The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves)

[faraday]

@Auspice Substitute times and dinner instead of lunch, and that was me yesterday.

[Sparks]

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

[Auspice]

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

Back when I lived in Cincinnati, I had a friend who would drop by my place a couple nights a week, food in hand: 'I know you haven't eaten yet today.' It really is a wonderful thing for those of us who just... space because something as simple as a walk to the kitchen can become two hours doing other stuff (esp. if you have an OCD element to your ADD/ADHD as well).

On work days, I do eat because I have my lunch break and there's a cafeteria on site. So there's at least that definite every workday I get a good lunch. But... dinner is more hinky and I only work 4 days a week. So those other 3 days? I sometimes don't remember to eat until 4, 5pm.

[faraday]

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

Kids are good for that too. "Mom, when are you gonna start dinner?" Ooops.

The days when they're at their dad's house are the ones when I tend to get wickedly off-schedule and eat dinner at 9pm or something stupid.

[Kanye Qwest]

Random shoutout to @Apos, who did a bunch of reading on his own when I was diagnosed, just trying to learn what to do to help someone with ADHD. Since then, he's been on top of cleaning up and clearing clutter away so that it doesn't overwhelm me.

Even with me working against him >.>

[Wretched]

@Kanye-Qwest Thats pretty lucky, right now my 'clutter pile' has become a depression nest and i really need like, a flame thrower.

[Auspice]

This is where the OCD is mildly beneficial. I mean, it sucks when I have shit to do and get caught, say, scrubbing cabinet faces for an hour.

But for the most part, I can keep everything tidy. My place isn't immaculate (there's dust on the bookshelves and the baseboards could use a good scrubbing), but it's clean. Everything stays put away (because I can't stand an unorganized surface/area), I sweep regularly, etc....

Like, thankfully, that is one area I do all right. But I have slipped into the depression clutter as @Wretched puts it before. I had that while I was between jobs in March. It's no fun and I feel for anyone who deals with it regularly. I'll take my irregular OCD fits over that, admittedly.

[Wretched]

@Auspice My grandmother and my mother are both INCREDIBLY OCD, my Grandparents house is a fucking MUSEUM, my mothers was like that but it turned to hoarding later in my life...

Suffering through other peoples OCD as a kid (endless chores with impossible standards) made me come to the conclusion that a little bit of a mess isnt the end of the world, and generally I live a life of mild clutter, but when the depression gets bad, its gets bad too.

ETA: But if someone wants to come over and use their OCD to clean my house for me I will pay you in food and weed.

[Auspice]

@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@Auspice My grandmother and my mother are both INCREDIBLY OCD, my Grandparents house is a fucking MUSEUM, my mothers was like that but it turned to hoarding later in my life...

Suffering through other peoples OCD as a kid (endless chores with impossible standards) made me come to the conclusion that a little bit of a mess isnt the end of the world, and generally I live a life of mild clutter, but when the depression gets bad, its gets bad too.

ETA: But if someone wants to come over and use their OCD to clean my house for me I will pay you in food and weed.

I wonder if it's a triggerable thing. I grew up in a messy house. I was the only person who ever cleaned, growing up. Which was depressing and exhausting. My mom (stay at home mother) had untreated depression and just... wouldn't. My siblings were terrors until they were 18+ each in regards to keeping things clean and if they were told to clean a room, but didn't do it... I was expected to do it myself before our father got home (so, you can easily guess how things went since they knew the only repercussions would fall on me). Juggling school, part-time jobs, and having to tend to the family (because I sometimes had to figure out dinner, too, when my mother's state was worse) was just... too much.

So I think it's partly this ingrained nervous tic. Cleaning up after myself, organizing, etc.

[Sparks]

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I wonder if it's a triggerable thing. I grew up in a messy house. I was the only person who ever cleaned, growing up. Which was depressing and exhausting.

Honestly, I suspect it is. My grandmother, who I loved dearly and who is in large part responsible for who I am today, was nonetheless a hoarder. (Which wasn't uncommon among people who grew up in the Depression.) By the time she passed away, the basement of the house was so full of stuff you couldn't properly open the door to get down the stairs, and the entire third floor was also filled with things.

Mind you, it wasn't like keeping just old newspapers or whatever; a lot of it was amazing stuff! Boxes upon boxes of family photos for instance, going all the way back to 19th century daguerreotypes. A Civil War military pass belonging to an ancestor who was a medic, granting authority to pass through both Union and Confederate lines to tend to the wounded of either side. A first edition of the boxed set of the Lord of the Rings. A set of 20-ish years of every issue of Astounding, Amazing Stories, and Asimov's. Just... wandering through that house was fascinating, even if you often had to edge around boxes of things to do so.

But there were also literally things like an entire cabinet full of ceramic marmalade jars, another full of washed-out glass peanut butter jars, etc., because "you never know when you might need one". Too many teapots to count, just in case one broke, so she didn't have to go buy another. And that sort of hoarding had certainly been the case during my mom's childhood, too.

In contrast, my mother is one of those people who is absolutely incapable of leaving something out for very long. She won't leave papers out on her desk, the only thing allowed on the coffee table when people are not actively using it are books (or a laptop), etc. She cleans almost reflexively, and is vicious about getting rid of things she decides she no longer needs. (Except handmade bowls to mix tea in for chado. She has an alarming number of those.)

And it would not surprise me in the least if it's because of the house she grew up in.

[Auspice]

@Sparks

I'd be interested to find out if there are studies on this sort of thing.
Because it does really sound like it can cause this sort of thing, in people who dealt with extreme cases. I grew up in a crowded (big family) house with people who were either slobs or too lazy to ever clean, so now I can be a little obsessive about it. I imagine if I didn't have the fibro (just sweeping the floor wipes me out sometimes), I'd get to that 'immaculate' level.

[surreality]

@Wretched Holy crap, I feel you on the clutter pile/depression nest right now. My work room... needs... possibly an enema at this point, but we just got a new scanner and printer and there's so little space in here even when it is totally organized that this is a whole weekend effort to wrangle through the piles o'stuff.

I have OCD, but I'm a sorter. So there are times it can be stupidly soothing. (A friend of mine had this dialed up to 23, and she would drop by and sort my bin of leftover beads while we watched movies or something when she was super stressed when she lived in the area.)

I can deal with a little mess. A lot of the work I do involves 'creative mess-making'. (Patina, painting, dyework... all of these are 'creative mess-making'.)

Even if it was flawlessly organized, and by gods I will get there some day <shakes a fist at the sky>, this room... it is the ADD Artist's Lair. I was fool enough to think I could display some of the shell and polished rocks collection in here because looking at it gives me the happies, but it's gonna have to move.

I made a good call on the shelves to make a 'hutch' on top of this desk -- it's old enough that the hutch you could buy for it was no longer available, but I love this desk, the other desk in the room is the same kind, it fits perfectly in a very awkward space... OK, screw it, tangent among people who understand tangents, DAMMIT. I fell in love with this furniture set a fuckload of years back. There's a 70inch L of it in the other room, too, but it can't be moved out of there. We had to get another one for in here. It's this one and bluntly, it's fucking gorgeous even as it falls apart after a decade of abuse in this room. We got the matching... non-L desk? That lines up with it along the longer wall to extend the desktop. This was ostensibly for photos for the jewelry, but to be blunt about it, the kit doesn't fit on it, so we're still flailing over some solution for that. All the photo gear gets stored in it, however, and that's still a win.

Main desk? When it's clean in here and there's room I'll get a picture. (Y'all will LAUGH and laughs are often needed these days, right?) It is some seriously kitbash shit at this point. Prefab laminate desks don't tend to survive for 10 years very well, and... this one took some poundings. (Sometimes, literally, with jewelry hammers.)

---

When we needed to replace the old computer last year as a graphics machine so I could ostensibly get back to 3D (meh), we cleared everything off the desk, knowing How We Buy Computers meant a spectacular expense was coming and that I'd also need to keep the old one running as long as possible for all the entertainment stuff. (Entertainment stuff of any kind is NOT allowed to live on a computer you're going to NEED to be able to write off on your taxes. I'm typing this on the 2010 iMac right now, in fact. It never got a name that stuck; it has one now: Boomerang.)

So, uh. Two iMacs, one desk. OK, cool, this desk can handle that; it handled a tower with two monitors in the other room, this should work like a charm. Does. Ish. But once it was cleaned off, this desk was a disaster. Surface was fucked. Sagged in the middle of the L and we were about to drop expensive electronics on it. I would now need a keyboard tray... diagonal across the notch, which isn't a thing for these desks. It needed hutch space, badly.

Y'all will understand this one: the brain clicked over to 'problem solving mode' without me even realizing it.

This hit around 10pm. By 8am, I was calling my poor long-suffering mother to ask if we could run errands once she got home from church. She asked 'what errands', and... I'm trying hard to not laugh, y'all, because it was all so serious and straightforward and I truly wish I could have seen her face, I really do.

"We need to go to Home Depot to get vinyl tile (specified which, price, and aisle location), and joist supports (same), and one shelf board in honey maple (same), and whatever clip LED lights they have cheap. Then, head down to the Container Store for 5 shelf supports (and again), and 10 shelving boards (and again). Bloodbath (Bed, Bath, and Beyond) for (specific sort of container, with prices and quantities and sizes). We're going to need to swing by BestBuy for the cross-computer keyboard (AND AGAIN ON THE SPECIFICS), and the related mouse is incoming from amazon now. Do you want to stop at the diner somewhere in there for lunch?"

Pretty sure there wasn't even a breath in there until it came to the question about the diner.

I had, of course, spent the whole night being an adult (read: googling how to do things) and researching all manner of options to resurface the desk, figure out a keyboard tray, support it from below where it was sagging, build a hutch, and organize the coffee corner of it in a frenzy of tabs.

Naturally, though... it never even occurred to me to explain why I needed these things to my mother. Or to my husband when he was asked to help drag them all in from the car. And saying 'keyboard tray, hutches, resurface the desk' realllllllllllllly doesn't quite explain why there's a pile of home improvement clutter now filling the foyer.

My husband is not diagnosed with AD(H)D, but damn if he likely doesn't have it. He is the world puttering champion, and if y'all think I ramble? You have no idea. NONE. Truly. I marvel at his prowess.

There is a difference in the way it manifests with both of us, though. I attempt to streamline things wherever possible. He overcomplicates them by default. This meant that getting my husband's help was a precarious dance of...

• Instruct him which heavy things need to be moved where.
• Get out of his way while he's overcomplicatedly fussing and puttering over things while doing something productive in another part of the room.
• Wait until he's asleep to do the things he has stated an intent to turn from a 2-3 hour project into a 2-3 day project.

This resulted in my husband waking up three consecutive days in a row and staring slack-jawed at the progress I'd made, buck nekkid in the doorway, like he just might be standing buck nekkid in the doorway to someone else's house.

Again, expressions I wish I had pictures of, and yet, the reason why I don't is readily apparent in this case, I'm sure.

---

Technically speaking, primarily the jewelry-making supplies and the computer stuff lives in here. But. (A but bigger than my butt.) That covers... a lot. (Terrifying truth: my grandmother used this room for her craft storage. It took us months to clean it out when she passed. I have maybe 1/4 of what she had in here. My mother and I would celebrate finding previously unknown furniture beneath/behind all the boxes as we'd clear with ice cream.)

• Jewelry? I have been making jewelry to sell since I was in the single digits, age-wise. Almost 40 years. Anyone who beads things knows how much shit you can accumulate in a few months, and how much stuff you need. Now extrapolate that out to almost 40 years, and being savvy as fuck to occasional bulk-buys you qualify for as a business. Yeah. We're probably lucky this room hasn't just collapsed into the garage below. Wire? Chain? Paper? Glues? Tools? Anodizer? WAY too may shells to make into things? Etc. etc. etc.

• The 'this is just to make things with and isn't to dye' yarn fills the crawlspace closet to keep it all completely out of the way. The actual Dyening Room is downstairs, once the dining room, but no more. And yes, we call it 'The Dyening Room'. Right now, though? The Dyening Room is full of rock polishing stuff on one side that gets a bit more use.

• Computer stuff... that desk. But there's a lot that's got to shuffle around this weekend. Let's hope my husband sleeps a lot.

[Selerik]

[Selerik]

For reasons, I'm studying the way our body handles changes of diet on a neurophysiological level. I found the below study today that sort of shocked me.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4790398/

The TL;DR is that our body can ACTIVELY HATE US when we diet, making us depressed. This is one of those knowledge is power things, where once you know what your body is doing you can put in place a plan to counteract it.

If I'm reading this study right though, that is a short term response. Long term it trends the opposite direction if you maintain the caloric restrictions.

[Rinel]

@Selerik said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

The TL;DR is that our body can ACTIVELY HATE US when we diet

I mean, turnabout is fair play

[Gingerlily]

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

So, the first ADHD medication trial I did (mentioned about two weeks ago in this thread) didn't do much for me; the ritalin was a really mixed bag. I was able to focus slightly better, but it gave me a raging headache, so we stopped fairly quickly. I was sort of disappointed and went, "Well, maybe medication won't do much for me after all."

But now I'm trying first adderall—tomorrow's the last day of that test—and then dextroamphetamine. And oh my god this is amazing stuff.

The first day I was taking the adderall, even on a minimal dose, I was able to sit in a 1.5 hour long meeting and actually focus for most of it; yeah, my brain still drifted off on some side track prompted by a random comment twice, but that's way better than the like... 12 times it would've normally been unless I was digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand under the table or one of my other coping mechanisms. Instead, I just sat there and listened and my brain stayed on track. And then I was able to go and start a task that I'd been putting off for like 3 weeks.

(And again, that was on one-third of a full dose. Full dose, I think my brain probably wouldn't even have wandered those two times!)

The downside is that the 5-hour adderall pills only work for me for 3 hours at a time. And the difference between those first three and the last two is stark. Plus, I get a kind of unpleasant headache for the last three hours.

Luckily, there's a very likely explanation for this: adderall is a mixture of dextroamphetamine (which hits quickly) and levoamphetamine (which takes longer to release). So the first three hours is usually the dextroamphetamine, the last 2-3 hours is usually the levoamphetamine. The fact that only the first three hours are effective (and that I have a headache for the last three hours) is a pretty common sign that dextroamphetamine works well for my ADHD, while levoamphetamine is a thing that is Not For Me. So starting on Wednesday, I'm dose-testing just plain dex, and we'll see how that goes.

At any rate, the reason I post this is that if you are ADHD—even if you think you have 'sufficient' coping mechanisms to function in daily life—if you are offered to do medication dosage trials, I really suggest that you do it. Because, yes, I had sufficient coping mechanisms to function as an adult (and a senior engineer), so I could've just kept going. But now I've seen how brains are actually supposed to work, where I can just... pick a thing and start it, much less do so without ending up thinking about three other things along the way, and it's amazing.

(Though I'm told the euphoric feeling of "holy shit I can actually do things what is even happening" superpowers does eventually fade, even as the productivity and focus remains.)

Late to this thread, got distracted HAH. But Adderall is what I take too and it works miracles for me. The euphoric/manic feeling does go away with time but I take medication breaks occasionally and that brings it back. Its basically a lifesaver. I think I'd do better with plain Dex too, I don't need the racing heart/physical symptom boost that the levoamphetamine adds. I'd love to know how it goes.

[Sparks]

@Gingerlily said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I think I'd do better with plain Dex too, I don't need the racing heart/physical symptom boost that the levoamphetamine adds. I'd love to know how it goes.

The plain dex trial went great, for the record. I got my final prescription and everything, and I've been on the real 8-hour delayed release pills for a little while!

[surreality]

One of the most frustrating things for me is getting derailed. More accurately, it's frustrating to not be able to explain this to someone who doesn't experience it themselves.

This is especially problematic in MU, in which there's not always a clear indication[1] that I'm occupied and focused on something.

Over the years, I have often left channels to avoid this. I ask people to page later with a brief explanation why, if it's the first few times it's happening. I'll log out of messengers, go invisible, set do not disturb, etc. I've sometimes set notes about this in RP prefs in +finger, noting that if I'm in a scene, I want to focus on that and am not available for chatter/etc. outside of an emergency.

Interruptions are annoying for anyone[2], but they're pretty awful when you have finally managed to get in the right brain mode to focus and are enjoying yourself, and then... boom, someone's bullshit drama, random ramble, or 'it can wait but I give none fucks about your enjoyment or boundaries even though I know this is an issue for you' question sends the train of thought right off the tracks and into a ditch with no survivors.

Does this also frustrate the shit out of you? (When it's someone you've explained this problem to before, perhaps multiple times?)

How do you handle people who instantly get huffy, no matter how calmly and politely you explain the issue to them?

How do you explain this boundary to someone, and sustain it?

1. And yet, sometimes there is. If I'm in a scene or on grid, especially in a large scene or an event, I feel this is completely fucking obvious. As a simple matter of politeness to anyone, that does not seem like the time to pester someone about random shit.

2. ...and this is entirely aside from the 'nnngh, it's a major peeve when people feel entitled to your time and attention on whatever it is they want simply because they see you are probably not asleep right now'.

[Ninjakitten]

@surreality Honestly, if it's a matter of people paging me when I'm busy with other stuff, especially when I've already said? I'd code myself a command to set a @lock/page against everyone and a polite explanatory @reject, either as a toggle or with a second one to remove them. +mute/+unmute, maybe. It takes a lot more work to violate a boundary if code's enforcing it for me. Plus at that point it becomes an issue for staff, anyway. If I generally left channels then too, I'd add that in also, just to save myself some keystrokes.

[surreality]

@Ninjakitten Yeah, I actually do similar. I should set it up as a code thing.

I tend to run into people doing this on discord or messengers, and insist 'they're just leaving a message for whenever!' even after I've told them about the problems it causes when they do that. (People who, for the record, are on the games at the time and see I'm occupied.)

It's usually presented in full muppet flail mode and only later 'oh, that wasn't any kind of emergency!' is an afterthought, way too late. 'Can it wait?' usually ended up inviting a flood of additional notes and information, enough to completely obliterate whatever I was doing, after I've already asked to please hold it for later.

Some days, I dunno, I'm just inclined to write this off to 'some people suck and have zero respect for boundaries'.