Sometime around December 2009 I was looking for blogs about being in graduate school and having ADHD but came up empty handed, so I decided to start one myself. Well, here it is, June 2011, a year and a half later, and I'm finally doing it. Ahhhh, life with ADHD... lol.
The web is littered with blogs by people with ADHD that start out strong and then eventually become neglected - I'm hoping this one will not end up being one of those...
A little bit about me...
I'm a 41 year old graduate student with ADHD. Despite both of my brothers being diagnosed with ADHD, the thought that I might have the same condition didn't occur to me until I was in graduate school. Maybe I'll go into the details sometime in a later post, but for now I'll just say that my growing frustration with my own procrastination and increasingly apparent inability to focus at critical moments sent me packing to the school counseling center to figure out what the problem was.
The initial diagnosis was severe clinical depression and generalized anxiety, with the additional possibility of ADHD just to round things out a bit. The counseling center sent me to the school clinic to see about meds for the depression, and we set up the first in a series of appointments that would eventually lead to the ADHD diagnosis.
I'll fill in the blanks in later posts, but the short story is that the meds for both the depression and the ADHD made a HUGE difference! Even so, it has been, and continues to be, a long and sinuous path through graduate school (because, of course, the meds don't solve anything, but they sure do help). And so I decided to start a blog with the hope that it will help me stay on track with my degree and also connect with other people struggling through graduate school while dealing with all of the challenges and rewards that go along with having an ADHD brain (and depression and anxiety too, woo hoo!).
I'm not sure what all will end up spilling onto these pages (screens?), but I envision some sort of combination of grad school and life experiences mostly related to the ADHD and other "mental disorders" (I really dislike the term "disorder" by the way, but that's what they call them, so oh well). What I would really like is to hear from other people with similar experiences...
When I was first diagnosed with ADHD I had an overwhelming feeling of relief coupled with confusion, and I will no doubt expand on that in a later post... What I found most helpful at the time, and continue to find most helpful, is reading and hearing about other peoples' experiences. So, I hope that this blog helps other people as much as I hope it will help me, with getting through the day to day stuff, with understanding how my brain works, and with figuring out how to work with my 'quirks' so that I can do the things I really want to do without screwing up too much along the way...
You can expect the posts to be sporadic, I'm sure there will be days when I post more than once, and other times when I go a few days without posting anything at all, some posts might only be a sentence, and others might test the limits of focus for my fellow ADHDers with their length and rambling nature, but I will try to not go more than a few days without posting something... that's the intention anyways.
I will eventually put some sort of a picture up, and personalize the rest of it (colors and such), but for now, as much as I would really love to hyperfocus on that, I'd better get back to what I'm really supposed to be doing, which is preparing for my committee meeting coming up in a week (yikes!)...
In the meantime, leave a comment... especially if you have ADHD and are struggling (or have struggled) through graduate school, but really I would love to hear from anybody who happens across this blog and finds it interesting...
Thanks!
No comments:
Post a Comment