So it’s been three weeks since I got diagnosed with AADD… and about one week since I really started dealing with it.

I’ve been trying to figure out a metaphor to explain the nature of the “liberation” I mentioned earlier at finding all this out.

Alright – try this for a rambling attempt:

Let’s say your focus / attention is a framed picture… Not your focus / attention on a particular object – but the very ability to itself… Don’t worry about what it’s a picture of… Just think about hanging that picture onto a semi smooth wall.. (sure, go ahead – you can play the metaphor through and say the wall is in a room called your “consciousness / mind”).

The back of the frame has no hardware on it except suction cups… It’s just how it came…. And you have no other tools at your disposal.

So you walk over and stick frame onto the wall.

If you’ve ever tried attaching a suction cup to a painted wall – you’ll know they don’t stick very well. Sometimes it’ll stick for a little bit… sometimes it just falls right off…

But you don’t know that… and just just keep trying… again…..

and again….

and again….

and again….

It gets really frustrating… Until…

Diagnosis finally walks in informs you that suction cups just aren’t good at adhering to drywall and will *never* be regardless how how many times you try to stick them on.

Then – at that moment you’re free. You can just lay that damn frame down and enjoy the other items in your room… look out the window… run your toes through the carpet… go sit down over there in that comfy chair.

Sure – that frame isn’t up… but why spend all day over there trying when it simply won’t…. not by itself.

Ahh… but lucky for you – your friend Diagnosis has brought stuff with him: Extra suction cups… mounting hardware… and porcelain tiles.

Enter treatment.

Medications, (porcelain tiles) change the wall’s surface to something more accommodating for suction-cups…

Cognitive behavior training can add extra suction cups to the back of that pesky frame.

/metaphor

Diagnosis and some education has enabled me to step-outside myself and observe the manifestation of the negative, (and some of the good), aspects of AADD-brain wiring… Sure there’s an impulse to freak out about it but at least now I’m not just endlessly trying to stick that damn frame back onto the wall for the millionth time. I know *why* it’s not sticking and can start moving forward in a constructive manner.

So here I am at the beginning of treatment.

I’ve been encouraged to continue digesting the book I bought, Delivered from Distraction, as best as I can and have been prescribed a fairly new drug called Strattera.

The medicine is one of those “uptake inhibitors” which prevents the brain from re-absorbing these chemicals which inform brain function called neurotransmitters.

Unlike the popular antidepressant medications out there for blue-folks that inhibit the reabsorption of the “happy” neurotransmitter serotonin – this drug inhibits Norepinephrine.

Unlike the more common stimulant treatments – this stuff needs to build up in your body before it becomes therapeutic… They’ve started me on a ramp up of one pill a day taken at bedtime:
7 days at 25mg
7 days at 40mg
then to 60mg which is where they’ll hold to see how I’m doing.

I start tonight… I’m going to try to be extra aware of any oh look a chicken.