Broken brains and me

[jerith]

Some of you good people may have noticed that I haven't been quite myself these last two weeks. This post serves as an explanation.

WARNING: Some of what follows is pretty personal. If I wasn't OK with it being public it wouldn't be here, but if you're uncomfortable with that kind of thing (or perhaps just don't know me well enough to care) you

Comments

[msmercenary]

I've never been officially diagnosed, choosing to treat it more as a personality trait than a disease. (You can medicate personality traits too - it's just often illegal) However, this and many other accounts of ADD describe me as well.

I suppose there's an upper limit to how well-adjusted you can be to spend all day in an IRC channel tormenting dicebots.

You probably have one of these in your kitchen.

[jerith]

I'm guessing you missed the link to that at the bottom of my post, then. ;-)

Same boat

[anonymous]

I have been ADHD for years... I found that often it was better to just do more then one thing at once and let them take slightly longer but this way you can bounce between different things and eventually get a WHOLE lot done.

The thing is you need to try new things and see what works for you personally. I found there is no one that knows *you* better then your self and no matter what a whole bunch of doctors say is a good idea it might not be.

~drubin

Re: Same boat

[jerith]

I've been doing this to an extent. Unfortunately, lots of context switching in the middle of something that requires me to keep a lot of state in my head doesn't work so well.

Re: Same boat

[anonymous]

If you ever need some advice/person to talk to ping me pn IRC
~drubin

Who makes it a disorder?

[ext_206924]

Hi Jeremy

Re: Who makes it a disorder?

[jerith]

I'm glad that's working for you. In my case, the medication gives me enough of a boost over the noise in my head that I can use other organizational and time management tools and make them stick. I did try meditation for a while -- I could never stick at it long enough to be useful without drifting off to think about something shiny.

Many of the problems I'm dealing with far better now than I was a year ago are about myself rather than how I fit into society. Being able to start something and then get it finished without a bunch of external prodding has made me much happier than I used to be. This has carried over into my professional life, too. I'm much better able to carry a task to completion without starting on a whole lot of other things concurrently and never delivering anything.

As an aside, I'm glad you liked my Erlang article. It was born of frustration and an idle evening away from all my usual distractions. Maybe one day when life is a little less busy I'll deliver on my promise of a followup using OTP. :-)

no pills

[anonymous]

Don't use pills.

You are ok.

Re: no pills

[jerith]

This looks interestingly like spam, but I'll treat it as a legitimate comment.

I'm somewhat ok without my medication, but I'm more ok with it. See above for more details, which still hold true a year and a half later.