ADHD and Medication

I am no specialist and I don't have any university degree in mental health, but I have something far more relatable that might be even more useful that you can't simply get from a professional, "lived experience".

Hi, I'm Saina and you're reading Sainaslife.

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional. This post is based on my personal experience with ADHD and is not medical advice. Everyone’s situation is different, and it’s always important to consult a qualified professional when making decisions about treatment.

What ADHD Means to Me

ADHD could be a nightmare, so much that today they call it a disorder or a disability. And truly if you want to live in today's world it is a hurdle on your way to success, but is it really?

I had quite a journey from the day I discovered the name of ADHD until now. I am so proud of myself for being curious and learning more and more about myself and my condition/variation to a point where I personally don’t feel the need to be medicated.

How I First Discovered ADHD

Let me take you back a few years...

It was maybe 3-4 years ago when I was at a gathering in my friend's apartment, she did something weird and her friend told us that she has ADHD, and I was like "what's ADHD?". Mind you I am a full display of what ADHD is and if you've seen the movie "Divergent", I think I can confidently say I'm 100% divergent lol. So that was the first time I heard that expression, later on, I was scrolling through TikTok and I happened to see some videos about ADHD, and weirdly I felt it was describing my behavior that I was punished or scolded for my entire life. So TikTok being TikTok, sent more of those videos along my way and the more I listened, the more I felt I might have this disorder.

When Everything Started Making Sense

The curious Saina that I was, I dived more into the topic and like many people, I self-diagnosed myself. It is usually better to be diagnosed by a doctor, but when you know yourself better than everybody else and you're smart enough to analyze your feelings in a logical way, it's a valid self-diagnosis. Of course, you won't get any medications if there is no official diagnosis, but that's why I'm here (I will later get into that). So during the past couple of years, I wrote some posts about ADHD and the struggles I had with it. The more I wrote the more I searched and learned. In the beginning, I felt like a victim, my whole life I felt there is something wrong with me, something didn't make sense. I was being told I'm very smart and good at some things but at the same time I was being scolded for doing things that I didn't even know were deemed mistakes. I was called focus-less, distracted, playful in a negative sense, impulsive, etc., so many labels I didn't deserve. But you know at the same time I am glad that in my time, and my country ADHD wasn't highly recognized and I wasn't diagnosed nor medicated, because today I personally feel that, for me, understanding my ADHD has been more helpful than jumping straight to medication.

I was grown into a woman with full capacity of ADHD and even though life was hard on me, I am so glad that involuntarily I was allowed to be myself and discover truly what ADHD is. I wasn’t medicated at a young age or treated in a way that prioritized convenience over understanding, simply because in my culture you'll be disciplined and mental illnesses were not being taken seriously at the time, so I believe it all turned out good in the end, and I'll tell you why. I’ve heard mixed experiences about medication, especially when started at a young age, which made me more cautious personally. I don't know the reason but for me, the idea of medication felt like a big step, and I wanted to understand myself better before considering it. I don’t personally see my ADHD only as something that needs to be ‘fixed’ with medication, at least not in my case, but in my opinion it should be treated with more care and some understanding.

After I self-diagnosed myself, I felt like a victim for a long time. It kinda gave me an excuse to let go and blame everything on my ADHD. I felt after all my life being scolded I was heard and I felt a sort of rage inside. People could've known and could've treated me differently because now I could pinpoint the exact cause behind some of my weird behavior. But at the same time out of feeling that rage and anger of being betrayed my whole life, I kinda stopped working. You know previously even though the pressure of studying, working or in general success was too high on my brain, I would've done it anyway, but now I had an excuse to avoid that severe pressure.

ADHD Is Not Laziness

I gotta add something here, people with ADHD aren't lazy, most of us are in fact hard-workers as working hard distracts us from drowning in our own thoughts, the reason people with ADHD doom-scroll on TikTok or sit on a couch all day and do nothing, is not because we're care-free, it's in fact because our head is a mess. So many thoughts, ideas, and concerns constantly twirl in our head; responsibilities, chores, work, study, life, all of these free-roam inside our brain while we are unable to prioritize any of them, so they keep bouncing and reappearing. And when there's so much going on in your head you are practically paralyzed and sit on the couch all day and do nothing.

When Guilt Makes Everything Worse

So back to the story, after that long time of being inactive and not being able to initiate something, I started to feel a crippling guilt. I was thinking I am useless, I have no job experience, no talent, no money and I'm dependent on my husband. These all broke me and paralyzed me even more, so every once in a while I tried to fight back to my ADHD. I would force myself to write on my blog about the things that I wasn't really interested in. I forced myself to learn some courses and one of them which was worth 40 hours, took me 6 damn months! This is the reality of ADHD, the more you are unproductive, the less your achievements and the less the dopamine in your brain. So eventually this creates a big hole inside your head and you are riddled with guilt and that guilt makes everything 10 times worse by making you depressed, burnt out and more unproductive as a result.

I continued this method for a while, forcing myself to write and learn because I realized that if I want to be successful and lead my way to the 10 million dollars in 10 years goal I had set for myself, I needed to put the work in. And even though I knew forcing myself would take a huge toll on me, I pushed and pushed. News alert, it didn't work. I noticed that because I had no authority over my head nor any deadline, me forcing me wasn't working out, I kept sliding back. I would write on my blog a few times and then ditch my blog for 3 months and then come back again and the loop continues. I was frustrated with myself and I felt so left out and behind my goal. I was even considering medications.

The Turning Point-ADHD Medication or Not

But yesterday, I was talking to ChatGPT and honestly it is a great tool for discovering yourself and being able to name your flaws and skills and learn more about them and use them in a smart way, and I was telling it that I was lost and I really want to write on my blog and improve it. The point is for my blog to grow, I need consistency and consistency is not something that is included with ADHD. ADHD is about being spontaneous, I think it is a natural survival skill that makes you not repeat the same routine so enemies can't figure out your pattern; it's about being unpredictable and I think that's so beautiful and colorful. It's innovative, fun and exciting. Unfortunately, the world system is built on the principles of neurotypicals, which means routines, exact hours, exact jobs and complete predictability and we the ADHD people are so screwed! This world is built exactly opposite of what it should've been for ADHD, so sometimes it feels like medication is used to help people fit into structured systems, which made me question what works best for me.

For me, using medication just to ‘fit into’ a certain system doesn’t feel right, but I understand others may have different needs. We are different, but we're not stupid or damaged, we are amazing in our own way. Instead of suppressing our reality, we should start figuring ourselves out. We need to find our pattern, which ADHD people are great at finding. Instead of forcing our brain to bend to our request, we should learn about it and go with the flow. We should stop swimming against the current and rather let it take us where it goes.

After my chat with the AI, I realized something about my blog. I needed consistency to grow my audience and I know even the ADHD audience will lose their patience if they see the content keeps coming in weird intervals, once every 3 months, then a week later, then a day later and so on. Weirdly enough people with ADHD like to be spontaneous but seek predictability, I think this is a byproduct of living in a highly structured society, it's a sort of masking; when you've lived your whole life missing appointments, losing opportunities, you start to develop serious stress as a response to the consequences, so things being predictable and with a clear timeline will give you some sort of relief. Or it could also be a survival tool.

But for me consistency is boring and exhausting, that is precisely why I keep bouncing off my blog and disappear every 3 months. I like things to be predictable but I don't like to be predictable, so I needed to come up with a solution and I'm so excited to share it with you guys! I realized that even though my ADHD is all about not having routines and not being predictable, I have a pattern. Everything in the world has a pattern, the day, the seasons, and of course humans. The pattern interval is different in different people, but luckily it exists.

What I’m Trying Next

You might've noticed it in this post where I said I come back every 3 months, so I think my pattern is not daily or weekly like many people, but it is quarterly. I think maybe season change might be a reason, but I'm so glad that I found out my own pattern. Every quarter I get an urge to write, I write for a week or so then I turn off again. So I made a decision, instead of forcing myself to write every week and give out shitty boring blog posts in the times I'm not in the mood to write, in the span of that 1-2 weeks of being motivated to write, I will write more than I usually would, if I used to write 3, now I will write 6-12 blog posts and I will schedule them to be published every week or so for the span of 3 months. Now I have my consistency without forcing consistency.

But I thought to myself, what about my blog's motto? I promised to be honest, real and spontaneous in my posts, to write about my feelings whenever I felt them. Well, those posts are not gonna change, let's call them "passion posts". I will jump into writing whenever I feel inspired or sad or whatever, the "batch posts" that I'm talking about pre-writing them, are mostly educational, experience-sharing and timeless. It doesn't matter if you read them now or 3 months from now, they will not lose their relevance and I will make sure to check them once more each week before publishing so it would match the trend of the day.

And this is how I want you to go with the flow. If you have ADHD, before considering medication, I think it can be helpful to first understand your own patterns. I want you to discover your true self and dance with it smoothly. It might take time and you might rage a lot cause I did! But eventually you will find your way, like I did. Obviously, I will keep you posted about this ADHD journey of mine and we'll see how that works. For now my plan is to write as much as I can in the periods when I get the urge to write. The process probably takes two quarters to fully realize if it has worked and if I'll be able to grow an audience with this ADHD friendly method.

If you feel you need some help to figure yourself out, you all know where to find me:)

As always, see you in the next post,

Best of wishes and luck,

Saina.