Hi friends, I'm 36 and recently just discovered what ADHD actually is, and am waiting for a consultation/diagnosis from a psychologist (a few more weeks on the wait list I think).
Apologies for the long post, but I'm working through some shit and feel the need to share here.
Anyways, as Ive been processing what having ADHD might mean for my life, Ive been having some incredible "aha!" moments about areas of my life where I feel significant amounts of shame for coming up short.
The one that I'm having now, which I'm very curious to know if anyone has also experienced, is an extreme amount of frustration and stress when my spouse starts "task stacking" with me. She'll ask me to do something around the house, or with our kiddo, and then while I'm in the middle of doing that thing, she'll ask me to do another second thing, and then a third, and so on until either all of the tasks are finished or I politely ask her to stop piling work onto my plate.
Relatedly, when we were dating we would spend a lot of time hiking together and its where we got to know each other a lot. However once we got married I began to really dread the days when we went hiking together. My thoughts on this now are that, we would have to wake up super early (which sucks but isnt a deal breaker in itself), but my wife would spend the entire morning in a whirlwind of task stacking, talking to fast to understand, and then have an unbreakable rigid "get out the door" time. Once we were in the cat to go hiking, I was a complete wreck of feeling exhausted and beaten down. I never had any of these frustrations or dread of hiking before we lived together.
This ended up in me coming to the conclusion that maybe I really don't like hiking at all (which I'm starting to suspect is not actually true), and then fighting back on planning days to go hiking (planning is another massively shameful kryptonite of mine, but that's another story). She's also silently blamed me quite a lot for taking away something that she really loved doing together, and I've felt this existentially deep shame about "false advertising" for myself while dating as an adventurous spirit, only to turn into a massive homebody once we got married.
Essentially, I'm starting to realize that many of the things that have caused me deep shame and cost me insane amounts of relational capital in my marriage might actually just be symptoms of ADHD.
Can anyone else here validate whether or not these sound like ADHD symptoms you've experienced and, if so, whether or not those symptoms have been helped by medication?
I ask my partner to text me a list. Gives me a reference, and she doesn't have to interrupt me.
This is a really good idea
My partner and I use a shared note app and collaborate on task lists so it’s less one person having to steer the other but more working together on the plan and figuring out what needs to be done.
We then sort them by priority so that they can be chipped away at, one by one, in order.
Get some little treats, eat one each time someone get a task completed, and any daunting set of tasks turns into a fun little game that starts anything off positively (treats rule).
(Everyone is different so this might not work for you but might give you some ideas for what might work)
Damn, I can see that being a really incredible tool for us. Do you mind if I ask which note app you use?
Google Keep. You can share a note and edit it in real time.
There’s plenty of others out there. Just mentioning the one we use. I know people who use Apple Notes for instance.
We did this too, but right now I'm looking for an alternative to Google. It's hard finding something lightweight that also syncs between accounts and doesn't cost a lot.
I just asked a FOSSy buddy at a party and they suggested Joplin Cloud.
Happy New Year!
Great point about one person steering the other, perhaps my method could use some tweaks :D