I have always felt like I was in some kind of bubble watching my life happen before me, feeling helpless to do anything to shape it, add to it, change it... I also have had dreams where I could barely see and was needing to get something accomplished but failed to do so, struggling and being frustrated. While awake, many times I recreated these dreams by getting completely loaded on booze, drugs or both.Is this some kind of comfort zone for me? I don't think it is a comfort zone more as it is/was an escape hatch.
I also notice many times when I have journaled, I put myself in the third person. I write about my problems as if they are a group of peoples problems. This is a tell tale sign.
The day I woke up and realized that time had definitely passed by, when I was suddenly in my late thirties and then my forties, I was suddenly forced into realizing that not only had many years gone by but I was truly getting older by the minute. Patterns that had been in my life were just that, patterns of behavior that when repeated just keep going and going all the while you get older and older. I always felt frustrated through my life not getting the things I wanted and if I did, they didn't seem to be big enough or important enough. I never seemed to be satisfied. Long before I knew I had ADD, I truly did believe that perhaps I just didn't really have “IT” and that this is what I was only capable of.
But then I would think about my younger years and some of the things I accomplished in high school and college. Had I not WON the state championship in Speech? Had I not been awarded the scholarship for the student most likely to succeed? What happened? What happens to someone with ADD as they grow up and it is not diagnosed? What happens when he has it during formative years when it isn't even really talked about or brought to public attention?
It would be like any other kind of physical ailment I imagine. The longer you wait to do anything about it or the longer it goes undetected, the worse it can get and eventually become a chronic condition. I guess I could say that I have chronic ADD. It makes sense that this has got in the way of my ambition.
I used to think of life as a big spiral that spirals upward. As the years go by, the seasons turn, you move up this big corkscrew spiral. If you grow in life you keep moving up and if you don't you just keep coming around to the same place only to repeat it. In my later years I see myself moving up that corkscrew very slowly. I have had many situations in which I repeated mistakes, banged my head up against the same brick wall. The worse thing was knowing it but not knowing what to do about it. Then, being IN it, not really caring what you were doing anymore and losing interest in work, life... horrible.
Well, now I know what has been going on. The jig is up.
So what am I going to do about it? Habitually I still want to just stay in the bubble and let life pass by. STILL I have a hard time being interested or connected to these things in life that used to fill me with passion. I feel like I have to TRY to connect. I think that if I have to TRY, I must not really be that into it. (I am suddenly thinking of that book, “he is just not that into you”) But I know that I AM into it. I perhaps just need to inspire myself some more.
When you are younger, you go through life learning and seeing new things almost on a daily basis. Then you leave the nest and get to explore these things more fully and go down roads, hallways, open doors you never dared to open before. But as you get older, life becomes a pattern and it gets dull and the days go by so fast you can fan yourself with the hands of the clock. What one needs to do as they get older is to KEEP learning new things, KEEP doing new things. KEEP stepping out of that comfort zone circle that got chalk marked around you.
That is what I want to do.