10 mo. ago • 85%

ADHD Women Weekly Check-in for Jan 28-Feb 3 : How Are You Doing?

What's happening with everyone? Please share whatever you feel like sharing - and thank you for being a part of this community :)

10 comments

I became an mechanical engineer this week, so no more school for me ever! Hope y'all are doing well

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- Congrats! 🥰
  
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- Congratulations! It must feel so relieving and exciting at the same time!
  
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  Thanks, it sure was a long journey
  
  To be honest, I was longing for that day to come that I was mostly just feeling relieved that it was done.
  
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I'm trying not to stay up late each night and failing. It just feels like there's no other time to do literally everything. The rest of the day I drift around feeling sleepy and unmotivated and like clockwork around 10pm I wake up and want to do things. I set an alarm for myself to remind me when to get ready for bed and tonight when it went off I wanted to cry. I feel like I'm wasting all of the time I'm "allowed" to be awake feeling shitty and all the time I actually feel awake being guilted for it and suffering for it later.

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- Oh. I wish I could hug you. I feel this deeply in my soul. I also wish I had answers to make it magically better. I unfortunately don't. I completely understand this feeling as this has been an ongoing struggle for myself as well. I hope that you know that there are resources out there. Therapy, meds, community. Maybe only one of these will help may e it will take all three. And I wish I could say that if you start one or all of these it's gets better immediately but I have been on a journey of all three for what feels like ages now with less success than I hoped.
  
  But you are not alone. Things can get better. And I think that it is very important to remember that it is okay to cry. It's okay to give yourself permission to be upset, to feel frustrated and it's okay to waste time. I know that this doesn't necessarily help and it's incredibly hard to find the balance between pushing yourself so you feel like your time is spent how you want it to and allowing yourself to not feel the guilt for "wasting" it.
  
  You are not alone in your feelings and they are valid.
  
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  Thank you for this. Meds aren't an option at the moment, but I might be able to find new help in the others. There have been periods in my life where I've been able to just live on my own schedule and this is not one of them. There's an element of grief here, and a feeling of loss. It chafes because I have a sense of how things are "supposed" to be and how my normal feels. I know my husband thinks I'm being stubborn or defeatist for not trying harder. There are a lot of "why don't you justs" from others and myself and I keep thinking "well yeah and if I was a bird I could fly".
  
  I know it's not hopeless, there's caffeine and naps and even if I feel tired and unmotivated things are still (slowly) getting done. I just would hate to be stuck with this as my life now.
  
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I feel so utterly and hopelessly lonely. It has been building for a while and I have taken some concrete steps to keep it from getting worse and connect to people. I asked my old group of friends for a virtual hangout to just catch up and boy that backfire. I ended up in tears last night after and I feel even worse. Nothing really bad happened. It was fine, it was pleasant but it felt so utterly hollow and I felt like I didn't belong. it felt forced and fake and now I am all up in my feels about my friendships.

I have taken steps to make new connections and it's been hard. I used to feel like it wasn't this hard but now I feel as if maybe I have simply been tolerated by everyone and maybe my friendships aren't as deep and strong as I thought.

Last time I as this lonely I was also so severely depressed (there were other factors to the depression as well) that it hurt my relationship with my partner now I am also anxious that this is a sign that I am headed back to the pit.

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- I'm sorry things are so difficult for you right now. I feel lonely quite often. It's difficult for me to form meaningful connections and it's only gotten harder the older I get. Hang in there.
  
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I have received the result of my ADHD diagnostics, and did not receive the diagnosis for various reasons. Those reasons are valid when viewed through the lense of a diagnostician and I understand why the decision is being made that way. But I still do have many of the symptoms and problems in every day life, which fit the bill (also according to the diagnostics, but that's not enough), and the alternative explanation they offered is basically ineffable due to lack of research, and in practice this just means that I will not have access to med treatment, even though they might still be helpful. In truth, I think I'm mostly disappointed that I cannot benefit from the well-established treatment protocol for ADHD, and don't know how hopeful I can now be to get a handle on my life at any point in the future.

I don't stand alone in this, my therapist is still going to give me a cognitive-behavioural training designed to help with executive function deficits. And I have already learned, that I'm allowed to stay 'round here even without the label. :)

But together with some other stressful stuff happening, I'm not doing so well, I think.

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