Forging a Path Forward

As I often say around here, whenever I go into a state of feeling fully overwhelmed the best path forward is basically to "close some tabs," starting with the easiest tabs to close.

The easiest tabs to close are typically the ones that were opened as sidetracks most recently and then abandoned because I had to step away to deal with something else.

It is interesting how taking just one thing off my collective plates enables me to more adequately take on something else and move forward from there, even if there are dozens of plates in total.

23 plates sometimes feels incredibly different from 24 plates. It's an "energy thing."

It leads me to believe that we all live with a sort of "critical mass point," being the point at which things go between being manageable — even if it's a struggle — and feeling like they're completely out of control.

I'm not sure what part of it is attributable to the executive dysfunction associated with ADHD and what part of it is associated with my autistic side but I think coming up with definitions is less important than coming up with tools that can actually solve the problem at hand.

Falling Through the Cracks

It really took me till I was this many years old (64) to fully understand how I fell through the cracks as a kid and for most of my adult life.

I was quiet when I was a kid and I was not at all boisterous nor “that kid who bounced around class, causing a disruption.” Because I was pretty smart, I could mostly figure out what was going on even if I hadn't been paying attention. And my not paying attention invariably took the form of daydreaming, “going within” and looking out of the window. Most of the time, it wasn’t visible.

The only thing anybody would look at and remark on was the fact that I seemed unusually withdrawn and quiet, and that I seemed very slow to learn things.

Those attributes followed me through most of my adult life and definitely did make it harder for me to hold jobs, often because I couldn’t adapt to new situations fast enough. As a result of this I (rationally) concluded that I should probably find some form of self-employed gig to make my way through life, preferably one that didn’t really involve people… very much.

The situation was likely exacerbated by the fact that I was not at all competitive, and generally very compliant and not someone to challenge authorities. It just wasn't in my nature.

And so, I largely fell through the cracks until the whole field of ADHD studies and understanding became a lot more expansive as I aged, and the definition changed considerably.

Even so, I had managed to create a life situation that allowed me to get by (note: not thrive, just get by) and the rest of the time I was masking pretty effectively.

I don't know how my life would have been different if different at all if we had had the knowledge in the 1970s that we have in 2025. However, I feel pretty sure some things would have been easier to navigate even if only for the reason of knowing what was going on with me rather than feeling like a freak.

I think about that, rather too often...