Me, my brain and ADHD

Self-diagnosis

I have self-diagnosed myself with ADHD. Never thought of this being a possibility because I always assumed ADHD was about hyperactivity and I am always lazy and bored.

There is a constant feeling of too much happening in my head, every moment of my waking hours. Being late for every scheduled event, often by just a few minutes, has become a second nature. Learning anything is very difficult. Forming habits is straight up impossible.

I did not have any explanation for these personal quirks up until a few months ago, when I came across a set of memes about ADHD. The symptoms mentioned matched awfully a lot with those which I face. I dug further into it and learned that the most common form of ADHD in adults is not hyperactivity but attention-deficit disorder (ADD).

But diagnosis is only the first step. It felt good to finally have an explanation for what I experience, but it still does not fix the issue. On some days I just give up and blame it for my low productivity.

Learning frustrations

For a very long time I used to think I have some form of learning disability. Learning with ADHD feels like an uphill battle.

It goes like this:

• I am interested in something for a few days (usually 2-5 days)
• I try to learn it obsessively
• A few days of low productivity and I start to lose interest in the thing
• Lose most of what I learned and have to start again the next time I get interested in it

Making notes does not help much as I rarely review them. 5 steps forward, then 3 steps backwards. This has been my experience with learning anything. Sometimes it does not feel like it's worth the trouble.

I am very bad at retaining information in my head. I have tried Anki but staying consistent with it is difficult too. I stay consistent for a few days, followed by no reviews for a week. Still, it helps.

"Out of sight, out of mind" is one of the most frustrating aspects of ADHD. I often lose things, habits, and even people within the span of a few days of being out of touch. I wish I could have a bird's-eye view of everything going on in my life. I fail at note taking because I lose track of my previous notes within a few days and it's very tiresome.

Decision fatigue

I am not very good at making decisions. The list of choices are often times overwhelming, especially if the decision is something that does hold a lot of meaning, for example, what clothes to buy, which skin care products to use, etc.

This translates into programming as well. A programmer has to make lots of small and big decisions. Code structure, identifier naming, which words to abbreviate in identifier names, what sections of code warrant a separation by a blank line, which functionality to extract out into a separate function, how to order the arguments, choice of libraries, module names, etc. Most of these have no effect on the runtime performance whatsoever. Actually, decisions whose results can be benchmarked are often easier to make because there can be a few decisions that are objectively better than others. Having a decent style guide sort of helps but it can only have guidelines for broad things like casing of identifier names. All this fatigue builds up and programming starts to feel like a chore.

Executive dysfunction

If I really want to do something, then I should be able to do it, right? Unfortunately, my brain does not think so.

There are spans of days where I do not program anything. This happens especially when I am free to do it. Because my brain does not like to do anything that I think I should be doing. The same happens when I start programming something random in the middle of my semester exams when I should really be studying for it instead. It is a common ADHD symptom to be driven by interest rather than priorities. It sucks.

Moving over items from my today's to-do list to tomorrow's has become one of the very few habits that I am consistent with. A lot of the projects that I want to do have been on my list for almost half a decade at this point.

What next?

I am looking forward to getting a proper diagnosis. The diagnosis and treatment not being very accessible does not help when one of the major symptoms of the ailment is procrastination. I have been considering it for the last few months.

I used to be wary of any kind of brain altering substance but a bit of researching on the internet convinced me that stimulants are the right step. I have been on an antidepressant before. Not sure if I really liked it. It made me very sleepy, but things in my head were surely calmer. Everything felt more approachable as opposed to feeling overwhelmed constantly and wanting to catch a break. Unfortunately, I got frustrated and abruptly stopped taking it. The withdrawal from it was horrible.

Things I am up to these days:

• Learning wgpu: I have tried and failed at learning graphics APIs many times. Three times OpenGL, one time WebGL, and once WebGPU. Not sure if I will go very far this time but hopefully I land somewhere farther than where I did in my previous attempt.
• Job hunting: Although, not very actively as I want to take things slowly this semester. I need to learn a lot and I want to try math and ML too.
• Spending even less time on competitive programming. Not like I ever put a lot of effort anyway. So, only some contests for cheap thrills.
• Mindless anime and YouTube consumption. I should at least try to treat these as rewards in order to do something productive. I have stopped visiting the YouTube feed though and it helps. I have a small script for playing YT videos in mpv which is invoked right from newsraft, the RSS reader of my choice.
• Too much proprietary software. I spent this summer in a city and having tens of apps just to function normally is very common. Apps for getting food, travel, daily commute, meetings, work chat, etc. Now that it's over I want to permanently delete them but most don't have an option for account deletion.

Things that can improve my life a lot but I am procrastinating on it:

• Diagnosis and stimulants
• Journaling: Need a good note taking software. Neovim and a bunch of markdown files scattered all over my home directory is not sustainable.
• Having my daily to-do list always be in my sight
• Find a better bookmarking solution and stop tab hoarding
• Activity tracking to find the anti-patterns

Anyway, I really want to do better than my current self and I know that is not a very high bar. As for this blog, I can't say it will be active from now on because I know I will be lying. I will try though. Giving up on perfection helps with making any progress at all.

With that being said, I still don't have much idea about my long term purpose. Maybe, AI research? or security? No clue, and I am allergic to hypes.