Finally an answer...?

[jennythereader]

I found this article on ADD in gifted children a few days ago.

It could have been written about me.

I... fell off a cliff academically in middle school. Everyone I knew told me that if I just tried a little harder, just focused a little more, just stopped letting myself get distracted by books or crafts, just had a little more will power and self discipline, I could climb back up it and be back on track to as much academic success as my intelligence suggested.

I never managed it. I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and dropped out of college twice. The whole time everyone told me it was my own fault. The whole time I believed it was a moral failing, a character flaw. Something that I could just get over if I tried hard enough. However hard I tried it was never enough. Nothing I did made a difference.

This article is the first evidence I've seen in 20+ years that maybe it isn't my fault. You wouldn't believe how much I've been crying since I read it.

I'm being tested for ADHD in early January.

Comments

[inaurolillium.livejournal.com]

I was diagnosed after I flunked out of college the first time, I think. I was seeing a therapist for my bipolar, which was certainly the proximate cause of said flunking, but the ADD had clearly been causing me problems for years. And yeah, I perfectly match that list.

Actually, I just went to see a new psychiatrist a couple of weeks ago. He asked me what I was like as a student, and I just said, "ADD." "Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at," he said.

(Sidenote: Fascinatingly, 20% of people with ADD have bipolar, and 20% of people with bipolar have ADD. Weird that the percentages match up like that.)

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

What has tripped me up every time I've tried school is having more than one big project with an actual deadline. As soon as that happens I start flailing. If I'm working at the time it's even worse. My one success in college was a single class, in a subject I really cared about, while I was between jobs.

It may turn out that I have some sort of mood disorder, but I really think that the depression I suffer from will turn out to be a symptom, not a separate problem.

[inaurolillium.livejournal.com]

What I can't handle is lectures. I just absolutely cannot stand them, cannot pay attention to them. I can nearly memorize the book, and have passed many classes that way, but lectures make me crazy. So I stop attending, and then flunk from absences. Infuriating. I only got through culinary school with lots and lots of help from the disabilities office. (Which, seriously, if you ever go back to school, you definitely need to make friends with. They can get you extensions so you can stagger your projects, and other things. They got me out of some of the attendance requirements. We had four hour lecture classes. It was sheer torture for me.)

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

For me, lectures are OK as long as the instructer can stay mostly on topic. If they stay off topic for too long I'll tune them out and may not notice when they get back on.

I stop doing homework when it gets overwhelming, and then stop going to class when I get too far behind on the homework. Big projects just seem to trigger that faster.