At home with my Monster

Part 2

Last time I talked about how ADHD affected me in terms of the transitions between one phase of the day to the next and also about how it can make me over emotional, hypersensitive and angry.  Today I want to address those other things that affect my home life which I also believe to be linked to my ADHD.

Anxiety

Anxiety, although I often don’t realise I’m experiencing it, affects me both mentally and physically and is deeply intertwined in my personal experience of ADHD.  In fact, it was the physical affects of acute anxiety that led to my diagnosis 5 years ago.

I often catch myself dreaming up negative scenario’s which could potentially happen in the future but which have no real basis.  For example, I might imagine a conversation with someone who is currently irritating me in real life in which they say something wrong and hurtful about someone I care about thereby giving me justification to be angry with them.  I think it is almost a subconscious way of finding somewhere to put some of my anger which tends to build inside me until I have an occasion to release it.  The trouble is that I don’t release it; I essentially wind myself up with imagined scenarios and continue to harbour that bad feeling based on something which never even happened.  I know its unhelpful, I know its bad for me, I know its bad for those around me but, like any habit, its incredibly difficult to break.  

I also get very anxious about getting enough rest.  When I was younger and enjoying an action packed social, work and studying lifestyle I used to get anxious about not getting enough sleep.  I used to get anxious in clubs which I never much enjoyed, thinking I was wasting my free time when I could be sleeping in preparation for the following day which would invariably involve lots of socialising, working and usually some kind of voluntary work as well.

As I have got older this has become more and more prevalent and I have started getting excessively over protective about my weekends which can, in fact, cause more stress and anxiety than a busy weekend might otherwise cause.  Again, it’s a bad habit I’m aware of but one that’s proving incredibly difficult to kick.  If only it was as easy as giving up smoking, a piece of cake in comparison!

Driving

Another area where my ADHD can affect both my home and work life is driving.  Sometimes, when my head is particularly ‘foggy’ I avoid driving and I can become quite anxious about driving long distances alone as I worry that I will loose concentration and crash.  I have never had a moving crash or collision caused by this but I am aware that it could happen and have to think and plan for driving long distances more than most. 

More often, however, I loose concentration when doing ‘every day’ driving.  Recently, for instance, I scratched my car coming out of the car park at work where I park every day.  I think this is because I do it every day my brain doesn’t feel the need to focus.  I know this is normal for a lot of people.  They do say that a third of accidents occur in a mile radius of home, but I really believe that my ADHD exacerbates this.

When I was younger I also used to get quite bad road rage.  Luckily this hasn’t happened recently but this could be due to the fact that I no longer live in London!

ADHD as a learning difficulty

One of the funnier aspects of my ADHD as a learning difficulty is that I have developed fool-proof coping mechanisms.  I am so good at looking like I am listening that I continually inadvertently fool my partner.  When we were travelling this caused no end of problems as I stood there ‘listening’ to someone speaking to us in Spanish, he would assume I was listening and comprehending so he would switch off himself and neither of us would know what was said.

I also really struggle with calculations and directions.  It was only a couple of years ago that I realised that not everyone counted using their fingers.  My partner has spent years trying to teach me to count in my head but to no avail.  My mind simply won’t compute without the aid of my fingers!  I am also completely useless with directions.  It is not only that I have absolutely no ‘sense’ of direction, but I cannot remember directions, or locations, or places at all.  This has been an ongoing joke for most of my life and, I too, find it amusing but the jokes can become hurtful at times as I do try exceedingly hard and simply cannot do these things.

Final word… because I always have to have it

The previous two posts have been a very personal account of how ADHD affects my home life and I’m sure that other people with ADHD will have very different experiences.  It is sometimes hard to know what is ADHD and what is just my personality but as I believe they are so inextricably linked I just put it all in there.  Apologies to any experts if I was ever off the mark!