In the next issue, the Joker paralyzes the city’s entire police force by using weaponized Viagra.
5 Likes
Could it be that you’re being harder on yourself than you should be? Sometimes things just take longer than expected. Try to be kind to yourself…
10 Likes
Thanks, it could be. This whole year has made me feel like I have very little control over this. Six months ago I’d personally feel terrible, but I could literally do twice as much in a day. Now I can’t seem to do much at all, and I find it difficult to focus in a conversation or if I have a few things to do. Last week I took my son to school, and I left the door open, forgot to pack his lunch and forgot to take his bag. I went back and sorted it out, but when he got home my wife mentioned that I hadn’t dressed him warmly enough. The next day was better: I packed his lunch, but still forgot his bag and arrived late.
4 Likes
I wonder if your growing awareness of your diagnosis could be sort of exacerbating or somehow contributing to the problem of focus and completion. Now, I know very little about ADHD, so I apologise if any of this is overly simplistic or condescending or just flat-out stupid because I don’t understand. But it seems to me that, from what you’ve said about ADHD recently, you’re newly-diagnosed but have had symptoms/traits/behaviours all your life. So that makes me wonder if it’s increased your anxiety about the overall situation, which then feeds into not being able to focus and complete stuff, which causes more anxiety… That is: you’re anxious, knowing you’ve got to do this, this, and complete that by a particular time. You set to work, but knowing your diagnosis means you know you’re going to have a hard time focusing and completing those tasks. Which makes you anxious. Which makes focusing on and completing those tasks more difficult. And so it continues.
Maybe I’m talking utter nonsense - sorry! But that was why I suggested being kinder to yourself. Hopefully decrease the anxiety.
2 Likes
It wasn’t so much that I had a diagnosis and started having anxiety; it was more the other way around (about two months after starting, I had symptoms of a kind of mixed mood disorder, sleep problems, anxiety to the point where I was basically shaking and getting paranoid about family members, obsession about particular topics and feeling like I had to keep thinking about and discussing them, depression and body image issues, weird emotional triggers and responses, increased stimming etc.). Nothing in the documentation had prepared me for the kind of neurological side effects I had and my psychiatrist couldn’t explain it, so I felt like I had to find the reason after I and other people had noticed that I was acting weirdly. I guess it was like something that had been going on in the background for a while, but the medication isolated and amplified the more autistic or mood elements as it suppressed the ADHD elements.
The only two groups that seemed to have similar side effects were autistic and bipolar people, so I researched both of those disorders while trying to find psychological tools to deal with the symptoms (my psychiatrist couldn’t give me advice, just adjust the dosage). In many ways it was helpful to go through that, since I couldn’t avoid all of the stuff that was subconscious or shapeless before (there are lots of symptoms of autism, so while I knew there was something going on, I didn’t have a mental picture of it). It looks like it wasn’t just me overreacting, since there is an interesting link between autism and ADHD and it can affect how people respond to medication:
It’s also very common for people with both to say that they only found out about the autism after being treated for ADHD. It’s good, now I have names and explanations for how I act at times, and ways to deal with it. I don’t hate myself like I did a year ago (a lot of it was subconscious before that, but when I became aware of it it was pretty overpowering and took some time to deal with). I can’t concentrate at all, but I should be able to sort this out early next year. The main thing is that it’s taking quite a long time (I haven’t been able to work properly since June, because you have to taper off the old medication and increase the new one slowly), and I don’t want to give my project managers the idea that I’m unreliable. There were and are anxiety loops, but this is much less of a problem than it used to be.
7 Likes
Best of luck with it all, cherub 
3 Likes
I made a date to see a movie with a friend. I last saw a movie with her eight years ago. She mentioned the day of the week she was available, not the calendar date, and after I okayed and went to write it on the calendar, I saw it’s on my husband’s birthday.
He still doesn’t have the birthday gift I ordered, although Amazon gave its arrival date as today, and even though we both walked up to get one shipment of the split order, and encountered a USPS truck and asked its driver if there were any Amazon Locker packages. I’ll be meeting my friend in 100 minutes, and my spouse’ll probably have dinner alone and no gift.
15 Likes
enh. I had a great time last night with the dinner and socializing. It has been fun to be lazy and watch dumb hammer horror movies today.
I got used to the holiday making a mess of my birthday scheduling long before we were married.
ETA also I am still very amused to see the cake on all my posts today.
12 Likes
I’m miffed because I asked the vendor, not Amazon, how long shipping usually takes, and the vendor said it was pretty fast. The arrival date window narrowed to your birthday, and I felt momentarily rested in my decision. I am not blaming the vendor: Amazon houses the item in a warehouse, and is responsible for shipping. I may be angry if the present has been resting for three hours in the Amazon Locker as of this typing.
I purchased this November 17. A week is not improbable given it left an Amazon warehouse.
Now that I reflect on this, I believe that the driver we questioned did not have the package in his truck. I do not know how many trips beyond two to the Locker he made today, nor do I know how many other USPS trucks from other post offices made their deliveries to same Amazon Locker.
6 Likes
USPS has surprised me lately with a morning delivery of Amazon packages and then the usual afternoon mail delivery.
And Sunday delivery by good ol’ USPS is still something I’m getting used to.
But with an Amazon hub just north of us, I’ve had a few “plain white van with an Amazon Logo slapped on the driver’s door” show up as well.
Maybe I’m ordering too much from them…
4 Likes
heh. I live in Amazon Central and yet our neighbourhood’s Nextdoor.com pearl clutchers fret like fussy chickens at white vans doing Amazon deliveries…
No present. I was going to collect it after the movie but can’t do that without a delivery confirmation and a code.
At least the movie was good.
5 Likes
11 Likes
I’m going back onto Strattera (with some other medication to handle the side effects), so I’ve been thinking about strategies to deal with things like depression, paranoia, anxiety, executive dysfunction etc. I find it helpful to reduce things to the simplest possible elements in order to understand them and work around them. How would I describe the physical sensations involved with something like depression? What are the thinking processes? How does it start, and what makes it worse or better? This helps to differentiate my particular issues from other people’s similar problems, or to see why I might act in a particular way and how to change.
For example, paranoia:
In my case the anxiety came before the things it focused on, but once those were established they became part of a positive reinforcing loop. It wasn’t really about other people threatening me, it was my anxiety focusing on the things that were closest to me: autonomy, relationships, family, financial security etc. If those feel less secure and threatened, my brain searches for external threats that may or may not exist. It also closes up into circular thinking where it builds a narrative in opposition to the outside and is less likely to accept external challenges to this narrative. It changes the way I interpret people. People say you’re not thinking rationally? That’s exactly what they would say!
After a while I could see that I was on edge and couldn’t trust my own judgement, so having a few people around me who I could trust helped to break this cycle to some extent. Having a sense of what is and isn’t a threat is important, but it’s also important to see how your judgement could be impaired in specific ways, and where it’s safe to ignore the alarm bells. Sometimes actually confronting reality can help – if you think people have a negative opinion of you, sometimes talking with them can help, since most people don’t really have strong feelings about specific people around them anyway. It also humanises them more to you. If their view of you really is negative or there is a real threat, at least you can deal with the facts rather than generalised fears. Keeping a good sleep pattern can mean that there’s a break in the cycle every day – at times I’d stay up late, wake up multiple times during the night and then wake up early the next morning, which also gave me less energy to think rationally.
Suicidal ideation: why would I feel that killing myself is a sensible idea (or even the only possible solution) when I have a family who loves me, work, good physical health and better opportunities than most people in the world? In my case it had a lot to do with negative self image and feeling trapped/overloaded by all of my responsibilities. Why do I have a negative image of myself? Where did it come from in my past, and what thinking processes are involved? If I met someone just like me, would I hate them and judge them as strongly as I do with myself? Does it help me or anyone else to look at myself in this way? This doesn’t mean that I’ll suddenly change since feelings are often irrational, but it can help you not to take them personally. It is possible to allow thoughts to pass without reacting to them, or even to find ways of reacting positively. I think of it almost like a hurt animal inside of me that’s lashing out. Attacking it will make it more violent, but it’s possible to change your relationship with it and treat it more kindly. Where I feel trapped, making a specific plan can help me to see the end of the tunnel.
Anxiety, depression and executive dysfunction can also prevent you from doing even simple things, but here it’s also good to break things down as simply as possible. I can’t do a certain activity. Why not? Which specific elements of this activity are difficult? What is stopping me from doing these things? Could I do this activity while eliminating or reducing some of these elements? What would happen if I did it anyway? (I could have an anxiety attack, I could fail, people could judge me, it could use up all of my energy and I’d be completely exhausted afterwards, I’d be too distracted etc.). If I allowed for the cost, could I actually manage it? If I was anxious or unmotivated inside and still did it, would that help me to do it again/better next time? If I can find ways for this activity to become attractive rather than threatening, would that help? Could I do it for five minutes, then five minutes more?
These strategies don’t change the reality that you can’t just will yourself out of depression, but they can help you not to be overwhelmed by it.
11 Likes
Went tobogganing this weekend.
Didn’t check my pockets.
Smashed the screen of my phone.
I am now without my phone for a few days and am out the money to fix it (which I can, thankfully, afford).
But still. I am currently quite annoyed with my own absentmindedness at the moment.
16 Likes
I feel your pain…
My phone, dropped last week:
Not getting fixed; it still works, and I can’t spare the money. My glasses aren’t in much better condition (scratched and crazed rather than cracked, fortunately), and they’ve been #1 priority for a few months now.
14 Likes
Mine didn’t, which was probably the determining factor.
The display was mostly useable; the touch screen wasn’t responding at all.
I should (fingers crossed knock on wood break a leg) get it back today.
The withdrawal symptoms aren’t pretty.
7 Likes
My phone is in the same condition yours is in. I dropped it from table height and the front of the screen spiderwebbed. I’m not getting it fixed either.
A couple months ago, I fell on my phone while jogging. The damn thing shattered like it was made of candy glass, and I don’t just mean the screen. Everyfuckingthing was shattered. There were pieces of phone all over the pavement.
7 Likes
Dropped my Lumia on the shop floor (poured concrete). Glass shattered in upper right corner. Not sure why I’m sharing this, seeing as I want my phone to die anyway and several times I’ve come close to smashing the phone out of pure rage due to cumulative frustration with the Windows phone OS and the utter shitpile that is mobile Internet Explorer.
11 Likes
I truly like my Nexus 5, but they are quite prone to shattering. I’ve found it cheaper to buy a phone with a bad imei or motherboard issues and swap in my motherboard. This phone is on its third “body.”
ETA: sorry @Snowlark, that was supposed to be a general reply.
4 Likes
My general sentiment.
I mean for the past decade I’ve been kinda ‘stuck.’ Actually a lot longer than that but who’s counting. I just can’t muster the giveadamned beyond momentary anger to consider ‘why try doing better than tread water when I can’t do?’
Apathy is a motherfucker when you kinda sorta want to do things, and especially if you want to get good enough at something people around you start actively helping. However at this point between my own mulishness and, to not sugarcoat things, my stepdad’s abusive tendencies… Getting any kind of momentum is difficult at best.
So fuck me I guess?
4 Likes
