Douglas Cootey has a great post up about ADHD, depression, and depression news around the web. (It was also a pleasant surprise to discover that his daughters are Irish dancers…)
This is the topic I’ve been dancing around for well over a month. Lately it seems like I’m bucking up against myself far more than I should be. I can’t necessarily call it depression as much as deadness, maybe even boredom.
Boredom is a dangerous place for an ADHDer to be, particularly one who has a lot of responsibility. It encourages impulsive acts or worse yet, self-destructive ones.
Honestly, I feel like I’m back in seventh grade fighting the hormones again. PMS is something I’ve never had before — now it feels like I get one good day for every ten. My house is a nightmare, I’m completely disorganized, I live a life of running from one place to the next for everyone but me, for every deadline I make I miss three others, and I feel like my brain is in a permanently foggy state where it never burns off.
The part about Nationals that I didn’t blog was how difficult it was for me to keep my brain in gear, to manage costumes, shoes, wigs, and assorted paraphernalia that goes with being an Irish dance roadie. Add to this the requirement that I be a cheerleader, manage not to rip the heads off of kids jumping around in front of me, run from room to room and in the case of team day, manage a 50-second costume change (including socks to tights) with a recalcitrant bitchy daughter telling me I have no clue as to what I’m doing.
That was a recurrent theme: I’d say something and she’d look at me and respond as if I were speaking pig latin or something. Then I’d get The Look. I’m sure parents of preteen and teenage daughters know it. It’s the one that says “You are an alien and I’m embarrassed to be listening to you.”
Then I’d get The Attitude. I’m sure I don’t even need to describe that one.
This isn’t unusual stuff for parents of preteens and teens to be dealing with. I see it with friends and online all the time. It’s totally normal.
Only, in this case, I FELT clueless. I felt like I was on another planet. I felt…stupid. I felt like what she was saying was absolutely true. It was all I could do to manage the details and I was completely failing on the communication side of things. I felt as though I were functioning on my last remaining brain cell and in more than one instance, one verbal cut from her reduced this ordinarily competent, fairly intelligent adult to tears.
A week later, sitting apart from things, I think I can identify the factors which contributed to it.
- I was on sensory overload. There were so many kids, so many parents, so much conversation, so much music, kids practicing on whatever floor real estate they could find, parents spreading out their stuff over zillions of chairs, me trying to manage things that I’m not especially good at to begin with, and feeling completely responsible for everything that my ADHD brain (even on meds) just overloaded with it all.
- I was required to do several things that I don’t do well when I have my full attention on just one of them. Here’s an example: I have NO sense of direction and I’m functionally dyslexic when it comes to reading maps. This is a family joke: I can get lost on the way to the market. Maps, streets and direction are counter-intuitive to me. Getting lost means stress, stress adds its own weight to my already-taxed brain. Yes, I use Google Maps. I even have it on my cell phone. But I still have to drive the car, watch the lights and look for street signs in unfamiliar territory. Oh, and Google Maps doesn’t tell you which streets are one-way. It was those one-way streets that were my undoing.
- We were under tough time constraints — her dance time was 8am both days which meant being there at 7am. We were staying about a mile away, but it was a mile that had to be driven through the heart of the city, a bunch of one-way streets and dead-ends, into a beast of a parking lot that had nowhere near enough spaces for the number of us trying to park. Even getting up at 6 am didn’t get us there on time, so add being in a hurry and being late to the stress mix, too.
- I didn’t keep lists. This is ADHD 101. Keep lists. Keep them where you can see them at all times. Use sticky notes, index cards, whatever, but keep the damn lists. I tried to keep it all in my head like I used to be able to do when I just worried about me and no one else. Bad mistake. As much as I hate ‘em, lists are essential and I should’ve kept at least three with me at all times.
- I didn’t have a backup. I have already told T (who I am re-dubbing BigDog, since that’s his real-life nick anyway) that I will never do Nationals alone again. Not ever. He will just need to bite the bullet and plan for that weekend now, because I am not going to be the ONLY adult responsible for all of this.
So this postmortem is great and I certainly probably would’ve been more on the ball if I’d managed this stuff better, but here’s where I’m seriously bummed out — I don’t feel like someone who is managing anything right now. Everything seems to be managing ME. I’ll try to break out of it a bit and get centered just in time for someone or something else to toss me off-center.
That off-centeredness has put me in a funky place. I have a zillion things to do, but I’m blogging. I could be off my butt doing a white tornado routine on the house but I’m blogging instead. I’m blogging because it seemed less irresponsible than taking the camera outside and filling a couple of 1GB cards with more pixels, which I would then get excited about looking at and post-processing to load up to Flickr (not that I’m not considering doing that anyway…lately pictures and Flickr have been my boredom panacea).
Bigdog and Sticks leave for Texas tomorrow. Sticks is attending the Jazz Drumset workshop at UNT next week. I’m not sure if this is a good, or bad thing. Either I’ll snap out of it or I’ll sink deeper in. Dancergirl and I will be each other’s company. That may be good or bad, too.
Anyone got answers? I could use some.
Technorati Tags: depression, lists, life management
