The joy and pain of living with ADHD

Entering adulthood with ADHD was not easy for me. Consider the inability to remember a simple thing or focus on a single topic for more than just a few seconds. With such a strong learning disability, I find it amazing that I was able to graduate computer science at one of the top universities in the country. How come — you ask. Well it seems there is more to ADHD than meets the eye.

Throughout the years, as I learned to understand myself a little bit better, I started considering ADHD as both a curse and a blessing in disguise. The two sides of the same coin.

Hyperfocus

Let’s start with the basics. One common myth about attention deficit is that it makes it hard to focus on anything a bit more complex. But this is not my experience. It only makes it hard to focus on boring subjects, or things explained in a boring way. On the other hand, it makes it easy to focus, for a significant amount of time, on interesting topics. Sometimes, to the point of developing an obsession, around a chosen subject.

Hence, it was relatively easy for me to learn programming, which I found fascinating. It was medium-hard to learn maths, which was somewhat interesting. And it was very hard for me to learn history or biology, which I believe can be fascinating, but the way they were taught to us at school was plain boring.

Getting Things Done

Once I became an adult, I got more motivated to get boring things done. And so I would look for ways to be more productive. With time, I was able to find a few practical techniques that would make it happen for me. Examples include maintaining todo lists, organising life around a calendar and using pomodoro.

In programming, I developed an obsession around test driven development, working with well-defined tasks and small commits. Each helps to focus better, by an order of magnitude. Together, they add up to the point that I am more productive than most developers and able to work on complex problems.

I was able to get far. However, there were some barriers that were still hard to overcome. Working in high focus for more than 3–4 hours a day on things I don’t find intriguing, while possible, would lead to burn out pretty quickly.

So, I had to learn to leverage diversity and find other complementary people to do things I am not able to do sustainably over long periods of time.

I think that leads us to one of the mighty blessings of ADHD.

Passion

I believe ADHD makes it easier to develop passion in life. On the one hand, it is easy to obsess about interesting topics. And there is a strong internal drive that can be redirected towards constant push to get better and learn more.

On the other hand, boring topics are repelled. There is also an aversion to repetitive tasks and routine in life. I believe most people with attention deficit are forced to find a way to make a living with things they enjoy, with a significant degree of freedom and variety.

Take a good friend of mine as an example. He recently discovered he suffers from ADHD. He shared some sorrows with me, as he recalled the times, when he was barely able to force himself to learn basic school material. Misunderstood, often perceived as lazy.

But there was something he was missing in his story, that I didn’t hesitate to point out. He built a great life for himself as a business owner with a passive income stream. Exactly, thanks to his passions and aversion to doing repeatable, boring work. When others were making a career, he was making a living in weird ways. Which eventually put him in a great spot, in which many people would love to be.

Voices in my head

I think the biggest challenge for me was always voices in my head. The never ending stream of thoughts, ideas, worries, excitements and all kinds of feelings from all over the spectrum. Constant cycles of ups and downs. There were periods in my life, when I thought my mind would never stop working. When I wake up, in the shower, on my way somewhere, when working, when resting, before sleeping, when sleeping. All the time.

When thoughts would get too loud and feelings too intense they would be very hard to stop. There are some not so good ways to stop them, like alcohol and watching television. Thus, a lot of ADHDers have addictive personalities.

There are better ways like doing sports and slowing down the lifestyle.

But one of the best things I found is meditation. In one period of my life I was meditating every single day for 15 min. I had a streak of over 300 days. That was one of the calmest periods in my life.

A structured, healthy and slow lifestyle is bliss for a hyperactive person. However, the kind of discipline it requires is just not easy to sustain for a person suffering from the disorder.

Perks and nuisance

I recently realised I have a reading disorder. While I am able to read books on the topic I obsess about, I have never read books for pure pleasure. In fact, I read just a single school reading in my primary school — “The Little Prince”. None of the other books were interesting enough to allow me to escape my internal train of thoughts. And I read just a few books in high school too.

But, there are perks too. Creativity is one of them. Living with the constant explosion of ideas is nice, as long as you can manage them and put some of them to work. Give you a rare feel of fulfilment, when an original idea of yours comes to being.

Drive, struggle and good life

The struggle of living with attention deficit and hyperactivity is real. While many negatives can be mitigated, it still feels like it is a constant struggle. A struggle that keeps driving you to do things and can be redirected towards making things better, though.

As a result, at the age when most people stagnate, ADHDers can flourish and live their best lives.

Pros and cons. Two sides of a coin.

Drugs

One thing that came to my attention very recently is that there are drugs that help to calm the stream of thoughts. I never tried them and perhaps they would save me a tremendous amount of struggle. I might want to try them in the near future.

But, if I could go back in time, would I use them? I am not sure. The struggle helped me build my character and got me to the point where I am. Would I be the same person? Perhaps not. Would I like that other person more? Not sure.