#literally lock a person with adhd in a room and see how fast they lose their mind x-x

[exotic-inquiry]

Thinking about doing the six fanarts thing so if you have any characters you wanna see me draw send me an ask! :D

Send me anyone from whatever TV show, movie, interactive fiction, or video game you want!! Although I'll be more likely to draw it if I’m familiar with the source 

[thegothicviking]

Hello! I have the ADD (ADHD without the hyperactivity) and YES I have been properly diagnosed by an psychologist who is an expert in the ADHD/ADD field.

I can list some of the symptoms that I have when I am unmedicated and maybe you can see if you recognize some of them in yourself?

Getting really frustrated or angry when you don't understand/get/don't know how to do something. YES! VERY FRUSTRATED! There is a saying that us with ADHD/ADD our every emotion is amplified. When we are sad...we are really sad. When we are happy...we are really happy! And when we are frustrated...we can get pretty frustrated and lose patience fast. Now; that doesn't mean that all ADHD/ADD-ers (?) are super violent or throw tantrums/hissy fit like screaming like you see them doing on TV. Some people do. Some people don't. When I get really frustrated; I cry. With tears. It makes me seem childish and people don't take me seriously! I wish I WOULDN'T cry but I just can't control this when I am off medication (Ritalin).

You forget carkeys, wallets, money, grocery bags at the bus stop...'did you forget to lock your door?' *goes back up the hill to check if you locked the house*...

you get really fixated on details (when I do my makeup I am a perfectionist and everything has to be on point and I lose the track of time and get super late for appointments..late for work..late for school etc...

It is always fun to start a new project...but to finish them?? Nah. Not so much. Right now I have a long essay that I should have been done 3 years ago..and a home assignment that should have been done 3 years ago and I have like 3 or 4 fiction books that I am currently reading and a Rammstein fan fic that I have been writing on for 2 years!! It is not unusual for ADHD/ADD-ers to get new hobbies very fast and sort of forget to finnish other projects/tasks etc. We are just a little bit more impatient when learning new skills or being into hobbies. HOWEVER; When we do find a hobby/skill that we are interested in...we can HYPER FOCUS. That means we can get so absorbed into our new fascination that it can consume every aspect of our life! (When I first began writing on my Rammstein fic series..I could write for 12 hours straight without eating, sleeping..or having to use the rest room.)

We have NO filter when we talk to others or if we do something. (I have gotten to learn that my friends in high school didn't ask for my opinion about their clothes and that telling them they looked pregnant/fat or ugly in certain clothes ..just telling them this out of nowhere..was NOT polite and NOT ok!! I have gotten better about it now as having ADD is not an excuse for being a rude asshole!) I also tend to overshare sensitive and/or personal details about my life to complete strangers during our first meeting. It's something that the Ritalin helps me think about; "Is this a too much random thing to say??" "Is this even relevant to say??" "Should I share this information to this person??". Without the meds I struggle to have this filter which everyone else seems to have! Unless if they are drunk.. (and yes people have assume I was drunk because of this...even if I was 100% sober at some parties!...well good for them I guess?)

It is not uncommon if you have ADD that you have a vivid imagination and that you talk a lot...this is like our version of the H (Hyperactivity) we are more Hyperverbal (talkative) than showing physical Hyperactivity. (I have had literally friends say to 'Mary...we love you! But shut up!')

We can't do many things at once! And some of us needs complete silence (or like my ex bf who has ADHD, constant static noice or background music) to read or do anything. I had a period were EBM or dark electronica with no lyrics would get me going when reading school books or writing essays. But usually I need complete silence when I am reading or writing something (like just now when writing all of this I had to Pause a youtube video about someone talking because it really stressed me out as I kept trying to write this faster because of the video)

We can be oversensitive to light, smell, touch, and sound. (I am very oversensitive to loud noises and get super stressed if I forgot my headset and have to be at a ferry or a bus filled with noisy people. So stressed that I have been at the brink of crying and needed to get out on the deck of the ferry because the saloon area was so fucking noisy!!)

We change subjects all the time when we write or text...and we can interrupt a lot.

We can be very creative and actually get good grades in class! YES BELIEVE IT OR NOT!! (The state pschycologists told me I couldn't have ADD because I had almost all A's or 6's as we have in the Norwegian school system. Meaning I had excellent grades so 'Therefore I couldn't have ADD...'... which is why I went to an expert/private pscycholgist instead. This is the most common misconception; Yes you can have bad grades and struggle in school and have ADHD/ADD but you can also have GOOD grades and struggle more socially/beeing more socially awkward like I was. As a kid I could randomly talk about things that I liked. Like cool facts about bugs for example or mummies from ancient Egypt! I didn't understand those 'unwritten social rules' like...'speak when it's your turn/don't interrupt people because that is rude' or 'don't randomly change the subject' and etc etc...) that's why my ADD was harder to notice. Because I was getting excellent grades but got bullied a lot. And that's why I was being checked by an expert of ADHD/ADD and not checked until I was long done with school. I got the diagnosis when I was around 22. I am 28 now. I needee to get the diagnosis from someone who understood that you can have the diagnosis and still have the best grades in school. But being social awkward instead and struggle to "fit in with other children". Oh and I also always got late in elemantary school even though I was literally neighbor with the school ground..5 minute walk..and I still got late! How!?!? Well...I wanted to stop and yell every 2 meters at the crows and tell them to shut up and chase them because they annoyed me so much..so of course I got late for school!!

We can be supersensitive to critisism or we don't even take constructive critisism too well. (If some random guy on the internet writes to me and says I look ugly as heck or calls me an annoying bitch...that comment can actually stay with me for days or even for a whole week even though he was just a random troll and I know I shouldn't care so much). The fact that we can be so critical of ourselves can also be that we are very focused on details and we can turn into a perfectionist and really beat ourselves down when we can't be absolutely perfect!

We have to have a plan for the day...at least I do! (I have to be on youtube and tumblr AFTER a task is done..otherwise doing simple things like vacuum cleaning..doing the dishes etc..won't be done that day...we really are the masters of procastination! Our brains are wired a bit differently. You see; the part of the brain that tells you to do certain things (frontal cortex??) Doesn't work properly for us. It's not lazyness! It's just that unless it's really rewarding for us or if we are unmedicated.. doing normal things like the dishes or laundry won't be done by us. It has to be rewarding. That is how the ADHD/ADD medication work! It fills in the gap we have at the frontal corvex..so that we can do these things without thinking so much about them..you know; like "most people with a normal brain can do". (Typing " " because then again...who is really normal these days??)

I think this was all....

To sum it all up; our emotions are amplified. We have less patience..less of a focus, we can have good grades, we are impulsive either by what we are talking about or what we do and we struggle to "think before we do/say", we can hyperfocus and get really lost into details, we are very sensitive to all sorts of critisism, we forget about the time and carkeys and wallets or to bring gymbags etc.. we can't do normal mundane things without getting a kick in the butt either by medicine or by other people's commands, we struggle to multitask and have a shit ton of unfinished projects and or many unfinished books or hobbies, we talk a lot and/or can't sit still, we think about the details or things like most people don't ever think about. You know the person that always asks wierd questions?? Like "Do fishes fart?? And how does a fish fart even smell like??" Yeah we are those people! Haha! No seriously...do fish fart?? We overshare with strangers..and most importantly we can't make a long list short even though we wrote that we would! Haha! See??

I think I have an inattentive ADHD but I haven’t been diagnosed (yet) because the previous doctor didn’t have the courage to do so because there wasn’t any suspicions of that in my childhood nor teen years (because I suffered from very severe social anxiety and selective mutism which took all the attention), but… I have a question here:

Is it an ADHD trait when you kinda… think you’re super smart but then get absolutely devastated and angry (at yourself) when you figure out you are not? I mean, I do have troubles seeing the forest for the trees because I loooooove details and I love challenges and quizzes and such that really make you use your brains. But once I cannot figure something out, I just get super angry. And it’s mainly because every time I don’t know something, I think like… “okay maybe I just don’t get it now” and I will give myself a permission to look it up (e.g. a game walkthrough) or I wait for someone else to solve it for me. Because you know, nowadays you can find answers to everything online but as a kid you tried with e.g. the same video game stuff for hours or days until you got it, often accidentally, because you couldn’t look for the solutions just like that the second you encountered a dead end.

And every damn time I do this, I will like “ah, OF COURSE that was the solution!” and I don’t know if I was just unpatient and getting frustrated or just plain stupid. I don’t know if I’d have got it eventually if I just worked harder and now I will never know that because I already looked up the answer. A great example is these Escape The Room type games - I always feel so damn stupid because I can’t get further but then check for a walkthrough and I legit don’t know if I’m stupid or too smart. I mean, I feel that I am thinking outside the box the whole time and usually the people creating these games are thinking inside the box. So I go for answers that feel more logical for me which are usually more complex than the actual answer. And I don’t get them because I feel like “1234″ is a stupid password, who the hell would use that??? And I count things and try to figure out so complex possible answers by counting corners of things or amount of letters in some cryptic message and then the actual answer was just to count the different colored windows. And I don’t know if I’m too smart or just too stupid.

Usually I suck at games I haven’t played before but if there’s more than one, I finally start to get better at them because now I start to understand how the creators think. I start to notice the things they do, their pattern and the train of thought. But similar thing is when I read books or watch movies/tv series, especially the detective ones, I’m constantly competiting against the detective and trying to outdo them. Another example is the Sherlock Holmes books: I have been reading those and now I have so many of those stories behind that I have figured how Doyle used to write his stories. I have actually figured his way of creating the plots and I figured what kind of things he used in order to fool the reader and I have learnt from that and I’m no longer fooled. I now notice every time the text is starting to lead the reader to the wrong path and I know immediately that he wants us to think something else and I’ve now been able to “solve” several cases “before” Holmes because of this. And similar things happen with video games and such too, except that everytime I get something wrong, I feel like “oh I should have known that!” and I feel like I’m learning from my mistakes but still I am not. I forget about them immediately. And I still don’t know if I’m smart or stupid or if my way of thinking is just too different from the neurotypicals, but I feel like I’m giving myself false hope when I do this whenever I don’t figure out something myself.