Cusp

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 17:54:46 GMT

The other day I was talking to my counselor about ADHD, and I told her I really had no idea if that applied to me. My mind started working very differently after the accident, but my life also changed around that time: I went through school, which was 100% damaging to my mind even without the accident; I switched from a job with daily hard labour which is great for me to a more desk-focused job where I only go out a couple times a week for a couple months and no longer bike commute; I lost a lot of my social network and thus both physical and emotional regulatory support but also the need to mask; I added a ton of responsibilities to my life; and I have a life plan besides dying as soon as I can't work anymore which kind of increases the stakes of everything.

When I listened to the Ologies podcast on ADHD, where she interviews an expert in the field, I learned that about 10% of folks with ADHD acquire it. Some % is genetic and some % is prenatal environment, I believe, but I'd have to re-listen to remember. Anyhow, I didn't have this sort of memory/cognitive/focus issue before school and the car accident, but also I've had these liftstyle changes, and some of the experience of ADHDers sounds more familiar to my life now. So, I don't know.

My counselor ran a screening on me and it was hilarious. The screen was sixteen questions. I am mostly completely unable to answer quiz-type questions, to borrow a phrase "I'm too autistic for this" because my answer is always self-evidently "it depends" but other people seem to have no trouble? It took an hour to get through the sixteen questions, of which the most notable were:

Do I find myself making careless mistakes when engaged in something boring or repetitive? No! I make a ton of careless mistakes when I'm in a hurry, but if something is especially boring or repetitive I know that's where mistakes creep in, so I am extra careful and check my work. I do a kind of data entry at work sometimes where mistakes are important, and I know my mistake percentage is lower than most other people's, but that's because I check my work. A lot of people don't recognise that they make mistakes, so they don't check their work, so they submit more mistakes. So I don't know if I make more mistakes in the first place, but my finished work specifically on a boring job has fewer mistakes. Now on a novel job I tend to make more mistakes than the average person? So is the answer yes or no?

Do I interrupt people frequently? No, that's annoying. When I was very little my kindergarten report card said that I interrupted people a ton, but that's because I did my work really quickly and, having nothing else to do, I would wander around and interrupt people. When I was supplied with books to read after I was done and told that behaviour was bad I stopped it. As an adult I hate being interrupted while I am focused, so even if I have the impulse to interrupt other people frequently (which I sometimes do!) I will put a lid on it because it's obnoxious. So is the question asking if I have the impulse to interrupt people, or if I'm capable of suppressing the impulse? Is the answer yes or no?

Do I feel compelled to move around as if driven by a motor? (And my therapist adds: I hate this question, I'm more in my head and compelled to think about things, but I've never been compelled to move my body even though I'm ADHD) Unequivocally, no. My body never feels like it needs to go. I need the results of it moving a lot, but it never feels like it needs to get up and move. I do like to have something to think about, and if I'm going to not be thinking about something I often like having the space delineated so I don't get stuck there, but this is the only question I can really clearly answer no to.

Do I fidgit if I need to be still (one question) and do I get up out of my chair if I'm in meetings etc and supposed to be sitting down (a different question) My body isn't constructed to sit upright in a chair. After about half an hour, maybe an hour if I've been practicing a lot, I'll be in hairly substantial physical pain. So I may fidgit as a tool to manage the pain, or if I'm in a situation where the power differential allows I'll get up and sit on the floor, stand against the wall, etc. I'm definitely able to be still if there's a big power differential, and I'm able to be still if my body is comfortable (thank you, savasana) but as a rule I won't be if I'm in a chair. So is the answer yes or no? Are people with specific disabilities more or less prone to ADHD? Is this another poorly thought out question?

Do I have trouble waiting my turn? Unequivocally, no. I love the experience of seeing other people get/do their thing. I feel happy for anyone in line in front of me when they get to stop waiting and finally get their turn, for instance.

Do I have trouble unwinding or relaxing? Yes. If there's something I need to do in the next little while, I can't dip into relaxation and then dip back into action easily, so I tend to leave myself "on" because it's super hard to transition from relaxation to work mode and vice versa. So technically I don't have trouble relaxing, I just need certain situations where it's appropriate to be very relaxed and those don't come along often, but I answered yes anyhow.

Do I fail to remember appointments etc? Yeah. This is a post-school or post-accident thing: I used to be able to see or feel the entirety of the next month or year ahead of me. Now I might remember there's a thing, but nothing about it, and I need to look it up in my calendar often. So yes, I fail to remember things all the time.

Do I have difficulty focusing on people when they're speaking to me (one question) and do I get easily distracted when there's activity or noise around me (another question) Yes and yes. But. I have really shitty verbal processing, both incoming and outgoing. Before school/the accident my reading processing and focus were really great, but I'd say I'm 20x or so slower at processing speech than writing. Except, after the accident my writing processing became less and I had to switch to speech-to-text for a lot of writing, I'm slowly getting it back but it's nowhere near what it was before. So I have a ton of difficulty focusing on speech but that's because I often can't process at talking speed, so my understanding starts lagging behind the conversation and I have to choose between processing what someone just said and retaining what they're saying now. If there's background noise around me this process is magnified significantly. I have had conversations where I retained and processed at conversational speed but they are mostly I think with a specific subset of other autistic people. So, is this a question about processing? If I removed the processing difficulties, would it still apply? Or is ADHD the processing issue to start with? I answered yes to both these questions but I'm uncertain of that, and I wonder if text communication counts.

Do I have trouble finishing a boring task? Again, yes but. Not finishing a task isn't so much about whether the task is boring, it's that not finishing something is a method for managing PDA: if I am not finishing something, I'm sort of not actually doing it, which means that I don't need to start a task in order to begin it, I'm just doing some prep to make the later task easier. PDA lets me do a lot in service of prepping for things, but it almost never lets me actually Do A Thing. So for instance I can do six sinkfuls of dishes no problem, but I will leave three or four pieces of cutlery in the sink becaus I can't "do the dishes" but I can "make it easier to do the dishes later" by getting a bunch of them out of the way. Likewise I can't "plant the roses" but I can get some of them in the ground so the actual planting will go more smoothly. I don't usually get bored or lose focus and wander away; the non-finishing is as Waymond says "strategic and necessary" and is the only thing that allows me to start on any project. I don't remember what I answered for this one.

There were some other questions I don't remember, but you see how my counselor was luckily patient and filled with understanding humour every time she asked a question and I laughed and said "I'm too autistic to answer this question! Here's the situation, does it count?" and how the sixteen questions took an hour only to come up with me being dead borderline: just on the likely-ADHD side of the inattentive scale and just on the unlikely side of the hyperactive scale, within a point or two of the cutoff either way. I almost always score that way on quizzes, so I should have guessed, but interpretation (do sensory processing and pain management techniques count?) would influence the result a fair bit.

Seems like the Catherine White Holman wellness center in my province, which is for genderwhatever folks, offers actual ADHD assessments for free to genderwhatever folks, and I might hop on that. If medication will help whatever is going on with my mind, I would like medication, please. I definitely hate the feeling of wasting a lot of years being unable to live happily and comfortably when I could have taken a solution that's at hand earlier.

Anyhow, that is the funny story of my epic 16-question ADHD screen and kind of the story of my life where I suck at being categorized because I'm pretty sure the categories were designed with humans in mind instead of whatever I am. Seriously, could *you* answer those questions without a ton of associated exposition?

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