on the spectrum knows, one big event per day is enough to blue-screen an ADHD Roomba brain (too many apps open, not enough RAM).
Thats it. One sideways event equates to taking up the whole day. Haven’t even walked the dogs yet and now it’s getting darker and colder outside. The important thing was to break the blog silence and type something, however vacuous, rambling, insecure, boring or likely to get removed again as soon as have an overnight mental defrag and read it in the morning. But I did it. and that’s MASSIVE. I achieved.
I hope that’s okay by you.