Life With ADHD: FAT City

 Happy Monday Divas! Day three into a new year, and my very first article on the blog. While most of you are back to work, I’m on holiday leaving here in a few hours back to life in Wisco and Stella. This weekend I enjoyed every minute I was here and I’m working on a list of resolutions, both personal and professional. If you read my last article covering AEW Tony Khan’s comments on former female talent Big Swole and his need to stop gossiping, you read that resolutions are indeed powerful and can help us change for the better, as they impact mental, physical and emotional health. I’ll have my resolution list up later this week, followed by progress throughout the year. 

When I get home, I’ll be without a laptop. The reason for that is due to both today’s topic and one of my resolutions. When I first saw this title during class in college, I couldn’t understand the abbreviation, then, as the lecture started and ended, plus the video, I fully understood what it meant. 

ADHD. Most people think of this as energetic kids who don’t listen or sit down. While that is true, the harsh reality is that ADHD children have difficulty focusing due to endless energy. The reason why we have difficulty focusing is due to the brain intake of many different things, such as sight and sound (both sensory and auditory input) while the brain and body as a whole finds time to calm down. Failure for brain and body to calm down is called overstimulation. 

And then we are on our way to FAT City. However, most of the time we reside in FAT City. 

If you have ADHD or are a parent of a child with ADHD, you understand the emotions. If you don’t, that’s ok. I broke my laptop. The reason why I broke it? I was frustrated. My three year old laptop constantly froze and updated nearly every time I used it. Needing to send an important email, my laptop sat there and kept updating. And updating. For nearly two hours, my laptop did nothing but update as part of a cycle that was never ending. Use, freeze, update. Use, freeze, update. Anxiety set in, and the longer it took to update, the more anxious I became. The building anxiety led to tension, which resulted in my breaking my laptop. 

This is ADHD. And this is my life. My life free of medication to treat it. I find myself constantly in a hurry. Eating, homework, conversation, anything, everything. This is motor and impulse driven, and being this way also makes it difficult to relax. 

I broke my laptop. I have ADHD. I broke my laptop due to my ADHD which is under control most of the time without medication, largely because I haven’t used meds for it at anytime in my life. 

Given my med free life for ADHD, my resolution for the new year is to relax more and do things to lessen my emotions. The good thing about ADHD as adults is that we outgrow the severity of it to some degree, yet still fit the characteristics that are part of us in a society that may not understand us. 

We are impulsive, talkative, eager, and have difficulty focusing. We are creative, intelligent, imaginative, and think outside the box. We lose things, and may remember details/facts,  the smallest detail/facts nobody would remember. We are the interesting piece of art that may not fit the color scheme and/or room, yet we add a complement to the room with our unique being. We are unique. We have ADHD. 

With fuzzy sweatshirts and love, 

Dani