ADHD How it Feels to Have ADHD
Imagine that it is tax time. Taxes are due on April 15 every year (unless you’re a farmer). On April 15 every year, we see a news reporter at out local post office, interviewing the line up of cars waiting to drop off their taxes at the last minute. Why are there so many people there? Completion of taxes can be a complicated task, it requires the ability to collect multiple pieces of data, sort and organize them into a meaningful data set. We often don’t know where to start! We sometimes do not know how to break down the task into several smaller tasks that we can accomplish.We may sit down to work on our taxes and realize we are missing a receipt (we might lose some of the things we need between January and April). Then we have to go hunting for it in other piles, possibly in other rooms. Sometimes we get distracted and don’t go back to the taxes for several days (we procrastinate). We may feel that it is going to be impossible for us to sit down and sustain the mental effort necessary to work on our taxes for a sufficient amount of time. We may experience confusion, irritability, and annoyance, with the responsibility of taxes weighing us down. It isn’t that we are lazy, or that we don’t care about our finances; we just feel overwhelmed.
Now, imagine if you have ADHD, and most of your responsibilities feel this way.