By Hallie Bulkin
I recently read an article about how it can be hard to love a person with ADD/ADHD. This was an interesting perspective for me to take as I focus so much of my daily life on how hard it is for the parents of my clients to parent a child with special needs, but I forget to look at how hard it is for my parents and husband to handle and love ME! (Love you guys!)
Now that I am an adult, I have had enough time in my adult years to figure out strategies for myself (compared to young children under 5 who are not yet able to create such success strategies). That said, the article I recently read and shared over on our Facebook page is still about 90% relative to my life. So much so, I could have written that article – but I didn’t. 😉
The interesting thing is I no longer see ADD as a struggle; I see it as a blessing. People with ADD have brilliant, creative minds and tend to become entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and more in tune with the right brain activities (music, art, inventing things, etc). If it weren’t for this so-called struggle with ADD I don’t think I would be willing to take risks and make big moves in my life. I do believe my ADD is a piece of who I am and has a hand in my recent success in launching my private practice, expanding my business, and always having “too much on my plate.”
Most of the time I feel that I am in control of my ADD…and then there are times where my emotions get the best of me. Part of that is being human and female…and part of it is that I really love passionately when it comes to everything I do!
SO…Today I am sharing with you what ADD looks like in my life and I would love to know if you can relate! Here it goes…
We love passionately. No matter what we do, we do it with passion and with 110%.
We are emotional beings. Sometimes we feel we cannot control our emotions. We cannot focus when upset, we need to shout it from the rooftops when happy, and we feel with our heart and soul…with just about everything we do!
We do everything with a sense of urgency and intensity. Just ask my husband…who likes to take his time and stay calm (everyone needs a good balance and reminder to slow down…especially me!)
We forget to get the milk at the store, but we can remember we have to finish a big project this Thursday to present at an upcoming talk.
We have the hardest time starting a task. We really have to be “in the mood” and when we are and we begin we get into our “zone”. When we are in the zone, do not even try to talk to us; we will either forget everything that we were just doing and then become irritated or we may just be snappy and seem moody. This is why I generally say, “don’t talk to me, I’m in the zone”.
The zone can be a tricky place! It’s a place of creativity and we feel like we are just flowing with ideas, getting a task done, taking it from start to completion. But we are stuck here…who needs to eat? Who needs sleep? Who needs to take a potty break? It’s tough when you’re in the zone! And it is never as short as it may feel…we get stuck here for hours!
We tend to be night owls. When it’s quiet and we don’t have distractions, we can sit down and the creative juices start flowing! We are able to complete tasks faster and get more done when everyone else is sleeping. These later hours tend to give us the “night owl” label but it is when we are most productive!
There were more that I resonated with but these were some of the points that resonated with me most in my daily life. In my next post I will talk about success strategies for ADD and how I handle these! This may give you some insight into how to better help a child with ADD…hopefully for today this helps you to better understand your child or another child that you interact with that fits this description!
Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
With love,
Hallie