Living with ADHD: Executive Dys-FUN-ction

Would you believe me if I told you that this picture was taken at midnight?

I was struggling through an episode of executive dysfunction. The only thing I could do was take photos in hopes they were clearer than the thoughts racing through my head; the hope that they would make more sense than a rambling, run-on sentence with no spaces or capitalization or punctuation:

sometimesmythoughtsfeellikethereisnospaceortimebetweenthemandmythoughtsarehijackedandidontknowwhereiwillendupatthesetimesifeellikeeveryonethinksimanidiotattimeslikethisidontwanttosayanything

And those are not even the times when I feel that someone played a cruel joke on me and swapped the F and S, E and Q, and T and Z key caps on my mental keyboard like this:

qvqryzhingfzarzfrqadinglikqzhifinmymindandbynowiknowihavqgonqcrazyandiwillnqvqrqscapqzoanysormosnormalizy

It can be humiliating and is not a lot of fun, but I digress.

I wanted to sleep. I truly wanted to rest and feel refreshed for the next day, but no. I was kept awake by thoughts endlessly flying through my head. Like a freight train with hundreds of cars thundering down the tracks of my psyche. I could see all the small details and could only hope to present the full idea. I can see the end product and destination, but the journey there is so difficult that I don’t know where to start, or even if I can.

Where do you start? How do you explain an idea so vague and so broad that the average person would look at you and only see minimal face value and not the potential? How do you even begin to take the innermost workings of the ADHD mind and unravel them into something digestible for the “average”— neurotypical— person?

How do you get out of your own head long enough to make your own thoughts digestible for yourself?

The answer: I don’t know. When it works, it takes time.

I have no idea how I do it. I don’t know how I get anything out of my head. I have learned to simply write how I speak.

You could even say, I talk myself through it.

I say what I mean and mean what I say... hopefully! I tiptoe around things that don’t make sense until they start to make sense. I think about things for so long that eventually they bubble to the surface like carbon dioxide in a glass of soda. I review, iterate, and repeat until my thoughts make sense. Then I can share the refined product with others I trust to help make more sense of them.

Maybe the ambiguity of my thoughts is a super power after all.