Tag Archives: adhd

Career, Mental Illness

The Thing About Growing Up That They Don’t Tell You in School

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Somehow, I’m turning 31 in two months. Wasn’t I just turning 30? Wasn’t I just turning 21? And all that time I had the thought implanted in my head that I was so ahead of so many others because I had a career and didn’t have kids or a husband of my own to get in the way. Those come later – like, once you’re old enough to really have a kid and a husband. I don’t know when. Just later.

With the exception of a few women I grew up with and know who are my age, most have at least one child by now. Many have two. God help me when they start on their third and I’m still not married yet. I’m just in this mega rut. Why can’t I focus at my job? Why can’t I believe in myself enough to get another job? I just feel like I’m living all of this life for absolutely nothing. Of course one needs a job and money to have kids, so there is that. But I don’t know about how to go about a life where I both want to be a mother and be a working woman… when I don’t even really want to work… and I don’t even really want to not work.

I don’t enjoy sitting around on my ass all day doing nothing, despite being awfully talented at it. But I also don’t enjoy spending my life trapped in corporate hell tearing my body apart with stress to promote some product that often times isn’t very good in the first place, so someone else can likely get rich off of it. This is life I know, and a very privileged one at that, and I should stop complaining. But suddenly those stars on shows like Teen Moon and 16 & Pregnant seem to have it all figured out. Meanwhile I’m just wasting away with no purpose. Woe is me, I know. But it makes me so depressed. It makes it hard to do anything at all. And I can’t believe I lost a really good job because I spent too much time worrying about wasting away my life. Well, now I’m wasting away my life and I’m not making any money. That’s not really any better, is it?

I’ve done good work before, I have. But every interview I have is filled with little white lies. They often get called out. I lean on my improv training to bs this or that. I know that I shouldn’t be hired. I worry about not being able to fulfill the job responsibilities. I worry about starting work and then it going so well that I put off having a family for another few years until it’s too late. And no job is really going to be better than my last one… I had such a great opportunity and I blew it. The company wasn’t perfect but no company is. I am the one who blew it. And now I have to deal with the repercussions.

Yes, I’m getting interviews, or at least a couple of them. One this morning I wanted to just stop in the middle and excuse myself from the application process because I just don’t have work samples to support all those things I had to say I’ve done before to get the interview in the first place.  Then the one company that really wants to hire me wants me for the most senior role of all, one I’m ill equipped to succeed in, one that I want but one that I want in about 10 years when I’m actually ready for it and by then god willing I’ll have two children and won’t want to spend all my time in upper management and never see my kids.

Part of me wants to just apply and hopefully get some basic administrative role. It won’t pay as well at all and I haven’t been that great at administrative work previously, but maybe now I’d at least appreciate it more. I just wish I had someone to talk to about all this, someone who could provide good advice but also who isn’t delusional about my actual abilities. I just feel like everything is falling apart, no more than normal except the slowly draining bank account, but I just can’t deal with it all. So I get further depressed. I start thinking about how lovely it would just be to disappear right now because no matter what I’m going to fail.

I understand from the outside that sounds dramatic but it’s reality. People want to hire people who can come up with things to do and get them done. I can’t do the first part. I have no confidence. My parents taught me to doubt myself every possible instant I could, and I still do. I wish I knew what it was like to feel confident, like I could be successful, like I deserved anything at all that I have. But all I feel is hopeless. Incompetent and hopeless and miserable. So what I wonder is, what is there that I can do where I can make some kind of money to survive and also consistently offer value to an organization? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I won’t mess up?

ADHD, Career, Management

10 Traits of a Great Manager: The ADHD Challenge

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As I’ve noted in previous posts, management does not come naturally to me. I think great managers often had parents who taught them many of these managerial skills from day one, or other parental figures who did the same. Evolving as a manager I am also going through the process of determining whether management is for me. I am hoping I can sort it out and make it work as management is where the money is, but ultimately I may be better suited as an individual contributor. How many of these 10 Management Traits do you have?

1. Multi-Tasking Genius: The ability to multi-task is the requirement of a good manager. She needs to be on top of the goals of her direct reports, not only designing goals that map directly to upper management objectives, but also helping those who report to her achieve these goals. While great managers know that the best way to win is to step aside, there will always be times when their guidance is sought and they need to have a good answer or be able to quickly find it, all while working on numerous other projects and priorities. Continue reading 10 Traits of a Great Manager: The ADHD Challenge →

Career, Mental Illness

GSD with Anxiety & ADHD (AKA Not GSD with ADHD)

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After bawling my eyes out at my weekly therapist’s appointment due to just way too many first-world stressors going on in my life, we discussed what was really bothering me most — my inability to prioritize tasks. People with ADHD are known for being creative yet unable to accomplish seemingly simple projects because they just can’t break down larger projects into smaller tasks and then prioritize these tasks.

So my therapist asked me to picture all of my projects at hand as different airplanes flying into an airport, and for me to be the flight deck controller determining which one needs to land first. She asked — which can you help land while you let the others circle until you are ready for them? That was a terribly hard question to answer. I couldn’t just pick one and ignore the others. My mind had to actually start going through every single step and potential issue that might occur for each “plane” and seemed more satisfied running through the problems than settling on the project that needed to actually be done first.

Continue reading GSD with Anxiety & ADHD (AKA Not GSD with ADHD) →

Career

Saving Minutes, Spending Hours

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As the sun sets over another weekend, I look back on the last 48 hours and wonder where the time has gone. Sure, I’ve been spending a bit of it on work that I didn’t have time to accomplish at the office, and additional time getting healthy and lounging around in my boyfriend’s arms finishing off the second season of Mad Men and the latest episode of Dexter. Still, I’d like to feel like my weekend was filled with all the excitement that working 60 hours a week pays for, and it just never is.

By the time the weekend roles around, I’m exhausted and haven’t gotten through 50% of the projects that need to be finished for the week. That has to change. For the next five weeks, I’m going to focus on closely examining where my time is going, in order to be more productive and ultimately have time that I feel I’ve earned to not just relax, but to live life. Continue reading Saving Minutes, Spending Hours →

Life as I Know It, Mental Illness

I Fired my Life Coach

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Well, I didn’t actually “fire” her — I just told her that I wouldn’t be continuing with my regular weekly sessions at this point.

After years of going to therapy on and off, I thought perhaps what I really needed was a life coach to help me figure out how to manage my time and feel like I was leading a successful, productive life. I sought out an ADHD life coach specifically because I thought they’d be able to help me best focus on the time management issues and all the other things that relate to my being ADHD.

She was trying to earn her certificate, so the actual coaching was on the cheap side — $10 per half hour session by phone, totaling $40 a month. But after a few months of meeting with her weekly, I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. It wasn’t her fault at all, I just realized that I’m not the type of person who can benefit from a “coach.” I tend to rebel against authority even when I’m paying for it, so the whole concept behind coaching backfired on me.

However, I did get an education in how to think about prioritizing my life, and how over committing is not the right tool for success. Without the authority role in the picture, I am hoping I can take some of the learnings and apply them, perhaps having value out of the months of life coaching yet.

Have you ever gone to a life coach? Do you have a success story?

Uncategorized

I Should Call My Blog: ADD & ADHD Money

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If you’ve been reading my blog for longer than two minutes you probably can guess (or have read) that I have ADHD. I don’t entirely believe in ADD or ADHD (I think its caused by anxiety, which I happen to believe is the cause of most mental disorders) but for whatever it’s worth, I have all the symptoms. I’m distracted, disorganized, have never followed a routine for longer than maybe two days at a time, and am pretty sure my intellectual potential far surpasses any of my output.

Every year, especially around this time, I tell myself — this year I will get organized. This year I will figure out what to do with my life. This year I’ll wake up early, go to the gym, get to work at a reasonable time every morning, work hard from 9-6:30, take an actual lunch break (not work through lunch), come home, clean, do laundry, COOK DINNER, read a book, go to sleep around 10, wake up and do it all again…
And every year, I know it’s not really going to happen. Not without some serious outside help that I’ve yet to find. I don’t know why I’m so unable to keep to routine. I don’t understand how most people do easily (or seemingly easily.) For me, it takes so much focus and energy to accomplish anything once, let alone multiple times on repeat into the foreseeable future.
I still feel like a child, albeit one who understands the world overall fairly well, but I’m still a kid in my mind, wanting to run off on a whim, commit to nothing, yet still have the security of being taken care of, and living a life where risk is just s synonym for trying something new without the fear of any serious kind of failure.
Here’s why I’m depressed — I am afraid of everything. I’m afraid of trying and failing but I’m even more afraid of trying and succeeding. What’s success? It always seemed like some sort of end to me. End of childhood. End of my 20s. End of growing up and instead being grown. At least failing you have somewhere up to go. I think too much. Constantly. My mind is filled with worry. I check my budget compulsively. Not routinely. Routine is alien to my very existence.
I oft wonder if some ADHD drug would help me focus… but every psych wants to treat my depression and anxiety before treating ADD. So I get drugged up on SSRI’s and give up on them because they put me to sleep, they don’t help me focus, they don’t make me able to handle routine, they just make me feel out of it, like a zombie who is unable to cry, who isn’t happy or sad. That’s not getting me anywhere.
Whenever I consider actually applying to grad school there feels like a huge brick wall up in front of my face that I can’t get passed. First is figuring out what I want to do with my life (I want to do everything and I want to do absolutely nothing), then there’s actually having faith in my ability to do graduate-level work (I struggle with writing, math, reading, well… focusing, and just about everything that is required of academia) so then I think “what am I thinking? I can’t do graduate work. I barely got through undergrad and somehow took enough classes to squeak by with a 3.2 from an average (ie non-impressive) liberal arts school. I don’t necessarily want a PhD, an MA or MFA is more likely, as my graduate study should probably be largely about learning and applying skills, not solely research. But I worry about the level of other students who would go to any of these programs – they’d undoubtedly be smarter and more capable of focus than I am. They’d already know a lot more about whatever field I decide to study. I’d never be able to prepare enough to feel competitive in any graduate program worth attending. Then there’s the pressure of applying — I was lucky in undergrad, I applied to 5 schools, and even with a miserable high school GPA I was accepted to 4 out of the 5, mostly based on my artwork. But now… I don’t know who would want me. I’m average at best and not sure what I could contribute to any program. Then there’s my average GRE scores (not getting into any of the Ivy-level schools I like to daydream about) and my fear of asking anyone to write me a letter of recommendation. And beyond all that there’s the cost of grad school which I can’t even comprehend. Right now I’ve at least gotten myself comfortable with saving… if I can stick to my budget, I’ll save $20k next year. But grad school looks like it will cost me $50k per year. For 3 years. After putting so much effort into getting accepted I then would have to take out HUGE loans that I’d pay back for practically the rest of my life.
Or I could… not go to grad school. I could find a job that I’m good at. But what IS that job? I get bored so easily. I fall for every job at the beginning and then after a year I’m ready to move on. It’s like this with every other aspect of my life as well, but even more so with work because it feels like it’s my entire life. I hate feeling infinitely trapped as an indentured servant of capitalism. But that’s life. Can’t I just accept it and move on? Why can’t I just… focus?
Mental Illness

Group Therapy: Cost Effective, but is it Helpful?

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As my loyal readers and those who peek at this blog on any given occasion know, I suffer from anxiety, depression and ADHD. That’s not to say my life is miserable, but I’ve gotten myself into one of those ruts and decided to seek help. Due to refusing to go through insurance for mental health therapy (until a healthcare bill passes that does not allow denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions), I have to be careful about my monthly costs to get help. Because it’s all out of pocket. (*since I have a high-deductible HSA account the only real benefit of going through my insurance company would be to have the fee go towards my deductible. Group therapy isn’t covered anyway, and mental health therapy for non serious conditions (ie ADHD, anxiety, minor depression) isn’t covered much either.)

There’s one doctor who is supposedly an expert in ADHD who, located nearby my work, charges $700 for the initial consultation. What? I know I live in a wealthy area but come on. That’s absurd. I found a career counselor and therapist who offered a free consultation. She normally charges over $200 per hour but has package rates. Ultimately, though, I decided I need to see a psychiatrist first to find out if I need to be medicated. I kind of feel emotionally out of control. And while I had going the pill route, at this point I’m willing to try anything. The psychiatrist cost $280 for one appointment. A short, 20 minute follow-up appointment will be $150. She prescribed me Celexa (which I still need to get and find out how much that will cost me.)

But I know weekly or biweekly therapy would help greatly. And given my current state, weekly therapy would be best. I shopped around and tried to figure out the most cost-efficient option. That led me to group therapy. While the rates were $75 per session, I was quoted $50 per session to get started, with her hope that I’d also seek out individual therapy twice a month.

As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “Group Therapy Offers Savings in Numbers.”

After two sessions of “process-based” group so far, I’m attempting to weigh the pros and cons of this treatment…

Pros:

– more affordable than individual therapy. $50 – $75 per 1 1/2 session.
– can afford to meet weekly, and its sometimes nice to just have that safe space that often.
– the value of your therapy doesn’t depend soley on your therapist
– you get to find out what other people think about you and your actions
– other people are counting on you to show up so you go even if you don’t feel like it
– you’re required to pay for every session in a month even if you don’t go, so you make an effort to go to every session.

Cons:
– even though the session is 1 1/2 hours long, it goes fast, and often isn’t about you
– you’re required to pay for every session even if you have to go out of town or get sick
– the benefit of the therapy depends on the dynamic of the group
– most people in group are also seeing individual therapists, it’s hard when you’re not
– the therapist has an odd role in trying to ask everyone how they’re feeling at the moment, but holding back on actual counseling (that’s for the individual sessions, which cost a lot more per person, after all.)
– while people are supposed to agree to at least 12 weeks when they sign up, people come and go. I can already tell the true value of the group comes from one that has been going a long time with the same people. Granted, bringing in someone new every once in a while and dealing with people leaving (abandonment) is theraputically good. However, too much of that and all you talk about is how you feel about people leaving and joining.

Have you ever had group therapy? What was your experience like?