Feel'd Notes: A Fitting Diagnosis
I’ve had a strained relationship with mental health for as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t until after my 30th birthday, however, that I encountered a fitting diagnosis — ADHD. Before my clinician laid it out for me at the time, my belief was that I had bipolar II. I’d previously met with a psychiatrist in 2010 at the encouragement of a friend who went to the same guy and received Adderall. I tried one of her pills and it made me feel productive and “normal,” so I went in seeing if I would get my own.
I later learned that mental health diagnosis is more effective when ones symptoms are being taken into account from a period not as heavily influenced by alcohol as mine had been. My propensity for late nights, barely sleeping, impulsivity, intermittent hyperfocus, distractibility, and mood swings were all attributed to the wiring of my brain, rather than the substance used to douse its natural faculties. The psychiatrist gave me a medication initially developed for epilepsy, one said to be effective for bipolar but required the user to wean on off the recommended dosage. Pretty sure death was one of the potential symptoms of taking (or discarding) a “effective” amount right away.
As you could imagine, I didn’t feel comfortable consuming that drug for a variety of reasons, and stopped dosing before I even hit the second tier up the potency scale. It was during this time that I began writing songs again after a near 4-year hiatus wherein I dealt with a guitar-related growth in my wrist. My drinking (and mood swings) continued for three more years, until I traded in my addiction to alcohol for filmmaking and yoga.
It wasn’t until another 2 and a half years that I found my way into another clinician’s office — the one who identified me as having the “classic,” indrawn sort of ADHD that is not as easy to spot as the outwardly hyperactive variety. While I had accepted the bipolar labeling with a grim badge of cool, learning about ADHD from my counselor (and an amazing book he recommended called Driven to Distraction) led to a flood of self-identification and … relief.
Reading strangers’ accounts that sounded like they were grafted from my own experience and into the book provided both pain and hope. Ahhhh, so THIS is that thing that I’ve always known but could not speak to, draw lines about, and know how to address. That invisible force, identical to my frame and mirroring my movements, finally had a shape, a name, and a host of effective remedies. I’d stumbled my way into typical self-medication techniques, but the confirmation of the more lasting treatments I’d already discovered on my own combined with a litany of other methods provided a greater plan toward self-mastery … or even just for surviving.
The funny thing about ADHD treatments, though, is they are often synonymous with activities one would do when living with greater diligence. Daily exercise. Keeping a schedule. Early nights and mornings. Meditation. Develop a skill. Sometimes my mind is so untethered that implementing the activities that harness it is a daunting prospect. I often fail. I beat myself up for it. I get worked up and stressed out until I reach a point where I have no other avenue but to write or sit in nature or stretch as many muscles in my body as I can find.
In the wake of such experiences, I feel rejuvenated and rested — even if I just broke a sweat. I reflect on those trails and wish I could have remembered that the stress never helps, and its never as bleak as my panic and depression lead me to believe by clouding my experience. I’m so grateful for those moments (or seasons), and am learning to be patient with myself when my mind grows dissonant. Because I know that I’ve not always felt this way and won’t always feel this way — that no matter how hard it gets, it always gets better.
Shoutout to my partner @veganastronaut, our counselor, and anyone else who rides these waves with me.
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Feel'd Notes: Gaining Perspective
How often is it that we lie on our backs, look up at the infinite expanse of everything, and feel what it feels like to be an inextricable yet impossibly small part of something so grand and limitless? As a child growing up in the woods of New York State, such a state of wonder was ever preset. Having grown and moved around up and down the east coast of both American continents, I find such connection less and less frequent in my life.
I make myself busy. Not just because I want to sustain myself and my family, but because it’s the nature of the way my ADD mind operates. I have so many interests, all of them infinite. It’s difficult for me to decide how to spend what little time I have in this life: how to practice, what to practice, where to be, who to be. I’m run to anxiety. I’m prone to really really low thoughts, and it all affects everything in my life. But no matter how worthless and scattered I may feel from time to time, sometimes just lying down and gaining that perspective that’s bigger than my worries and tasks, I see how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed, how much I’ve grown, how much life I have lived and have yet to live, how rich it has been — how wide and deep and peculiar.
I have been so many things to so many people, and yet throughout it I retain a single glimmer of awareness that has remained constant throughout it all. Losing touch with this perspective, I grow tired and terrified. I’m so grateful for the moments when I feel cracks in the narrative that I tell myself, and I am brought once again to an understanding of where I am and what I am to do. I sometimes forget how to have fun, and grow despondent. I sometimes forget how gentle I am, and lash out at those around me. Regardless of what you might think of me, how soft and how kind or how compassionate, there is a ferocity in me known only to those who I’ve lived with. It is as much part of me as it is not my truest nature — one of curiosity and wonder.