When I had some cognitive space back in 2022, I ran through some diagnoses intakes with my psychiatrist. We decided not to review for autism because the test is time consuming and there isn’t really anything you can do with the results. For the OCD intake I was like “of course I do these things, any rational person behaves this way,” (no, they do not). For the ADHD intake I was like “I do not have trouble activating to do things or focusing on them once I’m doing them, so this isn’t me; EXCEPT for when I’m on my period, in which case absolutely yes.”

Then I went on testosterone and things got a little more gnarly. If you do a search for this, you’ll see that hormones (estrogen in particular) and ADHD have some interesting correlations that may in fact be causation. Some tendencies I’d always had got more extreme.

And now, I’ve quit drinking, at least for awhile, and the feeling of being full of bees is back. I wrote about this way back in 2014, about turning anxiety into productivity. See, the world is full of things that Need Doing, and I have all this Anxious Energy, and my brain calms down when I Do The Things, otherwise I am physically uncomfortable. Or I can self medicate to slow my brain down to a pace that more closely matches things like, say, cooking a meal, or even conceiving of doing yard work, or spending more than 30 minutes with a (very lovely) 4yo who really wants to be a kitty tucked into bed 13,984 times in a row. I now also lay awake in bed for upwards of 2 hours with very good sleep hygiene (no screens, reading low-intensity things beforehand, etc) listening to audio books I’ve already read many times so my brain will latch onto the book instead of coming up with new ways to approach problems which would mean 3+ hours awake instead. So many run-on sentences in this post, but it matches the energy I’m writing this with.

In discussing how to deal with losing my main decompression mechanism with my lovely husband, who has been such a champion and rock during my ebbs and flows of self-medication, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I do have ADHD. It’s just that the things I hyper fixate on are considered beneficial to society and so no one thought it was a problem at any point. Like, I will absolutely make you an amazing database to track things. I will then obsess over it until it feels even more perfect. I will forget to eat while doing this, and I will want to talk about it with anyone who will listen. And, if I decide during unemployment that it would in fact be better for me to take on yard work instead of paying a lovely human who is way more skilled at it than I am, it simply will not get done no matter how much I know I need to do it.

Also, you know, absolutely thriving when I have 4+ intense, drastically different projects in flight at a time that I can bounce between. Apple was great and all, but the dozen projects I’d have in flight at once were all similar enough to each other, and the tracking functions were all supposed to be the same (great for leadership to have a consistent view across projects, terrible for adapting to the actual nuances of the projects themselves, and also not what my brain wanted).

So I guess I pick up a mindfulness practice again, and get used to being full of bees, and try to find enough stimulation that I’m not overwhelming any one group of people I’m interacting with by trying to sheep dog them because of my own internal issues. I dunno. How do y’all deal with this?