pure jenius.

My low self esteem dates back to my early childhood. I grew up in a household where I was to be seen and not heard. I was told quite often that nothing in the house was mine because I did not pay for it. I was not allowed to have an opinion or challenge the patriarch and authority. This continued through to my adult life and continued to shape how I felt about myself. I wasn't ever going to be good enough. It weighs deep with me today. I have very low self worth and self esteem. I don't feel like I belong in social situations with people who, from my own perspective, are normal. If they only knew how fragile of a person I am, it would be game over for me. It shouldn't matter to me anymore as I have proven, to myself, that I came from behind to catch up with my peer group from an educational and professional standpoint. It still weighs on me, I feel like others look at me and think that I must not be that smart because I'm only an XYZ at my job and not an ABC.  Of course...

 The past week or so has not been a good one for me. I have not been able to sleep which seemingly has fueled my ADHD which keeps me up at night, and I'm tired fueling ADHD, and I don't sleep. On and on and on.... ADHD combined with depression and anxiety makes for a cocktail of a mess. Depression and anxiety aside, ADHD for me has always been disruptive. Depression and anxiety at least have a function and/or purpose, for me these are protectors from vulnerability. But ADHD is just how things operate, it's nature and not nurture.  I struggle with staying on tasks through to completion, even ones that I get hyper focused on. On any given day when I'm doing a chore around the house, laundry, dishes, vacuuming....I usually get to the 70% completion point, if that sometimes, and call it good. There will be three dishes in the sink vs ten. Most of my laundry will be completed, but a good chunk will remain in the basket and probably get washed a second time as I start putting...

 I often get caught in an emotional downward spiral and can't stop it. It happens quite often and is most disruptive at night. I can't sleep and can't calm myself. My anxiety really kicks into high gear and I catastrophize everything in my world.  I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. Everyone else has a better existence than me. Everyone else has a better relationship with their spouse. The list goes on, and on, and on, and on.  I don't know how this starts with me nor do I know how to bring myself out of it. I have talked to my therapist about it and we are working on it, but it really hangs over me. It's tiresome.  I like to think that someday I'll be better equipped to recognize what is happening to me in these moments. I have a lifetime of this in me and takes work, a lot of work, to resolve what's going on. I don't feel like I am always doing the work required. I give in to easy to the decades of inaction and give up and just move on w...

 The problem with night time is when everything around me quiets down my mind starts racing. It kicks into overdrive and magnifies anything that is bothering me. Since my mind is not distracted by anything else, it runs through every scenario that brings me discomfort, unhappiness, pain, and fuels my anxiety. I'm stuck in this cycle were I can't stop it and can't be rational.  Like I said before, I struggle over the weekends. Regardless of how my weekend goes or how tired I make myself, I'm left with night time struggles that can sometimes go until 3 a.m. which causes even more problems the next night. I spiral out of control and cannot get any grip on reality to stabilize myself.  As I write this, it is starting to get late into the night. As tired as I am, I am not able to fall asleep, what is currently causing me trouble is how much inflation is having an impact on everything we buy and the stress of spending money on things we don't need has fueled my anxiety to...

 I struggle on the weekends. As hard as it is holding myself together during the week, at least there is routine with work and only needing to fill a few hours of nonstructured time. The weekends can be bad because without a routine, my mood swings to the more negative side. I try to find things to do, projects around the house, exercise, but without those being a requirement like work is, I slack off easily. I tend to thing everyone else is living this great life and loving every minute of the weekend with their friends or loved ones. That feels foreign to me. I spend time with my friends doing things we enjoy and spending time with my family, but in the back of my mind I always feel like a fraud and what I'm experiencing isn't real. I feel like I'm being tolerated by others.  It's not that I want something that others have, I have that, I want to be able to believe and appreciate what I have. I don't allow myself to see that. I know that I am doing that to myself,...

 There was a several week span from late April to early May were my depression, anxiety, and ADHD were spiraling and was making a mess of things. It had been a while since it was THAT bad. My therapist has told me to try and focus on what may have caused everything. In the moment it is hard to focus on something like that. Those of us (well, at least me) with ADHD aren't exactly capable of spending the time digging into the details of anything.  A few weeks have passed and I'm closer to a more "normal" and stable routine. My depression and anxiety have subsided for now, but my ADHD is commonplace for me. When I look back at those few weeks and try to think of how I got there, I can't put my self in my own shoes and understand. Even now, when things are "normal" I can't dig into why and how I am back to normal.  When my depression comes fast and thick, it takes a lot of effort and energy to hold myself together and move through the day. It is exhausti...

 Having low self awareness comes with the territory of lacking emotional maturity. It should come as no surprise that I'm blind to being self aware. I don't look at myself from someone else's vantagepoint to understand how I could be perceived by others. It's the lack of empathy piece that keeps me from doing that. I can't put myself in other's shoes. Alas, knowing what I know now, and wishing I new way back when, I'm working on understanding how my emotional state could affect how others perceive me. Because I'm not good at it yet, I can only read myself if I'm super pissed or super depressed. Those are the "easy" ones for me to look at how my outward presence can be different.  What I need, and getting help for, is understanding the everyday perception. When I'm not super pissed or depressed, but when I may be a little off or when I am more "normal." These things aren't easy for me. It takes effort to push up against my ...

 My first response to any external stimuli is usually emotional then in a very distant second is my rational response. There's a time and place for both but as an adult I still struggle with how I respond.  Like many of my behaviors, this goes back as far as I can remember. I'm working on trying to understand the 'why' and how I can, as and adult, become more emotionally mature.  My relationships have suffered because how I react in an emotional and immature manner which has alienated many people in my life. It bums me out but that is also something I need to accept and move on with what I have. 

 I'm no expert on nature vs nurture, my ADHD prevents me from getting past the first sentence and a half of any article. So it's more about me trying to understand myself and the difference between "how I am" and what has "made" me.  Nobody told me how to, or when to bang my head against the floor in frustration when things didn't go my way when I was three or four years old. I have no recollection of the time before that which may have helped shape my responses. But I'm ok with pinning that to the nature part of me. Knowing what I know now about myself and looking back at that time, my emotional outbursts were dealt with by being yelled at and to "stop crying!" and "go to your room!" and "grow up." As a developing child, I was not taught how to deal with my emotions from a rational standpoint, only my emotions were dealt with by opposing larger emotions.  Now I don't blame my parents for their inability to help me, ...

 I need an outlet.  I need to say these things out loud. For many years, a vast majority of my life, I have suffered from depression, ADHD, anxiety, complete lack of self worth.  I have been trying for the last two years to work on these things with the help of medication and a therapist. I feel like I have an understanding of how I got here, but don't feel like I've made progress.  As I have learned more about myself and the nature vs. nurture of development, I am now struggling with regret, embarrassment, resentment, and a whole host of other things.  At times I feel like I've hit rock bottom, mentally and emotionally, only to find there continues to be a new rock bottom.   I feel like I have worked more on putting up a front of my personality instead of being who I truly am. I struggle, every day. I can't sleep at night because that's when I tend to hyper focus on made up situations that reinforce my belief that everyone is living heir best life exc...