Thank you for visiting this blog. You surprise and honour me, as I have no intention of promoting this until I have my act together.
I do not have my blog act together. I am still learning layouts, how to remove comment sections and most frustratingly, how to find one voice and stick with it.
That was it. While I’m here:
ADHD and the undefined voice
I simply cannot find the name for that sister to echolalia, the inability to stop oneself from talking with someone with a different accent to my own, without echoing the same vowel sounds. Its a nightmare, its automatic, uncontrollable and brings a horrid fear that this wonderful person whose personality has engaged me in such rapport, might instead think I am mocking them.
This named/unnamed skill or flaw or whatever you want to call it, has a written counterpart. It doesn’t matter what I read, if I engage with it at all, I come away using the same language. Drown me in other peoples blogs and it’ll take me five minutes to write in short, fun, compassionate sentences. When I spent an afternoon writing my first post, I threw myself into multiple research documents to make sure I had the facts and then wrote my conclusion in a way that ‘felt’ simple, straightforward, common sense, easily read. Looking back it is incredibly formal instead and not how I meant to come across at all, but then I took on the language patterns of the research materials.
NLP Modelling as an ADHD lifestyle
Once upon I time I studied NLP to Master Practitioner level only to have a surprise final home study element thrown in before certification – to model someone’s behavior and state, a way of being that I desire, such as keeping a desk tidy. ADHD gifts us to model whoever we are in rapport with, provided that person is right there. Without them we’ll phase out or model someone else, because fun. Because meta state is our default, and coming down to ground in one place is our struggle.
I never got my certificate. It took me long enough to realise I was going to have to fake wanting someone’s behaviour, just to be able to define the steps to achieve it. The impossible part was modelling my own behaviour devoid of the purpose instilled by my human surroundings, well enough to describe the journey, the point A. Where I was coming from was harder to define than where I was pretending to want to go to. The last straw, was realising all this would achieve would be learning new names for tiny new steps in an already instinctual method of relating to the world.
ADHD students as litmus paper
As with any ADHD-er at school – put me in with the so-called good kids or the bad kids and I will simply, uncontrollably, be that, on speed. Best of the best plus 10% , or vise versa. And people wonder why diagnosis is more likely in poorer communities.
ADHD sensitivity and bluntness as the same thing
As with many of us diagnosed with ADHD as adults, a combination of support systems and IQ / ability to consciously either fit in or not self-implode have masked the condition for many years. Pulling your metaphorical hat down against the storm and ploughing forward demands too much energy and requires habituated and normalised self-denial, depression, martyrdom, sarcasm, masking and gallows humour. We veer between opening our mouths and putting both feet in at once, with ‘too much’ honesty and bluntness by neurotypical standards, and conversely being hyperalert to the tiniest of tonal and physiological changes in others.
Both are ends of the same stick. Positive, active and enthusiastic contribution to group consensus (because agreement and therefore an element of body mirroring is air, to us) and long-winded attempts to convert a 100% kinaesthetic experience of life into that most alien of concepts, a sequential and short response to a request for detail, devoid of metaphor are both ways to overshare and, depending on the eyes of the beholder, trauma dump. These are little windows into what constitutes matter-of-fact normal life to us, but what happens then is the realisation that we have gone too far, that our emotional resilience muscles have made light of something that is too heavy for others.
Fast to think, slow to realise
I didn’t mention our processing of new information is slow – slow processing means we push forward regardless, in the office, remaining cheerful and polite to all those around us, and only realise late in to the evening that we were thoroughly insulted.
One the one hand, failure to react is an accidental super power. On the other hand, if someone has gone out of their way to make your life suck, they tend to be really salty about it when it doesn’t work. You must be stupid, etc. They might even do it again with an audience, to bolster their ego. If someone has instead simply crossed your workable boundaries to their own benefit in the process of making an agreement with you, then tomorrow is probably too late to stand up and say “Actually, I didn’t mean to say yes to any of that”.
ADHD and retracted boundaries
ADHD people are generally short on boundaries and keep them close to home, through lifelong acculturation to the status of ‘the one in the wrong’. We struggle to trust a boundary unless there is an obvious disaster right on the other side of the fence, giving us real kinaesthetic certainty that we haven’t done it wrong, and that we have a proper excuse for it to exist. This in turn aligns our everyday boundaries with cliff edges and last straws, which perhaps helps others realise why crossing one (once we’ve noticed) can cause such panic.
We don’t lack boundaries at all, we don’t set them wide enough. We are too used to squashing up to accommodate others, of doing without and discovering that the sky still didn’t fall, again through that constant social education that everything we think and do is overdramatic, takes up space, inconveniences others. This eventual “I’ll manage, its not life or death” attitude bleeds on into everything including property ownership, putting ourselves first, finances. We become masters of missing out. To the outside we can look entirely devoid of ambition, which is nonsense. We are incredibly ambitious people but 90% of the time the top priority is ambition to get home without looking like a fool or losing approval, a goal we advance by becoming, as above, hyperskilled in noticing unconscious physiological communication.
ADHD and being the annoying one.
So far then, we’ve peeved our parents/mothers, our teachers, anyone who needs an instant answer, anyone who needs a succinct answer (so lets include interviewers and bosses in there) and our bullies.
Bullies might feel like the worst of the list, however, although the resultant trauma is blatant and immediate and upsetting, it is at least not insidious. Ask a person who has been comparatively depressed or repressed all their lives whether they are (depressed or repressed) and they will say no. Normal is subjective and different states do not register without experiencing the alternative.
I once filled in an alternative type questionnaire for ADHD which asked whether I often sprained my ankles as a child. I answered no, which is apparently the wrong answer. My ankles never sprained, never hurt; they went over sideways all the time, but they were loose enough for it to be a double jointed fact, not a sprain. Another example of missing the boat because of my difference, or perhaps because of the way NTs miss the point when writing questions.
Two more sorts of people we annoy out of their minds: firstly, perfectionists. If you are a fragile, brittle perfectionist who is in the perfect clothing and perfect grooming , standing the right way, armed with the right impressive vocabulary, do not go anywhere near anyone with ADHD unless you are feeling like a million dollars. We’ve long given up on playing social games because we don’t get the rules. You could walk in giving it your best shot at looking like a natural born leader and authority figure and topic-guru, but an ADHD person will spot that flicker of caution skip across your features (lets be honest here, it could settle for half a microsecond on a single eyelash) and immediately ask the wrong thing, such as “Are you okay?”.
Brittle perfectionists hate us. I know a few who are quite insistent that this inability to respond to the smoke and mirrors instead of to the real person is actually deliberate (its not) and therefore an attempt to humiliate.
There you go, we did it wrong again. The last people we annoy, vex, exasperate, deflate, are ourselves. Obviously.
Can you do much when you’re annoyed at yourself? Nah, us neither. If we’re in love, inspired, or furious, we might stand a chance because adrenaline and dopamine and all that jazz, but the huge central wastelands of meh-what-did-I-do-this-time? Nope-di-dope. Welcome to ADHD.