The more I think about it, the more I have to think about. It’s a problem I’ve had most of my life; to contemplate a subject means giving myself fully to trying to understand it; until my brain runs out of steam, or the answers are all laid bare along the side of the road, each of them radiating stark understanding as they lie discarded upon the ground.

The problem with ADHD isn’t that you can’t focus, but you focus on everything. Everything becomes 100% important until it’s not, so everything gets equal understanding, until it’s no longer needed. There’s no way to really stop this, unless your brain decides to go into a state of focus so exclusive of everything else around you, that nothing matters except the task at hand, which is an amazing quality in times of crisis, or when things need to be done in a semi-optimal way, but it’s quite terrible for sitting at home, with nothing to do, a small list of chores the only piece of work available to your docket for the day.

There are some ways to help minimize this ON/OFF switches extremes though, but I’ve found that sometimes the tool to help can become the same as the key to the wrong path; it’s very easy to start mistaking brief reprieves as the goal for a new norm. There is a reason temperance is a must in life, and doubly so for those with ADHD; Addictive personalities lead to addictive lifestyles, and as nice as it is to take a break once in a while, nobody wants to do nothing their entire life.

This is one of the reasons why I think so many people with this affliction are prone to using things like alcohol and weed as a crutch, only to continue down the wrong path and find themselves addicted to what should just be a tool to relax. For me, personally, this constant state of “Everything or Nothing” focus is much simpler to contain when I have a few drinks in me; my brain has slowed down enough due to the alcohol that it is incapable of thinking on overdrive, and so instead it chooses to value the feelings it believes it should feel, instead of making me think about each one. The subconscious is a wonderful, yet underappreciated thing, and after a few drinks, it begins to take over the hard parts of thinking for me. Weed has a different effect, but is just as efficient; when you’re entire life is spent thinking about everything, smoking allows me to get lost in the hundreds of thoughts floating around my brain at any given time, choosing one or two and dragging me down a rabbit hole of what-ifs and if-thens.

In fact, It’s so effective for my personal brand of Brain Bees, that after speaking with a couple of my doctors, I decided to start using it as a sleep aid, to great effect. I used to only sleep 3-4 hours a night; it takes forever to go to sleep when every little thing throughout the day begins to flood your mind at once. The key to falling asleep quickly, for myself at least, is to find a trail of thoughts that lazily leads nowhere, and follow it until sleep takes over. I found that the same thing that lowered my anxiety when sitting home alone, also allows me to drift immediately to sleep, almost on command; the stories of an altered mind tend to be more interesting than those grounded in reality.

A favorite path of mine to follow in the past, was to continue world building a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I was running for my friend’s. By imagining the downstream effects of a trade war, or a nations change in stance on neutrality, I could then come up with new ideas or plot points for my players to delve into, if they ever had an opportunity or reason to ask why. I would be able to fall asleep relatively quickly, however, the sound of a passing car or a quick cough would be enough to wake me up just enough to be conscious. It would start as only just being aware that I am no longer sleeping, only to have the everything begin to flood my mind, rising me from my slumber better than any alarm clock could.

If I was understimulated, or otherwise anxious, I could lie in bed for HOURS, attempting to find whatever trail of thoughts would lead me to a path that wasn’t filled with anxiety or worries about the day before or the day to come. I use the phrase anxiety or worries, but what I really mean is ‘Doesn’t have something I should probably pre-think before it actually happens’. I’ll get to that whole thing later on.

Sleep is important, and after a lifetime of chronically being sleep deprived, now I can’t seem to ever get enough. Some of this is from me getting older, and while at 32 I’m only just feeling like I’m getting to the “Full Grown Man” stage of my life, 10 years in EMS is cause for enough wear and tear than anyone would want to rest whenever they get the chance.

Now I originally got a medical card due to latent PTSD, as well as some chronic back pain, a byproduct of too many years sitting on a street corner, trying to nap for a couple minutes in the passenger seat, despite the squawks of a radio, and the sound of traffic and crowds outside the door. After COVID, and the stress that I had despite not knowing or acknowledging that it was stress at the time (like probably 70% of healthcare workers, who only just now are looking back at the last two years and are thinking to themselves, ‘Holy crap, that WAS kinda fucked up…’), I didn’t realize how much I had been having to deal with, I never had to stop going to work, or got anything really life-changing, catching COVID just made me sleep for a week, and the few stimulus checks were nice, but honestly, all they did was fund a couple nascent hobbies that have since been discarded, and paid my phone bill once or twice.

But now? Sitting at the other side of the rope bridge, looking back over the turbulent waters that threatened still to crumble the supports that brace it, with pedestrians still attempting their best at making the crossing? I’m shocked at how my brain ignored so many things. Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t important at the time, or the fact that sometimes you’re more prepared than you think you might be, but despite what caused me to overlook it, the memories remain. It was stressful at the time, but I did not notice, but unlike missing your exit, and taking the back way in, it’s much more akin to searching the fridge for that snack you wanted, but didn’t see because it was blocked by leftovers, or your eyes passed right over it without acknowledging it; but it’s still there, and it probably expired months ago.

While it’s good to relax, and take a moment for yourself, drugs in general don’t make the problems go away. Alcohol just pushes it to the back of the fridge; something to deal with later instead of now. Weed, however, is you standing in front of the fridge, trying to figure out if you can use a bagel as a bread, salami instead of bacon, and pepperoncini’s instead of tomatoes, to make the most cursed Frankenstein-of-a-BLT imagined. You’re just curious about the how to; Nobody is there to stop you and ask if you should.

Which is funny, considering I started writing this because I am lying in bed, trying to get enough energy to get up and make food. Now I’m contemplating, fully sober, what a salami pepperoncini bagel would actually taste like, and if there’s a market for a substitution food truck gimmick. Really though, it wasn’t because I was hungry a moment ago that made me type; it’s that I’m hungry for a moment, that made me type.

I had a bit of a realization the other night. Between switching to a Day schedule for the first time in 7 years, and having an unexpectedly busy day, despite all the events being on the calendar that I meticulously maintain. I haven’t actually looked at my calendar more than twice since I got suspended, people with ADHD thrive on structure, but are dead without it, despite the fact that we actually tend to hate structure at it’s core. I had the inklings of a realization, but they didn’t come together until I was sitting at a party, wondering why I have been unable to focus for longer than 12 seconds on any given topic, subjecting everyone I spoke with to at least two ‘Hold on, what was I saying?’ per conversation. It was towards the end of the night when I realized it, and when I finally put it all together, I became profoundly saddened by it.

A byproduct of living with everything being given equal measure of import, is that despite my brains attempts to process everything at once, it can only do so much before new stimuli come in. Or, it becomes easily overwhelmed, and I have to actively try and shut out stimuli just to remain functional. The former is the more common of these issues for me, with the latter generally only happening at large or loud parties, where I am caught off guard or unprepared by the level of stimuli’s, and have to go outside for a few moments to recollect myself. But they both have similar effects.

When too much is happening, and I’m almost keeping up, stuff gets backlogged to the subconscious. Still being processed, but at a slightly different speed, on a different thread than my conscious existence. When I am working, this is a great thing: I can ask 4 questions, get 8 answers, focus on the one or two things I need to, and the rest gets sorted out as needed. It’s a nifty thing, and I attribute a large portion of my success as a provider to this ability; I front load the immediate, and backlog the why, until I need to switch them around, or the why gets processed and kicked back to the immediate.

But when I get truly overstimulated, a similar thing happens, but in excess. Thankfully I don’t shut down, like those with Asperger’s or more severe social anxieties do. But I do get reclusive with my thoughts; more goes to the subconscious part of my brain for processing: I don’t have enough hamsters to run the big wheel, because they’re all in their hut. So instead of being gregarious and talkative, I spend the time trying to have one conversation, struggling to remember what my brain had already kicked to the backload. I’ve got into the habit of telling people I’m buffering when I’ve forgotten something; my brain literally doing the same thing functionally, and thankfully due to our countries lack of decent Internet, people understand it almost immediately.

Either way, the end result tends to have the same effect; I either am capable of understanding the moment, but can’t react until my brain catches up, or I avoid the moment at the moment of its entirety, and spend time recollecting what had just happened, hoping my subconscious grabbed onto the vital bits. Both are not ideal, and adding social lubricants at these moments of extremes tends to have the opposite effect than anticipated, further compounding the issue.

I said before I would get back to the subject of ‘Pre-thinking’, and here we are. For many adults with ADHD, having not been treated until after the coping mechanisms had been developed, our main one tends to be extensive pre-planning. When your brain works on overdrive at baseline, it’s easier to just let it run wild constructively, than to try and reign it in. It’s like an exhausted mother and child at a grocery store; if the child has a tantrum, sometimes it’s just easier to be prepared for it to happen, and to pick up the child, still screaming, and go about the day, instead of trying to deal with the situation then.

This breaking of the list is actually one of the reasons I sought help for my ADHD. I would be at work, and have a mental plan for my next 20 minutes, and then we would get a call. It would immediately dissipate my plan, and that infuriated me with minor annoyances throughout the days and weeks I worked. I didn’t like, or feel that it was correct, that I was getting annoyed with having to do my job. But the shattering of the list would cause me to forget what I was doing, and I would go into a call annoyed that my short-term plan was broken, and it would compound over and over.

Fun fact, this also ties into one of the reasons people with ADHD tend to interject an exorbitant amount during conversations: we have already had 4 answers prepped for your next sentence, and by the 4th word you’ve spoken, we think we know what the question is. Key word there is ‘think’, we are wrong as often as we are right, and it leads to us being confused briefly, which makes us forget what we just interrupted you for. I’ll probably discuss this whole thing in the future, at some point.

But the problem with pre-thinking, or preparing for the future, is that it also means something else. Combined with the subconscious backload of being understimulated or otherwise bored, and the missed stimuli of being overstimulated, we lose something very precious, and there is no way for us to ever achieve it.

I use the word ‘moment’ a lot in my writing. Many people view a moment as a small period of time, in relation to the grand thing that is life. Or they view it as a brief period where things were good, or bad, and that passed as quickly as it came. But when you spend your life pre-thinking, and post-processing, you innately lose the ability to have a moment. For myself, a moment is just the time something happened, and my brain put it all together, to understand the thing that just happened. I’m perpetually seconds or minutes late to my own moments, and there’s no way to recover it.

People with ADHD tend to be incapable of ‘living in the moment’, and as such, spend most of their lives running half a second behind their own. Because we have to process everything at once, we lose the ability to process as we go. We are never fully present for our own lives, and most likely never will be.

Which is why I’m sitting here, typing away instead of making food. Because sometimes, when I type, and I know people will be reading it, I am able to just let my thoughts be placed on this page, my fingers typing them as they come, uncensored and free as my brain can will them into creation. The workflow of my mind when I am typing about my thoughts is probably the closest I can ever be to just living in the now, the words coming out as fast as I can think and I just wanted to share that with you.

I hope you enjoyed this moment with me.