ADHD and me: three years.

March 20, 2016 • by kerri

Three years ago today I received the results of my assessment. While I waited awhile to have my ADHD diagnosis further confirmed, today—March 20th—is the day that I still see as my ADHDaversary (I mean, look, if I’m making this a cake-worthy celebration I’ll celebrate both days. Duh.)

Like anything, I’m not defined by my ADHD, but it helps explain me—and, over the last 3 years, I’ve learned a lot about how ADHD influences who I am, and how its traits are woven into the person I am. My diagnosis helps me understand myself better—and that’s the most important thing of all. Everything I wrote back in August resonates so much here:

I just felt different for much of my life: [ADHD] explains the frustration, the self-doubt, the guilt that was associated with not being all people thought I should be, the huge shift I’ve felt in my world on meds, the issues I had in school, the issues I had/have at times interacting with people, the sensory overload, all the freaking feelings that sometimes justoverwhelm me. ADHD helps explain that. Those things are all a part of me, and so is ADHD.

—it’s not a label, it’s a bridge: part two

I’m happy to have answers, to have words to explain my world, an amazing tribe of Smart Girls with ADHD who get it (Smart Girls founder, Beth, is the reason I actually went back and looked for my diagnosis date after her own anniversary a week ago!), friends who have reached out with their own stories, and others who may not totally get it, but they try. I am happy to be the person that I am, with the story that I have—ADHD and all.

In all of its chaos and ups and downs and the curve-balls it has thrown into my life, its still my story—THIS is what ADHD looks like: Me.

Appropriately random for the day several of my quirks got explained, it’s National Ravioli Day today (and no, I don’t care which nation is celebrating ravioli.) Obviously, I’m going to celebrate my awesomeness with ravioli for supper.

Here’s to more attention deficit adventures ahead… Because ADHDers definitely have more fun—at least once we figure out where we’re going, find our keys, remember what time we’re supposed to leave, and learn to embrace everything about who we are.

12 of 12 / life

12 of 12 – march 2016!

March 14, 2016 • by kerri

On the 12th of each month, I take 12 pictures throughout the day and eventually blog them. Here are my pictures for March 12, 2016.

12:18 am | kitchen. Nikki got me into Bullet Journaling. Plans for the day: Smart Girls with ADHD webinar, rescheduling respite, and 12 of 12. But first, sleep.

9:56 am | bathroom. I have lots of moisturizer. (I should use it more.)

10:22 am | kitchen. I got my mom to make me cheesecake-nutella french-toast-sandwiches. Fancy. (Apparently the thing I was referring to that Steve and I got in Ottawa was not that difficult to make at home. What are the odds?)

10:58 am | Costco. Temptation to change thermostat = so high.

12:11 pm | Costco. I think the only items I threw in the cart were lattice (waffle) fries and smoked cheese ravioli.

12:22 pm | 7-Eleven. 7 degree March days = slurpees and hoodies. I always want to try the fun Slurpee flavours like Gummie Bear, but if I do I’m sad I didn’t just get Coke. Even though I only really like Coke in Slurpee form.

1:38 pm | Kitchen. Discussing rulers and bullet journals with Nikki and Beth before the Smart Girls with ADHD Bullet Journal webinar!

2:31 pm | Kitchen. And Nikki is rolling on the first ever SGwADHD webinar. The TO-DONE list! And, choice quote, “Inspiration happens.” WORD, Emma.

3:03 pm | kitchen. Post webinar discussing tape with the SGwADHD admins. Except this is duct tape not washi tape.

9:12 pm – Kitchen. Why does the Canada Revenue Agency always time out on me and simultaneously interrupt everything I am doing?

9:13 pm – Kitchen. Taxes = done. It’s only March 12. Whaaaaat.
PS. I <3 SimpleTax.

9:33 pm – Kitchen. Snack time. Is it normal for other families to find it perfectly acceptable to break off half/mix-and-match the giant Costco cookies? Either way, mine does. Plus cheese string and Fruitopia.

See you on April 12th! [Kidding, I’ll post before then. I hope.]

adventures / life / music / on the road / wellness / writing

copeland and airplanes

March 5, 2016March 5, 2016 • by kerri

What? Two posts in a week? [And I won’t make this a goals update ‘cause that is boringpants. Although I haven’t ridden the bike this week—confession.] Since it’s becoming evident I will probably never actually complete VEDA or #hawmc or NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo [the last two, I cannot actually stand the names. NaNoWriMo has grown on me a teensy bit but not enough to say I actually don’t hate it] (and, though I will probably try them all again at some point) {bracket},

I have to start somewhere, right? Here’s some stuff I wrote on the plane back from Ottawa, fleshed out a bit.
So, let’s talk about Copeland and airplanes.

Imbalance. Unbalance.
Imbalanced. Unbalanced.

Stillness… [while] moving.
Waves.

I tend to feel most settled in a place where I am unsettled. The preparation for the next adventure is not enough: right now, I’m four weeks back from Montreal and Ottawa, and less than a week back from Toronto.
And despite that, the desire to be in flight again is strong. As much as I want to feel home, I feel unbalanced. Unpredictability, the non-routine of being away, being on the road, feels like home to me. Maybe I can thank ADHD for that, maybe it’s just how I’m wired, maybe it’s the bit of Romani Gypsy in my genes (seriously)–chances are it’s all three.

and it feels like we can’t get out
and it feels like hell

i think i’m safer in an airplane
i think i’m safer [with my lungs full of smoke / if i run through the streets]
i think i’m safer on the jetway
than a world without [hope / peace]

oh, and arms will stretch out when they’ve had enough
oh, when they are tired of holding up us…

–safer in an airplane, copeland

This imbalance, this unsettled-ness, is a different type of unrest. The only cure is to travel with hundreds of kikometers between your starting porint and your end point, wherever those may be, without touching ground. The flight map that shows you’ve travelled thousands of miles hundreds of feet in the air, all without leaving your seat. The number ticks up. It is in the air that I am settled, a place where many find unrest.

“wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”

–j. a. baker

I put my earphones in and stare out the window. My In the Air playlist and the sky—exactly where I want to be. Sorry to my friends who are my plane neighbours, I am not an in-fight talker. To the strangers who are my plane neighbours, I will engage until those wheels start rolling. After that point, my attention belongs in my head and to the sky.

The seatbelt sign is on,
And I am most alive here.
Turbulence,
Matching the imbalance
I feel the other thousands of hours a year when I’m not in the air.
Colours streaking the sky that I can never dream to recreate on paper or even with a camera.
I am alive, free,
myself.

I am these things in a place that so many attribute to chaos. While I’ve engaged in a few discussions about becoming grounded, I think maybe I am most grounded when I am airborne. Embracing chaos. The sky is place that so many worry about the things that can go wrong. That is out of my control, so I might as well remain unfazed.

Cell phone with transmitting modes off. Nothing but me and the moment I’m in and the music (maybe some words flowing from my fingertips, and the cabin service cart). And I need more of these moments, replicated outside of a plane seat. Intentionally.

“cause my mind just can’t stop moving
i think i know why.”

–i’m a sucker for a kind word, copeland

12 of 12 / life

12 of 12 – february 2016

February 19, 2016 • by kerri

On the 12th of the month (for many many months), I try to take 12 pictures of my day and blog them. [Sometimes I forget to blog them.]

Here are my pictures for February 12, 2016.

7:08 am – bedroom. Messy morning hair. Feeling like it’s an Addison Road t-shirt day.

9:05 am – Starbucks. I really wanted an Earl Grey tea latte, which I had not desired in months/years, but Starbucks was out of Earl Grey. (I know… What?) This “Royal English Breakfast” tea latte is NOT the same. I went for brunch with Mindy after, and fortunately Stella’s could make me a London Fog.

12:01 pm – Annex. Purrza… Persia?

12:01 pm – Annex. Yes. Unicorn kitty (not Unikitty), eating pizza. Garbonzo’s, you never fail me.

5:42 pm – kitchen. Quantified self-ing to get my priorities in-order. Optimized.

7:30 pm – kitchen. Looking up recipes. [If you glance to that sugar-free tag in the URL, well, I’m still into sugar and not into fake-sugar. I do own Stevia however. And agave that I’ve never used.]

8:42 pm – kitchen. Sometimes I try to draw stuff. This day, I tried to over-ambitiously draw a representation of the Farewell Fighter song I’ll Be Max, You Be The Monster. My drawing skills are lacking so it is far less rad than I wanted it to be.

9:03 pm – kitchen. I drew an octopus, but got bored prior to colouring it.

10:09 pm – kitchen. Here’s my computer background, the Manitoba Goalball logo I designed… yeah, all that non-tactile Braille and all. Still not sure my feelings on the pink with it, but too lazy to change it.

10:39 pm – kitchen. Yeah, if you were wondering about that sugar free tag? I just made eggless single serve cookie dough. Because that’s reasonable.

11:40 pm – kitchen. I’ve got a minion living under my cereal dispenser.

11:55 pm – bathroom. I friggen love my Oral-B Bluetooth toothbrush. My mom however does not love that it creates a light show in the bathroom as it charges, so I have to cover the blinky lights with a cloth.

life

i’m not giving you the finger on purpose, i swear! or, that time i got stitches in my middle finger

February 7, 2016February 7, 2016 • by kerri

I have about 7 blog posts running through my head, and 7 other things on my to-do list, except I forgot to take my noon Concerta today and I’m tired, so instead, here’s the brief story of Finally I Had a Normal People Reason to Go to the Emergency Room. (You know, as opposed to all of the bullshit from 2013.)

Last weekend, I travelled to the Montreal Goalball Tournament with our guys from Team Toba. So, two weeks ago, in preparation, I decided I was going to make a Manitoba Goalball t-shirt. Coach swag and all that. So, I bought those stick-on vinyl letters and a can of fabric spray paint (the aim was to reverse-stencil the letters, if that makes sense. I’ll show the shirt later. Gotta be sequential here.)

Then I tried to cut the bottom out of a shoebox so I could use it to spray paint within. Except I didn’t even get the scissors into the cardboard, and instead they somehow sliced my middle finger. At first I thought it wasn’t that bad. I grabbed some Kleenex and started the whole apply-pressure-and-elevate thing. Then I went and found my mom and got her to dig the gauze from my backpack. And then I realized I was bleeding pretty good. So I kept the gauze on for 10 minutes and checked it—still bleeding. Then I repeated that 8 more times, because I’m brilliant. After sitting there for 90 minutes with my finger wrapped in gauze, pressure applied, elevated, and still bleeding (look, I checked the ER wait times at about 70 minutes…) and a few false-exciting-moments that it was going to stop bleeding, I got my mom to drive me to the close ER (which I had never previously been to for myself, but figured I could trust them for a normal people issue such as this).

Registration. Triage. Finger still bleeding quite significantly when the nurse took my taped on gauze off. Got asked if I had a clotting disorder at this point (still not sure if this is standard, and asked them to check on my hematology labs from 2013. The doc later said he couldn’t interpret them and my family doc said a couple days later there was nothing of note), and the nurse dumped saline all over my finger and then wrapped it up in a gauze pad, saying “This is bleeding a lot for such a fine cut”. By the time she was done with me I held up my finger, which had already bled through the dressing, and was like “Uhh, is this okay?”. I then got a giant thing wrapped around my finger including like an entire self-adhesive tensor, and was told I’d be seen in the minor treatment area for stitches or glue.

A half hour or so later I got called to the back (aka not the minor treatment area). This was probably about 11 PM (I cut my finger at 7:20 PM if I recall correctly), and while a nurse and another nurse came in to do vitals and bring me two cups of apple juice (no snacks, just double juice—my mom purchased snacks), they finally informed the guy next to me with unexplained arm issues that the doctors wouldn’t be in to see us until after midnight shift change. I stuck my earphones in, texted with one hand, got a tetanus shot since mine was a bit out of date, and waited for 12:20 AM when I presumed the doctor would be in.

(The post-tetanus shot/seriously my vaccines are out of date face.
Also, I just happened to be wearing this shirt. Fitting, no?)

Eventually he saw guy with unexplained inability to move arm and sent him for some test, and then came in to investigate my finger. Somebody brought him the suture cart and he took off the dressing (still bleeding, by the way). Before he injected the freezing I asked if it was worse than an IV insertion and he said yes, but it wasn’t too bad (I mean, I could totally feel him giving me the stitches but when he asked if I wanted more freezing, I told him to just keep going because the freezing would hurt more than feeling the stitches going in). Eventually, he left me with a numb middle finger, three stitches and a significant blood stain on the sheet where my finger had been levitating for stitches. Classy all the way here. (Gotta keep up my trend.)

Oh, also he made me stick my injured middle finger through a hole in a sheet for the stitches, to which I said “I’ve always wanted to give a doctor the finger”. He and my mom weren’t as amused as I, and my people in the internet, were. That is why the internet people are my people.

So then I got to leave. I went home and promptly took a Naproxen (because I got a T3 after my fibroid surgery and then had no pain afterward, so why not try?) and went to sleep before the freezing totally wore off.

Pros of injuring your middle finger and needing to keep it bandaged for over a week: You can give anybody the finger and claim it is an accident. [Also, pros of any hand injury: no dishes.]

Cons of injuring your middle finger: Pretty much everything is MUCH more difficult. I kind of have a new appreciation for my middle finger for purposes other than giving the finger. Boots? Harder to put on. Signing every coin-toss and score sheet at the goalball tournament? Illegible. Writing anything by hand? Also illegible. Holding stuff? Yep, middle finger is important for that. Typing? Typing was part of the reason I got PowerFlex wrap to cover my bandage with—it looked prettier and made it a bit more bulky so I’d quit trying to type with it. Which was painful. Avoiding water? Yep, that’s fun, especially when the finger you can’t get wet is in the middle… Anyways, I’ll stop whining, but the middle finger is important for more than giving the finger.

I got the stitches out after I got back from the Montreal/Ottawa adventure. (Manitoba Health wouldn’t pay the full cost of getting them out in Ottawa, since I was there on days 7-10 of “get your stitches out on days 7-10, and my Blue Cross travel insurance didn’t consider stitches removal an emergency. Hm.) My primary doc says it’s healing well, but to keep it covered. Still.

My Little Pony/Cupcake/Minions/Curious George Band-Aids it is!

So, there’s my How Normal People Visit the ER story. It was very straight forward, as opposed to all the other visits. As for the box, my mom finished cutting it, and I resumed Project T-Shirt the next day… far away from the scissors.

Shirt on the plane.

Shirt at the Google Building in Montreal.

Shirt wearing and pink wrapped bandaged finger in front of a Habs sign at the Bell Centre in Montreal. ‘Cause that’s how we do.

Closing thoughts: Be careful with scissors, friends. Even if you, like me, are 24, adult supervision/assistance may be required from a more adultier adult.

Kerri on the Prairies

Seeing life differently.

life

ADHD and me: three years.

12 of 12 – march 2016!

copeland and airplanes

12 of 12 – february 2016

i’m not giving you the finger on purpose, i swear! or, that time i got stitches in my middle finger

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