ayy dee (aitch) dee ?

[jazzfish]

Shoutout to all the people who went undiagnosed in their childhood because despite never fitting in and feeling like you belonged, you got good grades, and that was all that mattered to anyone.

--@ skyler @ furry.engineer, 2023-09-23

This is of course an exaggeration. Other things also mattered, including "going to church every Sunday," "practicing cello," and, later, "Boy Scouts". But it was made real clear to me early on that "feeling like I belonged" was pretty much irrelevant.

(This isn't really about that. It's about ADHD. But that's a part of the story, so, here we are. CW: historical casual suicide talk below the cut.)

When I was a minor my folks took me in twice for "there's something wrong with your brain" doctor visits. You might think that "suicidal" would have done it[1], but no, both times were "your grades are slipping and that is Not Okay." The second time I ended up with my terrible first therapist (that motherfucker is somehow STILL PRACTICING three decades later). He put me on Prozac as soon as I turned eighteen[2], and was otherwise of no use whatsoever and in retrospect occasionally actively harmful.

[1] Sometime in grade 10 Dad caught me in the downstairs bathroom with a tie?belt? pulled tight around my neck. He had no idea what to do with me, and neither did I, so he took me to a computer store and bought me a game. Even at the time I recognised that Dad was way out of his depth here but was still trying, and I appreciated that.

[2] I went off the Prozac two and a half years later, in what I thought was going to be preparation for killing myself. Turns out, among other things, not experiencing Prozac side effects was better for my brain functionality.

The first time was in third? grade, when I got diagnosed with ADD and put on Ritalin. I have no recollection of it having any effect on me at all, but as I've said before, eight-year-old Tucker was not the most acute observer of his own mental state. In any event I got titrated off the Ritalin by the end of sixth grade. Consensus was that I'd "outgrown" it. When I told my terrible first therapist that I'd been diagnosed ADD as a kid, he sat me down in front of a computer and told me to press a key when I saw a particular letter flash on screen. Since I could hyperfocus sufficiently to do that, I obviously wasn't ADD. ("That's called sarcasm, Adam. It's very big in Britain.")

Anyway, I went for three decades assuming that if I'd ever had ADD/ADHD I'd outgrown it. In 2019 when Sarah started suggesting that I might be autistic (okay, so there was very little "might" about it) we also talked a bit about ADHD. My theory gradually became "if i am ADHD i am managing it quite well through a combination of caffeine, deadline anxiety, and sheer bloody-mindedness." In retrospect I'd replace 'deadline anxiety' with the broader 'crippling shame at possibly doing anything Wrong' which has also been my go-to for autistic masking.

But I don't generally have executive-function difficulties, or forgetting appointments, or distractible squirrel-brain. I keep my life running pretty well, most of the time. Admittedly I spent my first year in this apartment coming apart at the seams but that was just stress and not sleeping well. And this summer when I was finishing up the first draft of "Blood On Her Hands" I literally could not focus for more than about ten minutes at a stretch, I had to play a quick ipad game or something to get a brain-break and then it was okay to come back to it.

Now after nearly five months of no responsibilities I'm taking classes again, and they're basically self-directed. And I'm already falling behind and relying on that deadline panic to get caught back up. This ... is not great.

So after some gentle but persistent (and much appreciated) prompting from Erin, I'm talking to a doctor about ADHD. I need to get "a referral" from a normal doctor; that'll be Tuesday, and based on my previous interactions with this practice/doctor should be just a rubber-stamp. Then my actual appointment with the ADHD doc is on the 24th.

I'm feeling generally better about ADHD drugs than I am about antidepressants. Partly that's not having had a bad experience with ADHD drugs, or with being diagnosed ADHD. (tl;dr: because I was diagnosed with depression at eighteen, I was denied therapy coverage at twenty-seven, and denied short-term disability insurance at thirty-five.) Partly it's my understanding that it's Real Easy to see if the ADHD drugs are working, and/or if they're having bad side effects. And partly it's... I dunno. My depression, when it's consistently bad, is so often and obviously caused by outside circumstances. Even if it's my own brain chemistry making it worse, that feels like a reasonable response, or something. Whereas not being able to do things I need to do is ... not, in any sense.

So we'll see. I am a little optimistic, and even a little hopeful.

(I'm also still pretty mad at my parents, but that's apparently one of those things that's just gonna keep being A Thing. Doesn't help that "starting school with no money and no idea where money is coming from, and unrelatedly stressing out and doing poorly" is giving me nasty flashbacks to my first couple years at Tech.)