Dude I always thought my mental health was fine aside from the autism, the OCD diagnosis, the depressive tendencies, and my addictions so with that laundry list I was like okay I know everything that's going on up here maybe let's get treatment for that someday but for now it's relatively under control. Like at least I acknowledged it so we have 1/12 steps taken care of the rest are low priority. Henceforth I thought I had a good grasp on the origins of my crazy and I would deal with that after I actually applied to college and spent some time getting a degree, but then my brother (who has had pretty sever ADHD since childhood and has been medicated for that for a long while) started giving me adderall on occasion. At first I'm sure it was just to keep my antisocial ass awake and socializing, and then as what I suspect was some kind of experiment he was gathering data for.
To give some background on the man: he's very smart, you just wouldn't know that most of the time because he's incredibly reckless and a very loud extrovert, which I love about him and also irritates me to no end. The man can come out of an ambush of a mob of drunk tweaker rednecks with 4 new trucker friends and a lesbian he recruited to the group because they had the same haircut. He's a social miracle worker with incredible street smarts and I'll bring him everywhere new if I can help it, but if you want to be home before 3 AM on a Tuesday that won't fly with him.
So Turd, after about a year of giving me adderall every 2-3 months at gatherings and standing aside watching me and having almost a decades' worth of seeing the average person act up on his meds, decided to drop in the middle of a conversation, "Well, people who don't have ADHD like you and I-," and I was like hold up. I don't have that. I know I probably have autism I mean look at dad and his comic book room that shits genetic and bro was like I have seen tens of people without ADHD on adderall, and the only symptom I've seen from you is that you're having less trouble following the thread of conversation. And that really got me thinking. And I'm still thinking. Not because I'm stupid because it's thought provoking. Maybe a bit of both we'll see.
I never had problems concentrating as far as I'm aware, but I also only really paid attention to my level of focus when I cared deeply enough about a subject to want to stay focused on it. My dad trained (yes, trained) by brother and I to be able to pay attention for long periods. Being an older dad with his own special interests couldn't have hurt either. He sat us down to watch old black and white horror films (including silent ones once we learned to read), golden and silver age comic books with slow and outdated stories, but were still important to him for us to remember for lore purposes, and only books and parent approved TV (though incredibly lenient) until are age ended in "teen" and we were allowed to get a phone with a screen.
All that to say I never realized I might have an issue with attention until I had those experiences with adderall and started looking back on my life. When some of your first memories are of sitting in front of the TV and needing to sit still until the movie is over, you may not remember how your mind wandered but your body sure remembered how to sit still when you were told to pay attention. And it certainly does help one's focus when you're lucky enough that all your special interests tend to align with your academic choices. So I performed well on tests, sat still in class and at dinner, and no-one, not even me until now, would notice the constant fidgeting, the zoning out mid-conversation, wild topic changes, and poor listening skills when it wasn't something I cared about.
Now I'm certainly not claiming I have ADHD. Who knows, it might be just autism spectrum symptoms being cancelled out by the amephetimine. But it's got me thinking, because even though he's crazy as all hell he does know what he's talking about with this stuff.
2087
pixelskylines
areudirty
titsay