Finding My Joy and My Inner Voice

During my corporate experience, I (75F) had just been diagnosed with ADHD and was bored with my dumbed-down job, so I listened to Oprah on radio/tv. The guest developed a way to replace his typically negative thoughts/acts with gratitude. It’s the old rubberband on the wrist, but with switching wrists and rephrasing the complaint with a gratitude. (Fave: 'I hate this commercial! => I love my mute button! Ha!) After 21 days on the same wrist, you’ve got a habit! (ACOMPLAINTFREEWORLD)

This puts absurdity in its place - the best, most prevalent humor-source, and it defuses most explosives for me. Also, when I laugh at stupid stuff, others often get it, too. That can’t be bad!

Doing this has changed my outlook, allowing me to look for something good in what might have been considered catastrophic by accepting what is the actual, current history. It has been a real boon to my taste for dark humor - no victims or malice, please.

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I’m 47 and was recently diagnosed with ADHD. While it is kinda a lot to take in and try to work with, it does help a lot of things make a lot more sense. You know? I love your advice and agree that gratitude and humor help so much! Thank you for sharing this. :blush:

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I was officially diagnosed with ADHD in 2022. Self-diagnosed in 2009 while taking a Children with Special Needs course (read a passage on how ADHD manifests in girls and my mind was blown).

The world needs more of us – those who can’t help but challenge authority.

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Andrea , please tell me what ADHD is , I have no knowledge. I hope you are well Jack

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I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you!

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is basically where you have difficulty focusing and keeping your attention on something, but can also become hyper-focused and lose track of time doing other things. There’s impulsiveness, being fidgety, having racing thoughts, excitability, and often rapid speech. It can be easy to start things but hard to finish them. Forgetfulness, misplacing things, and forgetting to eat are really common. (Am I making any kind of sense? :joy:) Like, I’ll forget to do things all the time because I get distracted and start doing something else, and I’ll get so into doing something all day that I’ll look up and realize I haven’t eaten anything. I lose my phone about 20 times a day and have a really bad habit of cutting people off in conversations.

I hope you are doing well! :heart:

My description of ADD (the H is there - impulsivity, anyone?) starts with how the linear-logical (neurotypical?) human brain has 7 to 10 ‘slots’ in the short-term memory - (why we have 7-digit phone numbers). Whenever you add a datum to that stack, you have to kick-out something else. The ADD-brain has extremely-high turnover as (absolutely-fascinating) ideas fly in from all directions, all the time. Fortunately, my lifelong incompetent housekeeping skills (floors are frightening!) seem to be somewhat compensated, to my mind, by The ADD Gift - mine is for words, numbers, and (related to math) music. Pythagoras is one of my heroes, as are Benjamin Britten, Mahatma Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, my Aunt Jane, Bernie, and other saintly people, present or alive in my memory.

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