ADD and Feelings of Inferiority

I had a horrific interaction with my internship supervisor on Thursday. Like seriously horrific. Because this is a public blog and internet sleuthing could probably result in my identity, I won’t post specifics. Suffice it to say it was truly traumatizing, and mostly not my fault. The person in question acted unprofessionally and inappropriately. This person even said at the beginning that my lessons went well, and that I have a great rapport with my students.

Even though I already have a meeting scheduled with the head of the program to mediate, I still am fighting some pretty significant depression over it.

It got me thinking. I take negative comments pretty hard, and I dwell on them. I’ve read that focusing on bad stuff is an ADD trait, but I sometimes struggle in how much of my feelings of inferiority and failure are my ADD and how much of these feelings are just my personality.

And, of course, since I am depressed and feeling sorry for myself, I descend into this spiral. What if it’s not really the ADD at all? What if I just suck at life? What if I am taking the easy way out by blaming all these things on a cognitive disorder?

Do y’all ever feel this way? What do you do?

On Forced Writing

I’ve been averaging a post and a half or so a week for over a month now. Less than my original goal at the beginning of the blog rebirth process, but I haven’t totally forgotten the blog and disappeared for another year, either.





Thinking about my progress got me thinking about deadlines and forced writing. I’ve been with the V family all weekend, helping them pack up and move, by entertaining their children. Mrs. V specifically planned to take the kids with them house-hunting this afternoon, so that I could do homework by myself for a few hours. What did I do? Proofread a novel a friend is getting published, ate popcorn, and chilled. I did not write the paper for psych that I needed to write.

It is very hard for me to just decide, ok, at 2pm I am going to sit down and do work. I need to actually be in the mood for working on whatever needs to get done. Unfortunately, deadlines wait for no man. No ADD girls, either. I do try to capitalize on the times when I am in the mood to write, but those often happen when I can’t actually do it, like yesterday at the children’s museum, when I had two children and no notebook or pen.

Sometimes I worry that it is not the ADD, but just a lack of self-discipline. That really, not being able to just buckle down and do things is my own damned fault, and I shouldn’t blame a disorder for my screwups. Of course, I know that self-doubt and worry are two symptoms of ADD, but then I worry that maybe I’m excusing the behavior by attributing it to a disorder I can’t change. And around and around it goes.

The bottom line is, I get stuff done. Even if I have to pull all-nighters, I do have everything done when it needs to be done. My goal is that some day, I will be able to have a slightly more relaxed approach, and finish things :gasp: early, on occasion, but for now, done suffices.