First Blog Topic – ADHD

Today I am starting my bog. Let me start by telling you  that I have ADHD. I am not a doctor. I can’t tell you if you or a loved one has ADHD. I can only share my experiences with you and hope that it helps you in some way; that it servers a purpose.

I have wanted to blog ever since there has been such a thing, but I could never figure out what it was exactly that I wanted to share with the world. Now I know why. I am not able to shut my brain down. I fall asleep thinking about one thing or another every night. I wake up thinking about something else. I can very rarely focus on a task for any extended period of time if it is not something that interests me. On the contrary, if it IS something that interests me, I become hyper focused. And woe be unto you if you try to distract me from the task at hand. My children can attest to this all too well.

I am becoming better and better at controlling this as time goes by, but it is not without deliberately attempting to do so. I really have to stop myself and think about it. If you have a child that struggles with this, I have to tell you that without a coach or even the information that this is what was going on with me, I am still trying to figure it out at the age of…heh hem, coming up on the big five-oh.

Pros and Cons

Believe it or not, there are actually a couple of things that are positive about it.

The pros:

• I have a LOT of ideas. Some of them are really good ones. With all of the extra thinking my brain does, it becomes easier to think “outside the box”.
• I am ambitious. Overly so. That whole Jack of all trades, master of none? Yeah, that me.
• I LOVE to learn new things. Being in an IT profession, I often joke about being able to just plug my brain into the computer so I can just “download” all the information I want to learn. That is about the only way I will be able to get through  everything I want to learn in my lifetime.
• Being a teacher, I am starting to understand how my experiences with this condition can help other teachers and parents to understand what the children that have ADHD are going through and how they can help them.

But there is much that is not so positive. Here are just a few of them.

The cons:

• I have spent a lifetime frustrated. Until recently, I have been very down on myself for not being able to accomplish things that I wanted to get done.
• I forget things, hourly
• Organization is an insurmountable feat
• I am a Christian, but my prayer life is extraordinarily sporadic. Quite time? Non-existent.
• I get cranky when people try to talk to me and I am in the middle of a task.

Hopefully blogging about it will help you too. =)