Flying without wings
Is very hard.
I feel like I have been built to fly, but my wings are stunted and deformed such that I can only waddle around and look up at my fellows who are soaring in the air around me. “Why don’t you join us?” they ask. “You have wings just like us!” And so, in desperation, I search for a suitably high place to jump off so that, when I am engaged in the act of falling to the ground from that high place, I can delude myself into thinking that I can fly.
Metaphors aside, ADHD is crippling, and I can’t afford to get the drugs that help me deal with its symptoms. I’m even enrolled in grad school, but because I am in all distance education classes, I am not allowed to sign up for university health insurance. So it’s just me wandering around, acting like I am a normal human being, doing maybe half of what someone normally does (on my best days) because I’m too distracted the other half of the time. Most days I pick one thing and manage to get it done. Yay.
On the other hand, I must celebrate such victories as I am possessed of:
- I have brewed beer for a wedding. Not just a batch, but enough for three beers for everyone in attendance. And it’s good beer.
- I am in grad school–not UNC, but I’m also not still working at the vet clinic too many hours for not enough money.
- I have not bitten my nails, on meds or off, for very nearly three years.
More, I’m sure, but I’m on a writing sprint. So there you have it–the dilemma of someone with ADHD. Life is exciting! Except when it’s not. I wish I could just “get up” in the morning as some of my friends say. I wish I could just focus. I make lists, I scratch off a couple things, and then I make new lists with all the things that occurred to me while I was doing the couple of things on the first list. Transfer over, repeat. Then I look at the fifth iteration of the list and realize that several of the items are either nearly due or overdue, and panic sets in.
That’s life, I suppose.