My ADD has kicked in full steam. I think that it has been sneaking up behind me and just finally tapped me big time on the shoulder. It looked me in the eye and said, “all this time you thought that you could handle this but now we are bored and want to really make your life miserable.”
Like the abbreviation, ADD “adds” up and then your brain explodes.
It has made me pretty much anti-social, which is silly because I like the idea of going out and meeting up with people and having a social life. A social life eludes me.
The whole organizer thing is what is the worst and has been an obvious symptom of my ADD for so many years. You know that it is a problem when you lay awake at night thinking about it. I know that it is a problem when in the matter of minutes I make a decision to go with a paper based system and then revert to the PDA and then think that I could manage life with just a pad of paper… it drives me nuts!
When you see a harried mother at a grocery store with a bunch of kids and you approach her, ask her a question she will more than likely snap at you. So frazzled is she by the screaming children pulling at her skirt, shoving cereal boxes and candy in her face, she has lost her mind and the only way she can respond is through a funnel that resembles anger. That is how I feel these days and that is how I have come across to my partner.
He will call me on his cel phone and for whatever reason his voice comes across garbled and static like a speaker shot to hell by endless heavy metal music. “What?” I keep saying into the phone impatiently. Then I will say in what I feel is a normal tone of voice, “honey everytime you call me on your cel phone, it sounds so distorted. You need to turn down the volume or not talk so loud...” and I think I am just calmly saying this. In reality, a reality I am not in touch with, I apparantly come off scolding or yelling myself. But I don't feel like I am yelling. Just like someone who is AT a heavy metal concert and has to yell over the sound of the music. I have to yell over the noise that is ever present around me.
I don't like it. I don't like that I have always come off this way.
When I was a kid I would always hear how I would throw fits or act like a big baby... my Dad would imitate me whining or stamping my feet and I could not recall EVER acting like that. It pissed me off. I felt like I was being made fun of. It made me feel stupid.
Here I am on the threshhold of my forty fourth birthday and I still feel foolish, I still apparantly come off wrong, I am hyper sensitive, I am confused, I don't listen... it's not that I don't listen... I am TRYING to listen.
Back to organizers... organizers are my biggest symptom of ADD.
I have had every kind of organizer that the planet has ever spit out. It can be comical only because of the vastness of my history with these things. It began in grade school with notebooks. I think as soon as I had a notebook that had various sections to it, my ADD began to take hold. I could never decide which notebook to use, to have... I would use one for awhile but then want another one. Then I discovered journals. I began writing in journals when I was eighteen or nineteen. For the most part I would finish a journal but sometimes in the middle of the journal or towards the end I would get bored and start a new one leaving the last one unfinished. During my college years I discovered DayRunner and my life went off on a dangerous and debilitating side-track.
The organizer. I was obsessed with them. I was KNOWN for them. “Oh that's Rob's book... he always is writing in his book...”
The first one I remember having was grey leather. I was fascinated with the various organizing sections of the book. I liked the tabbed dividers. DayRunner lead to DayTimer and then Filofax and then Franklin Planner, Stephen Covey and then the merger of Franklin Covey... it's a big cloud, a big distracting cloud. I would go to Office Depot like a crack addict sneaking into a back alley. If I would get a new planner I would underplay it out of embarrasement that someone would notice that I had a new one. People would react in surprise, people would say horrible things to me like, “boy you sure have a lot of time on your hands...”
What a horrible thing to say. I would think that we had the exact same amount. What the hell are they thinking?
Then I got swallowed up into PDA's and don't even get me started on all the different sizes and formats of Franklin Covey... small teeny tiny organizers and big ass carry over your shoulder organizers. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars and lord know how much TIME on organizers.
Now I am at a point in my life when I look back and wonder what I could have actually accomplished if I had not been so hyper focused on distracting myself. As I write this I am getting ready to plan my day and all I really want to do is just write it down either in my present journal or on a yellow legal pad. I contemplate typing it and printing it out from my computer but then there is the potential of getting lost in trying to find a program to do such a thing. I could never just use a word program or text edit.
This is a scary thing and I am going to seek help.