Author: Katrina

What does my ADHD look like?

Everyone who has ADHD has different symptoms. There is some overlap between these, but the whole range of symptoms varies heavily. I have something called combined ADHD. It means I have symptoms from both inattentive and hyperactive. The symptoms I list are when I am not medicated. They change quite a bit when I am taking meds.

Things that I have struggled with the most are keeping my attention on one task for long periods of time. I will stay focused for a few minutes. I often check my phone, Facebook or Twitter. Sometimes I go to check a word or concept I thought about. Most of the time has nothing to do with what I am doing, except some weird jump of thoughts that make no sense to most people.

If I have instructions with multiple steps or steps that are very complicated, I forget half of it. I have a tendency to remember the last bits, but not the beginning. In school, the instructions were often verbal, and I had no chance. I always ask them written now if it’s possible. I will also forget to follow through with them and miss steps. I am always thinking about what to do next, so I forget what I was supposed to do now.

I feel like I hear everything and they take away my attention. I can hear the train nearby, dog parking, one of my cats just did a tiny eek sound. All this is taking away my attention as I am here writing.

I will put down something, and it will be forever lost if I don’t put my whole focus on it. I wish I was kidding. I also have a habit of leaving stuff in weird places. Again I wish I was kidding.

If I have to focus longer periods of time, I will get tired and cranky. It uses my brain in a way that it’s not meant to. To me, it’s like sprinting when you are supposed to be having a nice walk. I do also tend to walk or run too fast than it’s comfortable.

I have trouble staying seated or still. I will want to move. Even right now, my feet are rubbing against each other in order for me to keep moving while writing. I cannot sit down without having something to do. When I read for uni studies, I tend to have something in my fingers. I have a few fidget toys and they do help.

I have also a tendency to buy things when I don’t need them, just because they are pretty. I am lucky that I have a very strong sense of not buying more than I can afford, but not everyone is as lucky as I am. Dept and money problems are often part of ADHD. It doesn’t help that seeing the big picture over longer periods of time is not easy. We tend to be quite here and now creatures so the end of the month can seem a very long way away.

I hate waiting. I want things to happen here and now. One reason is that I’m impatient, but also because I will forget in the future. When I have medical appointments, I have two reminders. One for the day before, and the other an hour before I need to leave. I would be absolutely lost without my phone.

There are some things that are heavily linked to ADHD that I do struggle with. The first one is emotions. The prefrontal cortex is a big part in control and this is the part that doesn’t work like neuronormal people prefrontal cortex works and it can be measured in fMRI. It controls our behaviour, which stimuli is important, emotional response, thoughts. Some people describe it as a secretary that handles all incoming information and forwards the important to the boss, the brain. With ADHD, this secretary quit. They are not there so everything is coming full force to the brain. Because this control centre is not working full time, emotions can run amok a bit. I often feel that I get very strong emotions. When I feel happy, I am extremely happy. When I feel sad, I feel like I can never be happy. I am on a constant emotional roller-coaster ride. This is not similar to bipolar, where I understand the emotions run for days, weeks or months. For me, I can feel extreme excitement, joy, sadness and go back to the excitement, in one hour. The emotions are also distractable. The right thing can make me feel best again. And I take rejection very personally. Most of the time it is not real rejection. It’s most of the time perceived rejection or something someone says about my work, my appearance, how I talk. It can be an offhand comment, and I will feel like I am not good enough and I am being rejected.

A lot of us feel like we are not good enough. Mine comes from trying to be as good as neuronormal people. I was trying to keep up in school, at work, in life. I have had many burnouts in my life, mainly in school. I was trying to keep up with other students. I put 150% into my work and I didn’t get good grades. I worked harder than most people in my class and I wasn’t good enough. Even with my diagnosis, I still feel like I need to compete with neuronormals but it’s impossible.

If you are reading this and you do not have ADHD, I hope you can understand us a bit better. If you do have ADHD, I hoped you liked reading it. If you do not have ADHD, but a lot of this rang a bell, I’d suggest taking an online ADHD test and taking it to the doctors and asking for a referral.

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First time at the Mansion

Sam looked up. She could see heavy stones being lifted up. It was impressive work. They were rebuilding the Mansion. The previous had been destroyed with the help of the King’s army. The king wasn’t a fan of light magic and how the witches were helping the resistance against him.

The Mansion was a little misleading. The area would have multiple buildings. Two houses were going to be dormitories. One for nonmagical people who were helping with the witches. They included highly trained personal guards for the highest-ranking witches. They also made sure that everyone in the Mansion would be safe. There would be a huge garden behind the main building. They were going to grow much-needed herbs in there.

Sam had never seen anything like this in her life. They used old fashioned cranes to lift the stones. No normal rope could lift such a heavy stone, but the ropes were infused with magic. They were almost impossible to break. Sam could feel magic radiating from everywhere around her. The grounds were infused with magic which was the main reason the council had chosen this site.

Sam looked in amazement at the first-floor stones being lifted. She could see the woodwork disappear behind the heavy stones. At this rate, it wouldn’t take long for them to build the whole building. Sam predicted it would take a week before they would be moving in furniture. It wouldn’t be a small building. It was going to look more like a castle. They had said it would house the council, plus their apprentices. It would be easily more than dozen people at this point and the council wasn’t fully assembled yet. It would also house a war room and library for more dangerous artefacts and books. Witches didn’t fight in wars as such as they are being of light magic, but they needed to protect and heal in battle. Their magic prevented them from killing others. Which was the main reason why they had their own protective forces.

Sam looked around. She was standing quite a far away from the main building in case the crane went down. She looked the opposite way and saw the finished houses. Opposite the main building was the school. It was already mostly finished. Sam could see people on top of the building finishing the roof. Sam walked towards it. It was a fair walk. After a few minutes, she was in. The school also had walls made of huge stones pieces and the floor and ceiling were made from wood. Sam could feel the wards on the wood. They protected against fire and pestilence The main hallway had two entrances, and Sam had come through the back one. In the middle of it was a huge staircase going upstairs. On the left side, they had the main hall. It would fit all the students. It had a theatre stage. Sam had an understanding they did allow the students to perform music and theatre to the other students. Sam walked away from the hall towards the food hall on the other side. It had a great deal of small tables in neat rows. Sam had half expected to see a few rows of long tables. Apparently, the school encouraged them to make bonds of friendships with each other no matter how long they had been studying. The witches found new students by accident some of the time. Some of the students started older than others. Normally they started their first magical lesson at 12 or 13. Their bodies needed to be mature enough to handle the magic.

Sam walked upstairs. She ignored the door next to the main hall. It went to the teachers’ quarters. Upstairs were many classrooms as well as a huge library. The library took two floors, one going up towards a ceiling made from glass. It was a beautiful sunny day and Sam stood there in the sunlight for a few moments. There were few books on the shelves. Most of the books were still in huge chests. Sam giggled a little. Every time she saw one of those, she kept thinking of pirates’ chests full of treasures.

Sam walked out. She could see a woman with long black hair coming towards her. She was older than Sam. She looked to be in her 40s with some grey streaks going through her hair into her ponytail. She was short but no one wanted to mess with her power. She had been a teacher in the Mansion for 2 decades before starting her own journey elsewhere. That’s who Sam met her in the first place.

‘I can’t believe a month ago there was nothing here!’ Sam exclaimed in wonder. Aena smiled at her.

‘We can do things quickly when we put our minds to it. Are you ready to go? Aurora wants to see you,’ Aena responded.

Sam smiled at the thought of seeing Aurora. She was her favourite kid in all the worlds.

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Scary New World

Little back story of me. I was shielding since late March 2020. My body as a hobby likes to attack my internal organs, so I need to take medication that suppresses my immune system. They are cleverly names as immunosuppressants. I would die in about 10 years if I didn’t take these medications in a not a fun way. They protect me by lowering my immune system so something that is vital to keep me alive, doesn’t kill me. The unfortunate side effect then is that when I do get bugs, I tend to get them for longer, and often worse than people with normal immune systems. My immune system is not as effective as it could be. This is important note for later as you read. Because of this medication, I am more susceptible to getting bad form of covid. When I say bad, I mean hospital and possibly dying. I am not old. I am barely in my mid-30s. I don’t want to die or spent more time in a hospital than I already need to. I go to outpatient visits every couple of months to two or three clinics. Sometimes more when they want to do extra tests like DXA bone scans. If I get something like a stomach bug or ingest gluten, I end up spending some quality time with an IV. Depending on how quickly I go to hospital, it’s either three-hour visit or 5 days.

I have been lucky that UK did set up priority slots in home grocery deliveries. I got some of the government food parcels as well. Unfortunately, they had some stuff I couldn’t eat like bread, pasta and most meats, as they contain gluten, and I wasn’t in the mood for a hospital visit when the hospitals were overwhelmed with covid patients. We gave away the gluten containing food to others who needed them. Things were very scary for me. No one had any idea how bad things were for people with normal immune system, let alone for immune suppressed people like me. I consider myself very lucky to be able to get food delivered home. It wasn’t on a weekly basis most of the time. In the beginning, we relied on food parcels from Morrison’s and grocery delivery twice a month. For someone like me who needs to eat healthy to have any energy and be able to function like at a half pace, it was tough.

Freedom day was couple of weeks ago. It is terrifying for me and people like me. We had to go to the shops. I needed meds, some vitamin D and some food that didn’t arrive on the grocery delivery. We did a ‘divide and conquer’. I did some shops, and my partner did others. It was the first time I’ve been to Tesco. It was packed and less than half were wearing masks. Some were wearing masks under their chin. Most of the time I was trying to breathe so I wouldn’t have a full-blown panic attack inside the shop. Do you want to know why it was so terrifying for me? People who have immune system like mine, either from medications, cancer or cancer treatments, do not have fully functional immune system. I already mentioned, but this means that we cannot fight infections well and more importantly, we do not make antibodies like people with healthy immune systems. I have been double vaccinated. There is a significant risk, that people like me do not have enough antibodies to protect us from serious covid. We still need to go out and mingle with everyone. We are no longer shielded. We have to go to the office or workplace if they deem us or quit. There is no legal protection for us to stay at home if workplace says no.  Also importantly, we do not want things to go back to what it was, into lockdown. We just want to be considered, to be heard. We have no problems with things normalising, as long as people could keep their distance and wear masks. The government deems that hospitals have now enough beds for us, but we don’t want to be in the situation where we have to go to the hospital. Masks are not a perfect solution. But if it helps tiny bit, it is tiny bit more than we had before.

I do not want to be a sacrifice and a number for covid. I want to be able to live after this same as everyone else. So could you please wear a mask?

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My current story

 My new story! It is about a sort of ordinary woman. She is like me! I have given her some of my traits. She has ADHD like I do. Hers doesn’t seem to be as bad as mine is. Or that is just the shock of her new situation! Stress does weird things to ADHD. 

Anyway, getting side tracked already! She is from London, and finds something odd and decides to go through it. She ends up in the middle ages with magic! She finds new people, new friends who will end up being her family! She ends up in the middle of a bad situation. The kingdom she ends up in, has a evil ruler. The normal, greedy bastard who has some evil men working for him as well. The people she is with, want to change it back to peaceful place it was before him. So, she goes with them.She helps them as much as she can, she fights with them, and gets hurt with them.

This is a story of her growth, her finding a place to belong, of her going through difficult situations and how she overcomes her trauma. There is a lot more, but I can’t tell everything in a blog! I haven’t decided what to do with the story when it’s finished. This is the first part of it though. I have enough ideas for three stories! I might selfpublish. In case I do, I don’t want to give away too much.. I will however post bits of chapters in the future! I will also post about difficulties about writing, what I have come up with and how do I keep going on with writing. With ADHD, it is a bit tricky.

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Who am I?

As you visit this site regularly, you will start to see some themes. There are a few things that are imporant to me, including the environment, adopt don’t shop, psychology, mental health and my writing.

Psychology is important to me. It even comes up when I’m writing my story. I have hidden quite a bit of psychology in my story. It comes in ideas of 54321 method for example. I am a psychology student in university. I can’t help it.

This blog will be in two parts. One of them will be a more personal blog with my thoughts and ideas. The other part is about my writing. It will include what I have struggled with, what was easy and short stories.

A fw things about me that you might find interesting!

  • I have four autoimmune diseases, which include t1 diabetes, hashimoto’s and coeliac
  • I have two cats but I would love to get a dog or two
  • Like I said, I am studying psychology, but this isn’t my first time in uni
  • I have previously studied English philology in university
  • I am not native English speaker. I am a native Finnish speaker!
  • I have always wanted to learn how to play cello

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