On giving credit

After a weeklong bout with strep, I am no longer ill. At least when it comes to my throat. I recently started this annoying journey to get properly diagnosed with ADHD. Today was my second meeting with the clinical psychologist discussing the neuro-psychological evaluation. Yep. I have ADHD. Summary report oncoming over the weekend. I am not sure how I feel about this yet. The flag signalling an imposter is waving wildly in my mind. Can I really change my entire historical narrative? How can anyone expect that? Well… I guess no one expects that to happen overnight. Everyone I have spoken to about this agrees that this is a long process. I am impatient. Am I doing enough to make this growth happen? And if I am, is it enough? Is it the most efficient way of doing so? Well then, why not? Of course this is when my therapist would chime in about my need for control. Yes, I know I cannot control everything. Things will take the time they take. I must be patient. But all the while, I will feel like an imposter. To this, my therapist suggested that perhaps I am hard on myself and do not give myself the credit I deserve- which is apparently not just a little bit, but a lot. I have a billion objections to this, naturally. She likened it to a person who has a limp completing a marathon, against all odds. Sure you completed the marathon, but that does not invalidate the fact that you overcame massive hurdles. So let me try this. Let me attempt to look beyond my obvious deficiencies and see the accomplishments and choices that got me there. The first one that comes to mind is my struggle with pain killers. I do not talk about it often. I can give myself credit for not being helplessly addicted to pain killers. There was a brief stint in 2010-2011, when I was working, going to school, and also undergoig dialysis. As if that were not enough, I was also going in and out of outpatient surgeries because of dialysis complications. I had enough pain to ask for prescription painkillers. Doctors would not hesitate to prescribe what I asked for. Even without the surguries, I had a tome of medical issues that lead to chronic pain. The entrypoint was set. Soon I would notice myself get incredibly dependent on the drugs to function. If I did not have it before going to bed, I would be overcome with anxiety. If I did not have it in my bag, I would be a mess in school. I never used it in school, but it was a sort of safety net. My real use was confined at home, I became dependent on the warm hugh of the opioids. I kept silent about this for over a decade. It was my shame. Afterall, addiction is not something that happens to people like me? It is something you read about. Whatever this dependence was, it was not addiction. Right? Having noticed this, I threw away my remaining bottles of rx in one of those medicine disposal lockboxes. Afterall, if I was not addicted- I could always get a refill. Opioid withdrawals are hell. But I persevered through it. I had started to manage my time a bit better now. On an ideal day, I could squeeze out about an hour of socializing with my friends. I like to think I managed to mask my symptoms, but my friends are smarter than that. They never spoke about it. We just spent time together. They went out of their way to invite me out. It helped. But the withdrawal symptoms stuck for longer than I would have liked. Nights were the hardest because I could not sleep and find myself instinctively desiring that warm hug. I do not remember really what I spent those nights doing. I may have thrown myself into one project after another. I was forced to spend around 10-11 hours attached to a dialysis machine every night. I had time to indulge myself in projects.

Whatever the case, I managed. Yet, I can now see how easily that could have gone another direction. If my coping strategies had rolled in another direction. One that was not conducive in this world, how different would my life be now? I am grateful for that decision (and strength) to recognize a growing dependence and cut myself off. That was big. I knew then that these kind of drugs would be very tempting for me, and so they became off limits. No hard drugs, no weed, no alcohol, and absolutely no smoking. I recognized my addictive personality and set rules for myself to prevent this from happening again. Of course that was before I learned that people with ADHD tend to self-medicate with just these sort of drugs. Knowing this now, I ought to give myself even more credit for having stayed away from it. It could have gone a different direction.

I am very lucky that my coping strategies (maladaptive or not) eventually result in my picking up certain skills that society values. That is how, despite my erratic employment record, I have continued to scuttle from one job to another despite not officially being trained as such. Pure luck. My coping strategies could have easily been exclusively drugs and videogames. Instead, I lucked out. I obsessively read blogs, watched lectures, and jumped from one project to another. I felt dumb for never completing a lot of these. But I continued. I think I should give myself credit for continuing in the face of times when I just wanted to stop.