Week One Fact:
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. ADHD is caused by genetic and biological factors that affect how the brain develops. Like most neurodevelopmental disorders, it can be mild, moderate or severe, and affects each person differently.
Challenge Update Day 7:
Meditation: Body Scan meditation last night, 8 minutes.
Mindfulness.
Is.
Tough.
I realize this is the case for just about everybody, even those without ADHD. My friend Scott posted on Facebook a couple days ago his own need to become mindful again—a thought that many of us appreciated him sharing. Because mindfulness is hard, anyways.
And THEN, ADHD is like
T-REX.
Or whatever.
Yeah, mindfulness has become a bit of a buzzword—to me, that means mindlessness has become a prevailing approach to life, and the majority of us need to make a more conscious effort toward mindfulness. Which is simple.
Mindfulness is simply (per definition 2 on Google):
a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
To dig deeper, the mindful approach means acknowledging and accepting feeling, thoughts and so forth without judgement, embracing that it is okay to feel the things you are feeling—even if you want to change your reaction or the situation you are in.
I read an article yesterday from ADDitude that explored emotions and ADHD. Emotions are hard to quantify, so guess what? They’re not included in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, despite how common overly-intense or difficult to navigate/manage feelings are for people with ADHD—which, the rest of the world might interpret as overreactions or meltdowns. Another interesting fact from the article is how sometimes people with ADHD simply cannot articulate or identify how or what we are feeling (more here) and that it can be hard for us to interpret how others feel, especially when we are overwhelmed.
These are things that I definitely experience, and find that regular mindfulness practice can help immensely with: when I’m in a more mindful headspace, I pause to think—and breathe—before I react.
For me, this is what mindfulness is about: the pauses. They do not have to be long, but they have to be enough to plant me back where I am—to ground me—to reclaim a sense of calm when my mind is in the past and future simultaneously and not in the place I can control: right now. It’s about taking a few moments to hear the leaves crinkling along the sidewalk in the breeze and feeling my feet hit the sidewalk. It’s about remembering that my body exists and dropping the tension in my shoulders when I’m working. It’s about actually hearing the music I am listening to, picking out something new I hadn’t caught before. It’s about pausing to actually recognize the emotions I am experiencing before they are able to take over too much. It’s about the pauses.
When I am meditating regularly, I take these lessons out into the world with me. I am much better for it. It is still super hard, but, it helps. That’s where I’m at: I’m not about to trade my ADHD meds for mindfulness, but in tandem, they’re a solid pair helping me tackle the chaos that can be the ADHD life. Yeah, I’ll mess up—both in general, and with the mindfulness—but I’ll be able to tackle the obstacles better if I’m checked in to a more mindful space.
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Day 2 Challenge Update:
Plank: 65 seconds. The foamy tiles in my office are quite rad for this.
Meditation: I think midnight meditation’s going to be a thing (though I do want to try to make it a twice-daily activity); I used the Smiling Mind app again and did the 10 minute Breath and the Body meditation but I think I didn’t pay attention to half of it because I was relaxed nearly into sleep. (Not quite the intent, but I’ll take it).
Most people that know me are aware that three (and a half) years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD and learning issues primarily affecting my visual memory and processing speed. Since then, I’ve tried to engage with as many other adults with learning and attention issues as I can. For girls especially, it’s common that ADHD especially is missed, since we present differently than boys—more often we have the inattentive subtype, so we are less noticeably hyperactive!
October is ADHD and Learning Disabilities Awareness Month. You may also notice that things look a bit different around Kerri on the Prairies in celebration of neurodiversity—which is just the cool way of saying that everybody’s brain is different, whether you have ADHD, learning issues or autism… and that it’s okay to not be “neurotypical”!
But hold up, that’s not all! A guy named Jesse d’Eça from Quebec is taking ADHD Awareness month one step further, and he and the Centre for ADHD Awareness, Canada (CADDAC – don’t get thrown off, they probably existed before all ADD became ADHD) have come together to get Canadians doing things to raise awareness of what ADHD really looks like. Challenges can be whatever you dream up: CADDAC recommends: a) Something physical—like exercise, daily b) Something cerebral—like meditation or mindfulness practice for a predetermined amount of time once or twice per day, or c) something educational, like reading or writing.
Here’s my challenge:
Planking. Opting to follow Jesse’s lead, I’m going to be trying a plank challenge for October—the app I did the initial test on today (where I made it 55 seconds… just couldn’t make a minute!) claims I’ll be able to sustain a plank for 3 minutes and 25 seconds (or 205 seconds) by the end of the month. While I understand the whole rest day thing, I’m going to try to skip the ones the app requires taking because part of the whole challenge thing is to do something every day! Unless I like, injure myself.
Blogging. Hi there, people reading my blog. I’ll be here every day in October blogging for ADHD/LD awareness month. I even have a plan for this! Some days will be longer posts, some will just be pictures, but hopefully everything will share a bit of my story of living with ADHD.
I mean, look, random t-rex pictures? Yeah, that explains my ADHD life pretty well, right? 😉
Okay and you know what, since we’ve got column A – something physical and column C – something educational(ish) covered, let’s set the bar high.
Meditation. I meditate using the Smiling Mind app. The fact that they are led by an Australian dude does not hurt the app one bit. It’s something I’ve been trying to get into a habit about, so… Let’s do this. (I’ll give myself bonus points if I can manage to get in all 42 of the remaining meditations in the Adult track ;).)
Want to support the challenges I’ve set up, and support the Centre for ADHD Awareness, Canada?
The site is quite non-intuitive, so you’ll have to go here, select your donation amount, and then search my name (Hi, I’m Kerri MacKay if we’ve never met and you’d like to donate money. Thanks! How are you?). Want to do something yourself? Register your challenge here.
And as always, have questions for me about my ADHD, the challenge, or about anything else? Drop me a comment or e-mail me at KerriOnThePrairies [at] gmail.com.
Last year, my friend Beth (founder of Smart Girls with ADHD) shared her affinity for audiobooks on her blog.
I disagreed completely. You can’t listen to music while reading an audiobook, and I like blocking out auditory distractions with music (well, okay, you can, but that requires wizardry). I’d tried one audiobook around that time, Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, and while the story immersed me, I preferred reading its sequel After Ever After as an eBook (I ended up also buying Dangerous Pie as an eBook to re-read). Plus, I can read with my eyes just fine (I mean, the whole ADHD jumping paragraphs bit and rereading stuff is annoying but hey, whatever, that’s my life.)
Well, here we are a year later. And I get it.
Guys, you can play games on your phone while reading audiobooks. You can walk around the mall while reading audiobooks. If your fellow passengers aren’t too chatty, you can read audiobooks on the bus even if you have motion sickness (which I do not, but whatever, I can still look for my stop since the speakers do not always work, ahem Transit). These things are all great for mind-wandering ADHDers who need to keep some part of their body moving beyond flipping pages, and multi-task to a degree to focus… And so we’re more likely to not miss our bus stops maybe, but that happens regardless so I’m not holding my breath on audiobooks helping that too much. 😉 Sometimes I have to rewind, but OverDrive (the player my—and many—libraries uses) has a skip backwards 15 seconds button just for the spacing out times or the people nearby getting too loud times. Oh, and recall that they said in my assessment that I’m more likely to retain information that I get through the auditory bit of my brain than the visual bit.
EDIT: Oh, and you can play Pokemon Go while reading. Heyyyyo.
IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
I set myself a goal to read 40 books this year (last year I think I tried to read 75 books and failed, obviously, reading 30, so 40 seemed like enough of a jump). Except now it’s July so we are more than halfway through 2016 and I’ve read, um, not even half. (If you want to bug me on GoodReads, be my friend!)
Here’s what I’ve read so far:
Here’s what I’m in the middle of:
Some catching up is in order.
Maybe with my ears.
The oldish new thing is to go to these events where an artist teaches you how to paint a picture, and drink adult beverages.
Except I don’t drink, so I went to one of these events on Saturday night and learned to paint a thing. It was also a fundraiser so I went and learned to paint a thing for a good cause (or so my cousin Alyssa can be sent away on dance competiton trips. One or the other, or both.)
We signed in, flipped our canvases around (to claim them), and then waited for the fun to start. Then we flipped our canvases back the right way.
Note my non-alcoholic $2.50 iced tea beside my canvas there. Also I thought I was totally going to need more red eventually, but nope. Then we had to promise to not say that our thing sucked at any point. Which just meant that my cousin Jenn and I quietly discussed our perceived suck-ness at the break. 😉 (I said perceived suck-ness. It’s subjective, just like art, it’s fiiiine. We did it quietly at break and whatever.)
This was not my favourite picture I could have painted, but I guess that just means they’ll sell me on another event, right? This is the artist’s.
I was mildly confident going in, except for I think I’m more confident (and do better, even, possibly) when I can actually self-depreciate a little bit. It’s like, motivating-ish. Self-depreciation, and other related things, were against the “oath” we took before we started painting. Which mostly meant I had to be quiet about it. I am okay with making fun of myself, it does not bother me. There must be research supporting this!
Anyways.
Phase one, sky. I intended to take a picture every time we were forced to stop for instructions, except—typical—i did not always listen to that instruction.
Phase two: Grass. Here’s the part where I started hating on my grass. I mean, I was partly more engrossed in painting the sky all pretty than I was listening to the grass tutorial.
I mean, I listened but then I returned to painting sky. Jungle grass is what I ended up with here. So, I started hating on my grass out of earshot of the instructor who would surely tell me it looks fiiiine like Alyssa and my aunt did.
Alyssa and I also pretended we knew things about art before we started. Which, nope not really.
Phase three: And then there were flowers. Also later on the artist told us that taking a picture would make our paintings look better if we weren’t happy with them. So, I mean, yeah, maybe my grass looks better after having taken a picture of it? Or that could be that I did a bunch of touching up with black and white and stuff in there.
Mine, the sample, and the instructional piece. In retrospect (aka 10 minutes after painting the orange in), bigger clouds would have been excellent.
I thought I’d have some good, introspective things to say here when I decided, pre-painting, that I was writing a blog post on this—something self-expression-y or therapeutic or whatever. Like when I went to thermea or when I started creating things on purpose last year. Instead, I found this a bit of a challenge and that I was rather hyperfocused, which in some situations is good, and others it is extremely frustrating and difficult—last night was the latter, I think. Like, I legitimately missed the how to paint the flower instruction (which ended up totally okay) beyond “Start with a V” because I was still working on the grass (I copied Alyssa, it was cool). So, I do think that aspect—which can vary on a day to day basis—might have detracted from the experience a bit. (And maybe I should do my next Paint Nite without my ADHD meds—except I might still hyperfocus anyways. Also I didn’t intend for this to wind up being about ADHD either. It just truly does affect everything.
With that, I’ll end this with an after-the-fact realization that in life, we’re all creating the same thing, but they’re all going to turn out differently because we are who we are. Or something.
(Photo cred to my aunt, Linda)
That’s the Paint Nite nugget of wisdom. Maybe the “drink creatively” slogan is what leads to the insight—or, at least more creative acceptance ;). (Not that I’m going to start now.)
PS. Yes, I did sign my painting with a Sharpie once I got home.