#addfeels

[bubblebooming]

Day 6 588.35958 of being alive and still can't function like a normal human being 😂😭

[wiltedeyesandtwistedlies]

Adhd is:

Needing to sleep so bad your body is screaming at you to let it rest. Your eyes are heavy and burning, your head pounding, sending spikes of pain into your eyes. Your muscles literally ache, your limbs too heavy to move but too pained to be still. Your joints throb, your stomach cramps, your body weighs much more than it had hours ago.

And somehow you’re just.....too bored....to sleep...??

[wiltedeyesandtwistedlies]

I obsessed over an organizing project, worked out every single detail and category and subcategory.

And now it’s finished.

And existence is so so heavy.

[wiltedeyesandtwistedlies]

Obviously this is about a very specific moment. I was taking my midterm exam for my Communications course, an exam I needed to do well on to pass this fucking class. (I really love this class, it’s so amazing, I’m just having a harder time than everyone else and it makes me feel like shit.)

I had 50 minutes to write three short essays (four paragraphs minimum instead of the standard 2-3 pages) according to the prompts. Something that always helped me manage my test panic as a kid was if I reached a question I didn’t immediately know the answer to, I’d just skip it and refuse to think about it as I moved on. When I finished the questions I could readily answer, I’d go back and try to do the ones I skipped. And most of the time the questions near the end helped me remember the answer to the ones in the beginning, or at least helped me make an educated guess. It kept me from freezing up on a single question for the next thirty minutes, stuck panicking about the answer, the time limit, the rest of the blank paper, the TIME. And if I ended up running out of time before I could retry the skipped ones, that was okay too. I quickly understood that two or three, even five or six, unanswered questions were so much better than if I only got through the first four of a 60 question test.

My point is, I froze on my exam. As always my mind went blank and I forgot the most basic vocabulary, even switched the meaning between verbal and non verbal communication in my head. So clearly I did horrible on the first essay question. Then I skipped the middle one because I spent 20 of my 50 minutes just trying to understand the way too complicated and dense block of instructions for it, and rushed a sloppy three paragraphs for the third essay question before time was up.

Then, after we handed in our exams, my professor announced that whatever we wrote for the third short essay didn’t matter because she’s giving us all full credit for it anyway. Which would have been a really fucking nice thing to hear if I hadn’t put so much stress and wasted effort into it that I could have spent earning at least some points for the second essay question.

I bombed it. I can’t even expect a generous 10% for such an awful academic performance.

That moment when your anxiety over tests meets your adhd and you forget what the word “regulate” means, that you’ve already used “repeat” eight times in the same sentence, how to move your pen to write the chaos of random words ricocheting around in your head.