West Virginia Bound

In a month or so, I will be a resident of West Virginia.  I've driven through it twice, but I've never seen more of it than highway signs and gas station bathrooms.  I certainly never dreamed I'd be moving there.  Maybe the world really is ending this year.

Thus far, 2012 has been an introspective year.  I've been thinking a lot about life paths, patterns, meaning, magic, destiny, and most of the things one thinks about when examining their choices and current trajectory.  I think one of the reasons I like math so much is because my life moves in infinite cycles, repeating themselves over and over again until I'm dizzy.  If my life was a graph, it'd be a sine wave.  It's hard to map progress when you're moving in spirals that often lap back to the beginning.  And lack of measurable progress can often be quite disheartening.  If life is measured by accomplishments, I am failing.

I thought, when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD that life would change somehow.  And, I guess it has in a way.  Mostly, though, I've just become less of an enigma to myself.  My spiraling life is just a mirror of my thoughts winding round and round themselves.  My tendency to fail at school after a successful semester is also indicative of my condition.  Folks with ADHD are a group accustomed to truly epic failures.  Success comes hard.  It brings with it a mix of fear, shame, and anxiety.  It's slippery and scary.  And so, after a big win comes a big depression.  And then enters failure.  And the cycle repeats itself.

I've been living my life in this holding pattern for a long time.  I always assumed that by 30, surely, I would at least have my bachelor's degree.  And, had things been different, that may have been a possibility.  For instance, if I had known that I had Attention Deficit Disorder before I was 28, I would have understood my setbacks better and been able to find a way to work around them.  Or, maybe not.  Being a child of a narcissist, I wasn't actually allowed to have diseases.  It's highly plausible that ADD, like Asthma, would have simply been a make-believe disease that really meant I was weak-willed.  So, perhaps finding out as an adult did more good than harm.  There's no stigma attached to it.  I spent the better portion of my childhood pretending I could breathe like a normal person and refusing to admit when I was having an asthma attack.  I was 25 before I'd let my doctor prescribe me medicine for it.  How long would it have taken me to allow myself to actually have ADD?  I shudder to think of it.

More than anything, I want to finish school.  I have all these puzzle pieces swimming around in my head, and I'm certain that they fit together to form a truly spectacular whole.  But, I don't have enough knowledge to fit them together yet.  Someday, I hope.  Unfortunately, I've failed so many times and taken out so many student loans that the only way I'll ever have a bachelor's degree is if I pay for it myself.  And...  That brings us back to the imminent move to West Virginia.

One of my favorite things about getting older is becoming more self-aware and accepting.  And, 2012: An Introspective has at least led me to the realization that this is me.  This is my life.  Right fucking now.  I can spin in circles waiting for something to propel me forward, or I can do something completely crazy and move forward myself.  Selling paint is not what I want to do forever.  It's not my life's work.  But, it's what I'm doing now.  And, I happen to be very good at it.  So why not allow myself to move upward and onward in that particular field?  And why not have an adventure while I'm at it?  And maybe, just maybe, I'll bring in enough money to continue hacking away at my degree.  Or, maybe not.  I can't be sure.  I'm also not sure if I'm going off on a tangent and will return in a few years or if I'm starting something completely new.  Those things never become apparent before the very end, though.  All I can do is speculate.  And wax nostalgic.  And, believe me, I have been doing plenty of those two things.

And, as my departure looms ever closer, I also find that it is getting more difficult to walk away.  I suppose the reasons to stay somewhere never become fully apparent until you're leaving, and this is certainly no exception.  As I sit here writing this and looking out my window, I have to admit that Louisville has come closer than anywhere else to feeling like home.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it probably is home, and I'm just not accustomed to recognizing those feelings.  And, of course, I will miss my people here.  There are the people that I have known and loved for years, and there are the people that I was just getting to know.  In a way, I think it's the latter relationships that are hardest to walk away from.  The might have beens.  Lord knows I could write a country song about them.

And, now that I'm sitting here all teary-eyed, I have to remind myself that I'm moving three hours away, and I have a company car.  It's not like I'm moving to the other side of the world.  It's not like I won't be able to visit frequently.  And, for the first time in many moons, I feel like adventure is on the horizon.  Maybe this is really is just a tangent.  Maybe this is my pilgrimage to reclaim my sense of awe and adventure.  Like a wilderness explorer, I step bravely into the unknown...

Just like this guy.

Could You Repeat That? I Wasn't Listening.

Since I deleted all of my prior blog posts in a moment of insecurity, there's really no back story left.  And, I don't particularly feel like inserting one here.  So, to make a long story short let's just say that I had quite a traumatic childhood which led to a slew of psychological problems that I've spent the better portion of my 20's coping with.  And, when that was pretty much done, I assumed the rest of my life would unfold before my eyes, that the red carpet would unroll and lead me to a glamorous and fulfilled life.  And...  It didn't quite work out like that.  Like, not even a little bit.  Something was still wrong.  I was still running myself ragged spinning in circles.  I tried to go back to school but after a semester I was self-destructing again.  My house still looked like it had been ransacked by burglars.  The relationships I had been so excited about building were stagnant.

And, I discovered the one major drawback to psychotherapy.  You view every negative behavior as stemming from your unconscious.  You analyze yourself over and over again trying to find that buried negative feeling that's poisoning your psyche.  You assume that all your problems are psychological.  You dig deep, looking for any hint of damage that could explain your behavior.  I couldn't find anything.  I really felt certain that I had come to terms with those things that used to haunt me.  Instead of looking for another explanation, I started getting paranoid that I had repressed memories.  So, I went back to therapy to uncover what I was hiding from myself.  But, it wasn't helping.  We weren't getting anywhere.  I assumed that I had closed myself off and was refusing to allow anyone to help me.  It was hopeless.  My life wasn't going to ever be any different than this because I was too broken to fix myself.  I became depressed, which made all of my problems seem even bigger.  The circles I was spinning in became ruts.  My house was starting to look like it could be on an episode of Hoarders and my stagnant relationships were becoming non-existent.  This is what my life was going to be like.  I just had to accept it and move on.

And, that's when we had a breakthrough in therapy.  We were having a particularly bad session.  I had decided in our last session that I was never coming back, but I had not been able to muster up the energy to cancel our next appointment.  Since I was going to be charged if I didn't show up, I decided to just go.  I mean, it couldn't really get any worse...  He was asking me why I wasn't doing my homework or going to bed on time and I kept saying, "I don't know."  And, he kept grilling me.  I was starting to get pissed off.  And I was sort of yelling when I told him that I really wanted to finish the things I was failing to accomplish, but I just wasn't able to.  It was like a scene that repeated itself over and over again in my childhood.  My parents came home, and my chores weren't done.  And, because this happened pretty much every single time they came home, they were red-faced when they asked me why my chores weren't done.  "I don't know."  I could tell by the wide eyes and shaking hands that I had just written myself a death sentence.  It always played out the same way.  I wanted to be good.  I wanted to make my parents proud.  And, I failed, over and over again.  I was rebellious and lazy.  I was wasting my talents.  These episodes, which happened all the time, cut a little bit deeper every single time.  I really did intend to do what they asked me.  I would just get distracted and either forget about something altogether or put it off indefinitely, saying to myself, "there's plenty of time."  Well, time is a slippery little bugger.  It always slips away at the last second, and I find myself empty-handed and ashamed.  Eventually, I started to both resent my parents and believe the things they said to me when they were angry.

So, I'm sitting on my therapist's couch getting increasingly angry over this line of questioning because it's hitting a little too close to home.  And, he puts down his clipboard and says, "It sounds like ADD to me."  I had been expecting to see a concerned look on his face while I received a speech about how I would never get what I wanted out of life if I wasn't willing to work for it.  I had NOT been expecting that.  I don't think I realized how significant that moment was.  I just sort of cocked my head to the side and said in a mocking/disbelieving tone, "Really???"  He (quite patiently, I should add) described the disease to me.  He had been diagnosed in his forties, which is why he was able to recognize the symptoms in me.  I left with my head spinning faster than it normally does.  It made sense. It took a while to get into a specialist and receive an official diagnosis.  During that waiting period, I kept dreaming that the psychiatrist told me I didn't have a disease, I was just lazy.  I experienced a very interesting mix of hope and apprehension waiting for that appointment.  And, at the end of our first 45 minute meeting, she confirmed the diagnosis.  It was official.  She recommended a couple of books, wrote me a prescription for the first medication we were going to try (150 mg of Wellbutrin XL), and shuffled me out the door.  I burst into tears the moment her office door closed behind me.


Of course, there's a lot more to treatment than that.  Perhaps I'll get into it later.

At the moment, though, I'm experiencing a very new and fabulous sensation.  I feel hopeful.  I feel like I really can do anything.  It finally seems like every step I take is leading me down a path that doesn't end exactly where it started.  I'm excited to see what happens.

For anyone curious about this neurological disease that is more prevalent in the US than any other country, I highly recommend this very awesome and easy to read book.