"There's more to life than trying to survive"—Annie, Vanessa Carlton

SO, when D at the the CHADD meetings found out about my trip (I'm in New York at the moment) he essentially told me to blog while I was gone. The problem with that, I have found, is that while doing things worth blogging about, I am, well, busy. Doing them. And when I'm not, when I have a minute, I'm not blogging because I'm taking that minute for myself. So I haven't really managed my time well enough to blog. I've only gone online twice before this, to email my family. I haven't even texted my friend like I said I would. I need to get on that...

But I digress. The only reason I'm (the following no longer applies as it is several hours after I first put pen to paper today; right now I'm at the computer. Duh.) sitting here right now, by myself in the basement apartment of my aunt and uncle's house with a blanket wrapped around me, scribbling away in a borrowed-without-permission-but-with-FULL-intent-of-returning binder is that, for once—or rather, for the first time this trip—the words came into my head and I couldn't stop them. Clear words, when I often think initially in intentions and impressions. The words were:

"I'm so overwhelmed right now. I'm so overwhelmed..." Completely and totally overwhelmed by what is going on with/to/for me. I had to "take a minute. Just a minute. Just a minute. A minute, a minute, a minute. A minute, I need a minute. Just a minute, a minute, a minute..."

Which I did, curling up with a blanket that doesn't smell like home wrapped loosely around me.

...
...

That reads, to those who don't speak panic-attack-ese: I took a blanket off 'my' bed, wrapped it around my shoulders, debated over bringing a stuffed animal with me, walked over my suitcase very carefully wihout looking at it as tears gathered in my eyes. It means that I sat down on the part of the couch I've spent the most time on, brought my legs up, and fell slowly over into the fetal position as I adjusted the blanket so it was over my head, still muttering (maybe, I'm not sure, I may just have been thinking it with increasing anxiety and decreasing coherence, as is often the case in such circumstances, about needing a minute, just a minute, a minute, a minute, a minute, a minute.

(Sounds poetic, doesn't it? It isn't.)

It means that I gave myself over to helpless, hopeless (I wasn't sure which so I went with both) shuddering as near-scalding tears rand across my face to my temple. It means I was listening to the sporadic pouding of feet over my head as my second cousins ran around and my aunt talking to my dad  on the phone, and it means that I was hoping, vaguely but sincerely, that someone (Jen) would come downstairs and find me and hold me or something. But that, of course, didn't happen.

It hardly ever does.

And then it means, if you read very carefully and think about your own experiences in such things, that I stopped listening to them and started feeling the heat of my own frantic-ish breaths against my face, and that I realized somewhat that I did not, in fact, want to get up and walk over to my bed for my inhaler so I had to calm down. I started feeling, slightly, the pulsing pf blood through my veins as I started, perhaps,  to regulate my breathing.  Which of course got me thinking about runnings laps outside in the winter in my seventh grade  year, and the female eighth grade Phys. Ed. teacher telling me/us to breathe in through our noses and out through our mouths. I did that for a bit, then shifted slightly and the blanket moved an inch or so and I could see light, which I didn't want, and smell fresh air, which I realized I kind of did.

I moved the blanket back to darkness and realized acutely that the blanket did NOT smell like home, or dreams, or anything familiar, not even, really, the house I was staying in, so likely it was the smell of the last person to use the blanket before me, which was weird. Then I rememberd, I think, that the teacher had actually said in through the mouth, out through the nose (so as not to harm the sinuses or somesuch thing) and started doing that instead.

That was about when I realized that there wasn't much difference between having my eyes open or closed. And no, that thought didn't lead to some for of epiphany. In fact, I'm not sure what I thought about then, but it wasn't long before the tears dried on my face, at that time proving I had taken several minutes, not one, and I sat up.

And started thinking about how D had said I should keep blogging while I'm gone. That was when I got the binder off the bookshelf. Then I sat back down and started writing.

As of now I'm starting (again, not true present tense as I'm on the computer, but whatever) my fourth front-side-only sheet of paper, and my hand is cramping because I've written so much in so short a period of time.

Yay me.

And Jen has come downstairs, though that was just to find out if I would prefer she drive me to the bus stop tomorrow, or her husband, my cousin. (I picked her because we get along really well, whereas I've never been all that close to my second-eldest cousin. [Hah, funny story: my eldest cousin was born on the due date of the aforementioned second-eldest, and vice versa—one was early, the other late, just enough so they switched birthdays.] )

I'm suddenly realizing I haven't eaten yet today, and that I should try to finish the "DEEP JUNGLE" level of Kingdom Hearts today AND that I need to  pack up down here because my "jast murried" cousin and his wife are going to crash here tonight. Probably. And I'm leaving this place. Tomorrow. Not never-to-return or something—I'll be back in about two weeks—but I have to go and get on a bus at about one A.M. on Saturday to go to Maine.

Which is what started all of this, by the way. Talking about bus tickets and the buying thereof, and getting to the bus stop. And I'm proud of myself; I never once mentioned that I HATE BUSES.

I really do.

But, yeah. So, hmm, let's see... a quick (HA!) run-down of events since the night before I left.

I was supposed to have started packing the day before (Saturday) but I went and got my hair cut and then spent a few hours with my mom talking to my hairdresser, as apparently I now have one, and I'm not realy clear on what happened then, but I only got around to packing my new $60  purple suitcase on Sunday, late-afternoon at best. Then the Secoind Degree Sunburn for HELL that I got on Friday started acting up and giving me incredible amounts of pain.  At which point I became essentially uselkess in the matter of packing my own luggage. I could and did, however, prove the case I've been making agains cleaning my room: I know almost precisely where nearly everything in my room is, even if you can't find it, thankyouverymuch.

In fact, there's a Marvel Universe character, Dr. Modern (not a superheo) who deals with things so case-sensitive that he doesn't use a filing system—he names folders things like "Weird" because he thinks the contents are weird, and leaves all the oddly labeled folders stacked around his place of residence/employment, I'm not sure which. And he can find anything he needs to because he memorizes the information and where he put it. No one would ever be able to be all in-steal/copy the file in question-out  because they would have to look through everything!

So, yeah. Just because my room is terribly disorganized doesn't mean I don't know where things are. And a good portion of the tisme I can't find something it's because someone else touched it since last I did. So there! (Can't you just imagine someone stamping their foot and sticking their tongue out immediately after saying that? I can. But I didn't.)

Anyway, I proved my case, and after hours of intense discomfort I passed out on my mom's shoulder, my arms (where I was burned) wrapped in a towel or something with an ice pack and calami lotion, doped up in Benedryl. And they still hurt when I woke up.

But whatever. Dad drove me to the airport, and having already gotten special permission to come with me past security due to my anxiety issues, came in with me. He helped me with my bags, felt triumph over the fact that my larger bag weighed in at exactly 49 pounds... and got chosen for a 'random' search. Grr. And my bag was searched too, my carry-on! Apparently my tube of toothpaste was too big. I had to let them throw it away!!! I mean, this was a totally new package of Aquafresh, bought just for me, for my trip, and they threw it away! I felt horrible, terrible. That was money, that was mine, that was... in the garbage can. I could've killed somebody. I swear, if I weren't so anxious... And my arms, which had calmed down as I had? (My body has this neat history of having actual, legitimate physical problems crop up when I am uncomfortable with something. Like, I would be panicky-nervous about a class before school and I would throw up, thus ensuring I couldn't go to school for 24 hours.)

But back to my arms. Yeah, they started acting up again. Just like that. A tube of toothpaste, a theoretically "...entirely random, I promise. A lot of people think it isn't true, but the system really does just select random people..." search, and I was almost back to full-blown agony. And I still had to repack my carry-on ! Then, of course, as we were looking for my departure gate, this announcement comes on both the speakers and the TV screens that we don't pay attention to. Then we realize that it mentions my flight number and includes the words 'about to depart without you'. My dad and I looked at the nearest screen.

Yep, that's my last name, but... "Victor", it said. My first impression was more or less, I hate it when my name has too many characters. as my whole eighth grade year my name in teh school system was Victor. My second impression was more along the lines of oh my god no way.


There are four and a half more pages that I wrote earlier this afternoon, and I'll post that tommorrow or the day after, but I'm burning time and, frankly, sick of transcribing things from paper to screen right now.  I mean, I already wrote this once today! And, yeah, okay, I figured this point made a nice cliffhanger.

If your nervous, however, I suggest you go back and read the first sentence.

I obviously made it here.

But thanks for the concern.

Ja na!

"Someday, I'll be living in the big old city and all you're ever gonna be is mean"—Mean, Taylor Swift

I'm learning that support groups are called 'support groups' because they are full of people who, well, are willing to support you. Not that I assume everyone at every meeting would help me when I needed it—sure, they'd call nine-one-one if I was coughing up blood or something. No, I wouldn't expect these perfect strangers—aside from one night a month—to support me. And, for the most part, I haven't needed it.

Last month's meeting was the exception.

I had woken inanely early that morning after going to sleep stupidly late (I can't recall whether the fault was my own or that of good old-fashioned insomnia) and was just generally very... off. I'd had an appointment with my psychiatist that same day, first time seeing her in months, and that had gone really well. (This was something of a surprise considering the weight of dealing with my falling-to-pieces relationship remaining firmly in the same place it had occupied for the previous month, but not so much because I've been seeing this woman for six years and she has always had the answers. Tangent, MOVING ON:  )But the issues had started before I left the house. Namely, I didn't want to leave the house, didn't want to go to the appointment I had asked for. No particular reason, I just... didn't want to.

Okay, I REALLY didn't want to. But that's not the point! The point is that I had a tenusous hold on my emptions already and just when I had decided not to go after all my dad told me that we were running so late that there wasn't time for him to drop me off before the meeting. You can probably imagine how I reacted, but for those of you who can't, here's a pretty good imitation:

-__-

That's right, people. I was Not Amused. The fact that we were late because we were at the comic book store getting my latest Power Girl graphic novel didn't mean anything. That didn't make it better. We pulled into the church and saw, what, one other car there? Right by the doors, too, not in a parking spot. But I recognized the car. My dad pulled into its usual parking spot, and I flipped. By flipped I mean I had a Grade-A 'What-the-heck-do-you-think-you're-doing-this-is-so-freakin'-wrong-Park-somewhere-else-NOW-please' OCD moment. I almost started crying. Or maybe I did start. Tears didn't actually fall, so I leave whether I was crying or not to the readers' discretion. Needless to say, my dad moved the car—he probably decided that it just wasn't worth fighting about.

Bladdee-blah, some stuff happened that I don't remember. I do remember my dad getting just a tad exasperated and walking away, conversation done. I started crying before he'd walked three feet, but that hardly matters, does it, when someone's back is turned. No. So he didn't see and I just kept crying, quietly at first, then not so quietly. (If you think I cry a lot, you are absolutely... right. Maybe.)

Luckily for me and my dignity (what little was left at that point) I noticed the approaching person before they got within three feet of the car I was huddled up in. I had just enough time to suck it up like a big girl before she kocked on the window or whatever it was she did. I opened the door and we talked. We talked about my blog; she told me she had read an commented on it and thought that it was good. I put aside my comic book and wound up the cord to my earbuds. She told me that she was very sorry I had had such a negative experience the month before and that that many people in one meeting was veritably unprecedented and they had a plan for what to do if it happened again. I unbuckled my seatbelt. She told me that she really valyued my input at the meetings and pointed out something I knew but wasn't sure anyone else had noticed: that as someone who had very recently lived through (and kind of still am, being the age I am) the trials and tribunals of school life with ADHD I had a totally different kind of advice to offer people. I turned in my seat to face her more. She told me about an awesome option available at the school I'm going to attend where I can do some volunteer work, help her out for x number of hours and actually get school credit for it or something. (Which is pretty darn awesome.) And she (unknowingly, I think) did something that my parents have been trying to figure out how to do for four years with an if-not-quite-then-very-nearly 100% rate of failure.

She talked me out of the car.

Now, I have missed many a school day simply because I was so afraid of the boig, bad world that I couldn't leave the car. (Yes people, 'paralyzed with fear' is a literal phrase, not an exaggeration. DO NOT argue with me on this. Just a friendly warning.) Getting to leave a car I have decided, even subsubsubsubsubconsciously, to stay in is next to impossible. I'm not actually sure myself what it was in all the layers of reassurance that actually got me to stand up. At some point towards the end of our conversation my dad came back outside and very, very studiously ignored the conversation (mostly).

Anyway, I went inside, chatted a little, and became very invovled with a best undisclosed number of Red Vines, a few of which I used as straws for my root beer (a surprisingly good mix) much to the amusement of those who actually registered what I was doing. More people came; people I knew! We talked. There were jokes. More people. We got down to business.

I'm learning that I really dislike the introductions. It's the same people, so I don't want to recite teh same lines and bore them, but my story is fairly simple. Each time I insert some random little factoid or tic to keep it interesting. I've been to three meetings and I'm running out of ideas. This doesn't say much for my acclaimed imagination, but hey. I may not be particulary creative, but I'd still rather eff things up myself. So I suppose I'l just figure something out at the next meeting. And at least we aren't playing name games for ice breakers. No, we just wait for someone to crack a joke. I'm finding myself quite inspired byone of the men who attends these meetings; he rambles on very coherently (though that may be the ADHD in me speaking) until his wife puts her hand on his knee and hushes him. He gets in about three more sentances before he stops, though. ;P

Past the introductions, everything went really well, I think. I mean, certain people seemed not to get the answers they were looking for, but this time I was able to buck up, gather my thoughts, and present them in a if-I-do-say-so-myself-and I-do orderly fashion with surprising ease. I answered question they didn't ask of me, because I was there and I deserve to be heard, dangnabit (don't ask, that's just how I spell it and I'm trying really hard not to swear on this blog)! o, anyway. Last months' meeting went, I think, really well. I hope that at the next one the have the same, amazingly delicious peppermint bark. Or whatever it's called.  I swear, I don't care how early it is—and I'm one of the people who refuses to listen to X-mas music until after Thanksgiving dinner is over—those things taste like freaking Christmas.  Can you say, yummy? Very good.

But yeah. Went really well, and I think that, with these people there and supporting me, even if they aren't going out of their way to do so or even realize it (unless they all read this), I'll be able to take everything in stride again. I'll be able to talk. Though admittedly, sometimes it's better I keep my mouth shut, because there are some really acidic/caustic things that come to mind at times. Not usually at the meetings though. But still. Yeah.



Random thought of the day: I'm incredibly amused (and to be honest, a bit intrigued) by the fact that I can read a 300+ page novel in two sittings, but it takes 17 hours, three locations, and no less than twelve transitions from sitting to laying down and back again to finish a single publication of Cosmo. And I don't read all of it (some so-called articles are just too mind-numbing)! I guess it's that whole selective focus thing?

Ja na!

"Sometimes living on the up-and-up means being on the down-and-down." --Lost in Yonkers, Act II

As for the last CHADD meeting I went to, the one where beforehand I was nervous and tense and didn't want to go? Somehow, looking back, I feel that those feelings were justified. I don't feel that I contributed very much to the last meeting. In fact, I felt downright unwanted. Let me describe the scene for you:

Same small church room with the same small stage at the end opposite the doors. This time my dad and I sat facing it. And this time, instead of seven people, there were about, what? Fourteen? Me, dad, the woman next to me, the man next to her, his wife... One, two, three, five, six-seven, eight, nine, ten-eleven, thirteen, fourteen. (Wow I'm good. -Ish.) Anyway, all these people! And not just people. They're all legitimately grown-ups. And there I am, eighteen and two months to the day, and very obviously out of place at what was clearly a parents and grown-ups meeting.

Now, while I may be 18, and I may consider myself (mostly) an adult, that does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that I am "grown-up". Grown-ups have at least seven and a half more years of life experience than I do. Minimum. Of course, even beyond that there is a case-by-case basis.

So what was I doing there? These people (almost?) all had children with ADHD. I still am a child with ADHD. Sort of. Yes, I'm a babysitter. Yes, I'm a Girl Scout. Yes, I'm just as comfortable talking to people older than me as I am with those my own age (sometimes, I think, even more so). These were the thoughts racing through my mind, and there was nothing for me to do, nothing for me to contribute. And then, every time there was that little glimmer of realization that I have something worthwhile to say, I would feel like I was catching sight of someone who was staring at me, as though asking the same questions I already had earlier: what's a child doing here? I was unwanted I was a burden, I was superfluous.

I left the room. I went outside and walked around the parking lot trying not to cry because I hate being unwanted. [More on that in the next post.] Then I started noticing things; there was wind and people walking their dogs, and what on earth breed was that strange little fuzzy thing on a leash across the street? I let my mind wander, embraced the careless, distracted part of me that I had gone there to talk about.

And I did it silently, so no one noticed. I went back inside and listened to every word, piping in every now and then, usually when people were discussing something I had a strong opinion on. Beyond that though, I sat there, half-fuming, half-despairing, all wondering what I could do to feel more involved without feeling like I was interrupting a conversation between teachers/parents/camp counselors/doctors/other miscellaneous authority figures.

If it had been a smaller group, I would have just spoken up and told them that I was feeling awkward. I can be blunt like that, when I'm not feeling like I'm crashing a party with masks and ballgowns and no princes to be seen.

Ja na!

"Let's get down to business..."—Mulan

The effect my first ADHD support group meeting had on my was profound. When I attended the meeting, I was, for the first time in my life, really and truly validated. For the first time, I was not different from the people around me. I wasn't on a wavelength that was utterly foreign to them, or talking too fast, or picking topics that were too vaguely connected for my words to be followed. I was in a room full of people on exactly the same wavelength I operate on. I was able to glance to my left, see a man messing around with a miniature rubber chicken, catch his eye, and know that he basically knew what my thought process was—because he was able to catch up. In the seconds between when I caught his eye and when I started laughing, he figured out what I thought was so funny! (And it certainly seemed to amuse him, too.)

So yes. I felt validated for the first time in my life because in that room, people who think like me were the majority. You know what the kicker is? I didn't know I had any feelings of inferiority or isolation because I have ADHD until I got home, went to wash my hands, and ended up crying.

I think that's actually the first time in my life I've cried anything close to tears of joy. I felt so relieved. I finally knew that the way I think wasn't abnormal—because I never knew whether my mind was like that because of ADHD, or if I was just a freak. Events in the last three years had caused me to lean unconsciously towards the 'freak' answer.

But guess what? I'm not a freak. I'm not the only person in the world—I'm not the only person in my neighborhood!—that will stand up to go do something, get to where I was going (or not even that far) and have no clue why I got up beyond the fact that I was going to do something. To be so clueless, in fact, that I have to go back, sit or stand exactly where I was and look at exactly what I was looking at and try to think exactly what I was thinking before I remember what I had intended to do!! I'm not.

I'm also not the only one who tends to eat sugar before bed just for the sugar crash. I'm definitely not the only one who wakes up in the middle of the night because, as I was indirectly told at the meeting, the sugar crash that made me sleep had come to an end. One of the great mysteries of my life (literally. No, really, I'm not joking) solved just by listening to three people talking about self-medicating with candy bars.

I'm not the only one who will think of something and get so obsessive over it that nothing else (not even, really, eating or sleeping) is anywhere near as important.

I'm not the only one who has a hard time remembering to call people when I don't have anything in particular to say to them. Not the only one to realize that when said people show up at my door asking if I'm mad at them because I didn't call/text/e-mail/tweet/facebook/what-freaking-ever them that the friendship is probably not such a good idea.

So you know what? If you're reading this and ADHD, or depressed, or god forbid both, like I am, then I in all sincerity urge you to find a support group for whatever your 'problem' or 'condition' is. Joining one doesn't mean you're weak, or screwed up in the head, or a freak. It just means that you can recognize the fact that support would be beneficial.


On another note, this is probably much more like what the rest of my posts will be like for the next few weeks, until I really get a good idea of what I want to say/do.

Ja na!