The Kitchen.

What's it like being an adult with AD/HD? If I'd forgotten my medication, I'd have started this blog earlier when I was meant to be cleaning the kitchen. Instead I mostly finished the kitchen and planned this first paragraph.

I can't answer that question in one quick post. I doubt anyone could. I'm not really the best at living with it either. I'm still learning and I have a way to go. I suppose thats kind of strange because I've always had AD/HD. I actually showed my first clues at around fifteen months when I began showing abnormal sleep difficulties. Of course, they couldn't diagnose it then. I was first diagnosed at six, and again at twelve. My family and I didn't accept the diagnosis - both came during Sixty Minutes AD/HD hysteria.

Eventually I was diagnosed again at seventeen and I've been on medication since. I'm twenty one now, and I'm finally starting to get some understanding about the disorder. I live in Australia, so the information isn't quite as readily available as it is in the United States.

My girlfriend was the one who got me to really look into it. We've been together for almost two years and she was the first person who noticed that I wasn't as well off as my doctors thought I should be. She pointed out that the meds didn't really fix anything - they just put me in a position to fix things. But while I was under the impression that they were fixing me, I wasn't really trying to fix myself. I didn't know how.

Now she helps me work on it. We come up with these little systems to make life a bit easier. When we clean the house, I clean the kitchen. Mostly because its a small and enclosed space, the mess is a little more even and consistent. I can get distracted in there and get back to what I was doing just as easily. Its a load off my mind, being able to do things out of order but in bite sized chunks. Eventually, even if I keep getting distracted cleaning different sections and doing partial jobs, it does end up clean.

Cleaning the whole house, I'd probably have to pile the mess all in one area put things away bit by bit. Which might run counter to the way my girlfriend does things. Then I'd have to vacuum and dust. That'd be hard to do without stopping to read a magazine, a book, watch TV, end up on the computer, or punching out notes for my next blog post.

I also haven't figured out how to get AdSense or Google Analytics working on these blogs yet. If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to let me know. I'd really appreciate it.

I better go take out the recycling and the garbage.