A Day In The Life...

     The alarm goes off, provided you remembered to set it the night before. [I have become slightly OCD about setting early alarms and having numerous reminders on my phone because if I don’t, I forget or will be late. I’ll miss the ever-so-important appointment that I waited months to get, I’ll leave a friend or colleague hanging, or I’ll wake up three hours after I’m supposed to be at work. Doesn’t really leave you thinking that I’m a dependable person does it?] You eventually muster up the willpower to drag yourself out of bed and you start into your morning routine: breakfast, shower, get dressed, brush your teeth. But for a person with ADHD, this doesn’t always go as planned. You lay in bed too long, you put on music and dance around when you should be eating breakfast or getting dressed, anything and everything becomes a distraction that’s just begging you to procrastinate a bit, and before you know it, you’re running late.

     You get to school, hoping no one really notices what time you stroll in at (but they obviously do), sit at your desk and start up your computer. Email gets checked, Facebook gets checked, sometimes Twitter or online news articles, and then you start to piece together what you need/plan to do that day. Most people would then set to work, being more productive before noon than the student with ADHD will be all day. This is because you have an inherent lack of motivation and follow through, an unrivalled urge to procrastinate for “just a little longer.” Plus, you can’t get yourself organised enough to start working and you just can’t seem to sit still and focus on anything for longer than 30 seconds. Then guess what? It’s lunch time and you have done nothing productive all morning. That’s okay, you’ll stay later tonight and get everything done. You finish lunch and finally start to get your act together. You get a bit of work done and start to do some reading but you keep zoning out. You re-read a paragraph three times before you are actually aware of what you read, and by this time you’ve been sitting for way too long so it’s time for a walk or a coffee break. By the end of the day, you have completed a quarter of what you planned and that promise to stay later? Well, it no longer exists because you have exhausted your concentration capacity for the day, so you head home.

     You get home, go for a run or hit the gym, shower, make dinner, and then you have four hours to kill until it’s time to hit the sack. Since you didn’t get much done during the day, you decide to do your work now. You hunker down on the couch (it really should be at a desk, but I don’t do well at desks so it ends up being the couch) and start in on the copious number of journal articles you’ve been meaning to read (again, always meaning to do things) or crack open a textbook. Three paragraphs in and you find yourself looking around the room, daydreaming, worrying about something completely irrelevant, the list goes on and on. And before you know it, you need a snack or the laundry needs to be done or the floor needs to be vacuumed, anything that will tear you away from those readings and get you moving. Even watching your favourite TV show becomes a chore because you just can’t manage to sit still or focus long enough. Now you’re blasting your music and dancing around the apartment because you just need to be moving and when bed time rolls around you’ve once again accomplished nothing. However, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes when you’re really interested in something or you’ve procrastinated for as long as humanly possible, you end up with a crazy intense ability to zone out the world and focus solely on the task at hand. These moments are wonderful, but a lot rarer than the moments of sheer restlessness.  

     Anyway, you get into bed but you just can’t shut off your mind. Thoughts keep racing, you’re worrying about everything all at once, and you start to toss and turn as you attempt to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. Occassionally, you drift off after an hour or so. More often than not, you’re out of bed again, listening to music until three o’clock in the morning.  It is only then that you can finally fall asleep. Unfortunately, the alarm is set for 7:30 am, leaving only four and a half hours for you to get your beauty sleep.

     Medications help but there will always be that inherent lack of motivation and follow-through, especially when you combine the ADHD with the depressive phases of bipolar disorder. Hopefully one day my "mental health team" will be able to help get me to a state of being stable and productive.