Seeing posts like this makes me wonder what I would’ve been diagnosed with when I was younger. And how different my life would have been, if I had access to the right medication. I am pretty certain I had ADD and am probably somewhere on the spectrum. Symptoms lessened with age, ADD in particular, in my early 30s. I still have some face blindness where I can only remember faces in a certain context and won’t recognize people outside of it. I once didn’t recognize my own grandfather when I met him on the subway. Ah, well.
I would have been Asperger’s Syndrome, but there was absolutely nothing to be done about it at the time, so a diagnosis (as my psychologist actually said) was all downside. Eventually coping mechanisms developed, some through hyperfocus, e.g. learning how to identify emotions in others with body posture and language, microexpressions, voice analysis etc., was a deep rabbit hole, but it’s served me well. If I turn it fully on I seem creepily intense in my focus, so I mostly don’t, but it’s there if I need it and just mildly on brings me up to parity with normies. I’ve done similar things with exercise, diet, meditation, and more.
Solving (my) problems, one hyperfocus at a time ;)
adhd doesn’t just go away or get better when you get older, you just learn coping strategies that mask the symptoms better. i know from personal experience. i still struggle to do stuff and medication helps a lot. might be worth a shot.
For some people it does change. After all, our bodies are not static. The brain in particular has five major eras[1], with big turning points at around ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. For me, the one at 32 changed me a lot and let me finally understand that my life wasn’t typical.
But it is of course true that you learn to cope better and once you’re done with school/uni, a lot of the situations that ADD made really bad for me simply don’t occur anymore. Any kind of test situation was awful.
Seeing posts like this makes me wonder what I would’ve been diagnosed with when I was younger. And how different my life would have been, if I had access to the right medication. I am pretty certain I had ADD and am probably somewhere on the spectrum. Symptoms lessened with age, ADD in particular, in my early 30s. I still have some face blindness where I can only remember faces in a certain context and won’t recognize people outside of it. I once didn’t recognize my own grandfather when I met him on the subway. Ah, well.
I would have been Asperger’s Syndrome, but there was absolutely nothing to be done about it at the time, so a diagnosis (as my psychologist actually said) was all downside. Eventually coping mechanisms developed, some through hyperfocus, e.g. learning how to identify emotions in others with body posture and language, microexpressions, voice analysis etc., was a deep rabbit hole, but it’s served me well. If I turn it fully on I seem creepily intense in my focus, so I mostly don’t, but it’s there if I need it and just mildly on brings me up to parity with normies. I’ve done similar things with exercise, diet, meditation, and more.
Solving (my) problems, one hyperfocus at a time ;)
To life being full.
adhd doesn’t just go away or get better when you get older, you just learn coping strategies that mask the symptoms better. i know from personal experience. i still struggle to do stuff and medication helps a lot. might be worth a shot.
For some people it does change. After all, our bodies are not static. The brain in particular has five major eras[1], with big turning points at around ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. For me, the one at 32 changed me a lot and let me finally understand that my life wasn’t typical.
But it is of course true that you learn to cope better and once you’re done with school/uni, a lot of the situations that ADD made really bad for me simply don’t occur anymore. Any kind of test situation was awful.
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/five-ages-human-brain