Like many people with ADD, I’m prone to speeding.  When I’m driving fast, I feel more engaged with driving, as if the high speed forces me to pay attention.  My car, which is an under-powered late-nineties Toyota sedan, has often been a source of frustration for me.  [...]]]> I’ve often complained about how boring my car is.

Like many people with ADD, I’m prone to speeding.  When I’m driving fast, I feel more engaged with driving, as if the high speed forces me to pay attention.  My car, which is an under-powered late-nineties Toyota sedan, has often been a source of frustration for me.  It accelerates slowly, which means that I can’t get around slow people who have the temerity to be in front of me on the freeway.  And that drives me nuts.

But at its 100,000 mile service last week, my incredibly boring car vindicated itself.

I dropped the car off at 11 am.  I got a call from the garage 4 hours later.  My car was ready for me — the mechanic had changed the oil, put air in the tires, and was in the process of replacing the windshield-wiper blades.  The total cost was about $100.

It occurred to me as I drove home that my car has been a great help managing my ADHD.  My car has never once broken down.  One of the repair indicator lights went on once — once — about ten years ago, when it was still under warranty; and it was determined that the fault was with the indicator, not with the mechanics of the car.  Hell, that car has never so much as made a funny noise.  The only repairs it has ever needed fall under standard wear and tear.  This means that I’ve been able to plan in advance when to take it in to the garage, and how long I’ve needed to leave it there.  I’ve never had to deal with nasty, schedule-altering surprises.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the streamlining is the single most important thing I can do to manage my ADD.  For instance, I stick to pretty much the same schedule every week, running the same errands at the same time, so I don’t have to stop and think about each and every step.  This saves me huge amounts of time and energy.  The fact that I can rely on my car to get me to and from these errands is a godsend.  When you factor in the amount of money my household has saved over the years in repair and maintenance costs, my boring little car looks better and better.

If you have ADD, and you’re in the market for a new car, you can save yourself a ton of hassle by shopping on reliability.  Check out Consumer Reports car reviews, with particular attention to repair records.  Keep in mind that the more sophisticated a car is — the more bells and whistles it has — the more things there are to go wrong; which means that you will not only be spending more for the car initially, but you’ll also have to sink more money into the car over its life in order to keep it running.

Keep it simple, and your car will help keep your life simple.

One of the things on my to [...]]]> If you’ve ever wondered why the ADD adult in your life can’t seem to get things done in a timely manner, perhaps the following tale will shed some light.  The moral, for those of you who want the Cliff’s Notes version, is that sometimes it pays NOT to optimize.

One of the things on my to do list today was to order some slides online.  There’s a cool site called iPrintFromHome that does digital slides (and prints, and giclees, and stuff like that) if you upload your jpegs.  My art teacher is requiring us to show slides this term, so I had to make some, and since I have to show them next week, I needed to place the order today.

I was uploading about a dozen high-resolution jpegs (at least, I HOPE they were the high res versions … and that can take awhile for a computer to do.  I wouldn’t have ADHD if I tolerated boredom, you know, AT ALL, so I decided to do something else with the time — namely, start building a blogroll for this blog.  I congratulated myself on taking advantage of some dead time, and started building a blogroll.

Time passed, as I clicked through the blogs I like, looking for relevant content and links to other relevant content.  Then my browser crashed (Firefox doesn’t like it when you’re running 35 tabs in two windows, apparently) and I had to restart my computer to get it running again.  Only it didn’t start running again; it rebooted and instantly froze.  I tried closing the windows several times, and eventually I guess it thawed enough to actually quit … and then I restarted my browser, again.

By that time my husband was online, and we got to discussing his upcoming job change, which reminded me that since his new job will require him to take a pay cut, I’ll need to hustle for a day job to make ends meet.  That, in turn, reminded me I should really work on my resume.  So I did that for awhile.  After saying that I possess Excellent Written and Oral Communication Skills (doesn’t everyone say that?) I went looking for a different word to use to describe my “visual and artistic skills” … and opened thesaurus.com in a new tab … and realized that I was supposed to have my slides done three hours ago.

I got my pictures uploaded and the slides ordered.  I looked up when I can expect my order to arrive.  I found out that they do same day shipping if you place your order by 6 pm Eastern.  If I’d just patiently waited while my jpegs loaded the slides would have shipped today.  I hope that that it won’t cost me too much time to have them ship tomorrow, but I’ve been burned by FedEx Ground before.

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s [...]]]>

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s not surprising, really.  A femme has to be organized.  She needs to get her hair cut regularly, and she needs to leave time to style it every morning, and then she needs to do her make-up.  She needs to shop for coordinated, fashionable, flattering outfits, which can mean buying more bras than I’ve ever seen in one place to go with different necklines and silhouettes.  Then she has to get up in the morning early enough to put all of this together.   If you have ADD, you’re lucky to be heading off to work with matching shoes.  We need to keep it simple just to stay sane.

For instance, take my wardrobe (please!).  Clothes are one of the areas of my life that I streamline for time-management purposes.  I don’t spend a ton of time shopping or dressing.  To this end, my couture consists of five t-shirts and a single pair of jeans that are all way too big.  But what the heck, I have a belt, which means my pants stay up.   It’s all good.

Most of the time, this works pretty well for me … except that I’m going to France next month, and people there dress up a little more, and I don’t want to stick out like the Ugly American.  On a more practical level, I need some clothes that dry quickly, and my giant pair of jeans is not that.

And that means it’s time to shop for Pants.  The dreaded, dreaded pants.

Allow me to digress into an anecdote.  I used to work for a major outdoor retailer.  Many of the women who shopped with us were marathoners, triathletes, and century cyclists.  What I’m getting at here is that they are not your stereotypical chubby Americans.  They are not marshmallows.  They are athletes in prime physical condition.

And yet, every single woman who shopped at the store where I worked would come out of the dressing room with a dozen pairs of pants.  “I’m really sorry”, she’d say as she handed them to me. “I don’t want to make you restock all these, it’s just that none of them fit.  I’m sorry.  I must be a mutant or something”.

At the time, I was a good sixty pounds overweight, and pants shopping was a nightmare.  I assumed that it was because I was fat; for some reason, a lot of stores — my employer included — seem to assume that fat people don’t exercise or go outdoors.  By their standards, I was the mutant.  Right?

But if that were true, why were all these fit, athletic women struggling to fit into pants?

The answer is that Pants are Evil.

Pants, you see, don’t fit any woman, at all ever.  At least, not until her spirit has been broken by trying on the 30th pair in four hours, and even then, only if she’s lucky.  It has nothing to do with how fat or thin a woman is.  It has to do with the fact that she’s a woman who dares to shop for Pants.

Back then, I was a size 20.  When I started working at that store, nothing we sold off the rack fit me (I had to go to the website for extended sizes, and even then it was a maybe).  Shopping for pants was a miserable, horrible experience that made me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I was sure that if I could get into shape, lose some weight, everything would be different.

Now that I’ve gotten into shape, shopping for pants is a miserable, horrible experience that makes me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I’m a size 8, or 10, or 12, depending on who’s asking.  There’s actually one retailer’s size chart where I’m an 8 in the hips, a 10 in the waist, and a 12 in the bust — except of course that size 12 shirts haven’t fit me in six months.  Except that one time, when it did.  And I recently had to return a size 8 I ordered because it was too big.   Of course, it should go without saying that whatever pants I get are 5 inches too long.

Talking to those athletic women who came out of our fitting rooms with armsfull of pants should’ve given me a clue.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been [...]]]> This weekend I wrote a Squidoo lens about tabby cats.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been about my various cognitive issues, and some of them have been pretty heavy.  I chose “tabby cats” as my topic for two reasons: one, I have two tabby cats; and number two, I am such a nerd that I have actually phenotyped my cats.

That’s right, I was reading about cat genetics several years ago on the internet, and armed with the information I found about dominant and recessive alleles, I figured out which genes both of my cats express.  I did this for fun.

Anyway, I figured that I’d be able to write this lens in my sleep.  But then I decided that I wanted to illustrate the lens with photos of my actual cats.  So I had to take pictures of them, and then download them, and then crop them, and then upload them, and then write blurbs about what they illustrated …

And in short, the lens took me twenty #%*@ing hours.  Gah.  Actually, a lot of my lenses, and my blog entries, and anything else I write, tends to take me way longer than I feel it should.  You may have noticed that I can’t write a blog entry without writing an essay.

I know I’d be more productive if I could let it go sometimes.  One of my MFA profs liked to tell a story about a pottery class in which half the students were told that they’d be graded on the quality of one perfect pot, so they spent the entire term on that one pot.  The other half of the class was told they’d be graded on the number of pots they produced; the quality of the pieces didn’t matter.  Those students spent the term madly making pots, as many as they could.

Guess which group produced the best ceramics?

If you know anything about the creative process, you won’t be surprised to learn that it was the second group.  They felt free to experiment and make mistakes, because the only thing that mattered was that they made as many pots as they could.  They felt free, and it showed in their work.

What does this have to do with ADD and organization?  Well, I’ve been reading a lot about time management lately, and it turns out that perfectionism is a common ADD trait. It’s also a huge drain on productivity.  It certainly tell you that it messes with my life.  I don’t update my blogs as often as I would like, because I feel like I have to say something profound, and I feel obligated to add graphics (that takes quite a bit of time, actually).

So I am hereby resolving to write my blog posts without worrying how “good” they are.  It’s a blog, dammit, not a New Yorker article or a PhD thesis.  Some posts will be extensive and detailed.  Others, well, they’ll just be blog posts.

I had set myself an e-mail reminder for yesterday morning, reminding me [...]]]> I was on my way out the door today when I happened to check my text messages.  I’m glad I did; I was alerted to the fact that the Vietnam Veteran’s Association was coming by to pick up the donation pile from my entryway.

I had set myself an e-mail reminder for yesterday morning, reminding me that this was upcoming.  I read it and told myself, oh yeah, I need to remember that.  I had set myself an SMS reminder for 11 pm last night, reminding me that this was coming.  I didn’t hear it because I was charging my phone.

So this morning, trying to make a streetcar that was due in less than ten minutes, I had to haul several boxes outside and label them for the VVA.

The thing is, I’ve achieved a general level of organization such that this was no big deal.  I grabbed some paper from the office, a sharpie and some tape from the mail center in the kitchen, got the boxes outside and labeled, and I even (if barely) made my transit connection.

Why, then, was I cursing myself out as I boarded the streetcar?  Beating myself up for my chaotic ways is just such an ingrained habit, I start in on myself without realizing it.  Besides, it’s not like I would have been the only person, EVER, in THE ENTIRE HISTORY of the VVA pick-up service, to forget to set out a donation.

I did good today.  Even though my system failed me, I was able to compensate because of the strides I’ve made over the past few years.  I don’t need to expect perfection from myself.  “Good enough” is plenty good enough.

When this realization struck, I took a few minutes to think about the ways in which my self care has gone off the rails the last few weeks   My [...]]]> I realized today that for the third time in a week, I forgot to take my meds this morning.  This is not good.

When this realization struck, I took a few minutes to think about the ways in which my self care has gone off the rails the last few weeks   My appetite has been all over the map, so some days I’ve been eating enough to sustain me through a long hibernation, while others I just haven’t been hungry at all to the point of forgetting meals.  My sleep has been even more effected.  I’m exhausted in the morning, and if I don’t set an alarm I will sleep until noon (and could sleep longer if I don’t force myself out of bed).  My energy is low all day, and doesn’t pick up until 10 pm, making it hard to get to sleep before 3 am.

Of course, the whole thing is a cascading clusterf***.  It begins with oversleeping, so if I remember to take my meds I’m taking them at noon, meaning they don’t wear off until late evening, and then my meals are all off by a few hours, and forgetting to take my meds wreaks havoc with my appetite, so I’m a bit spacey all day, until I hit my late-night energy surge and can’t go to sleep when I’d like.

Now, I’m of a pagan-y turn of mind, which means that I like to mark the turning of the seasons in some way, however simple.  This year, I haven’t done my equinox ritual.  Pondering this fact, I realized that it’s due at least in part my reluctance to engage with the diminishing sunlight.  As the daylight fades, so does my brain, and I resent this like hell.

Resentment does not change the earth’s axial tilt, or any other inconvenient fact of astrophysics. But pretending the resentment isn’t there just because it’s irrational doesn’t make it go away.  I know from past experience that if I don’t stop and take stock every now and again, if I don’t realign myself with the natural world, if I try to pretend that my non-rational spiritual needs can just be reasoned away, there will be hell to pay.

So I did my equinox ritual.  I sat in my art studio, which has the least natural light in the house (yeah, I know), and fixed myself a healthy lunch because I needed to eat, even though I wasn’t conscious of being hungry.  I lit some candles and sat in front of them.  I made my lunch into a ritual meal, and as I ate I focused on my need to take care of myself.  I admitted to myself that I’m angry about the shorter days, that I’ve been sort of in denial about this fact, and that I was trying to carry on as if nothing was happening.  I admitted to myself that the world around me is turning inward to rest up for Spring, and that this has very real and profound effect on my body.  As the world around me slows down, so must I; I must be slower and more conscious in my daily habits.  I need to take care of myself.

As the fog rolled in, slowly dimming the sunlight and making the room even darker, I sat and enjoyed my lunch.  Instead of framing my thoughts in terms of what has to get done today, I thought about what might be in the best interests of my body.  I rested.  Then I closed the window against the cold, damp autumn, and withdrew to the warmth and light of my home.