Kate’s Tangents – Spotlights – Kavi Sharma

Hi there! I’m going to let Kari take this one away since she shares Ms. Kavi Sharma’s diagnosis of ADHD and will definitely have something to share about it.

It’s like having a TV in my mind. I’m supposed to be watching the Math channel while I’m in Math class, but instead I’m on the out-the-window channel watching a squirrel run up a tree or I’m on the dance channel, figuring out a new routine for the revue.

That’s – kind of – how Kavi Sharma explains her ADHD to her friends in her journal. And it’s pretty close to accurate, actually. I live with ADHD too and I can agree that it’s really hard to keep my brain on the channel it’s supposed to be on unless it happens to be something I love to do.

Living with ADHD can be both a blessing and a curse. Some days, I get absolutely nothing done because I can’t keep my focus where it’s supposed to be and I end up starting four or five projects because I can’t stick with just one. This is when you’ll hear me tell you to please wait a minute or two, let me finish what I’ve started or I’ll never get the train of thought back to finish it.

The other side of the coin is hyper focusing. Getting so involved in the project that I’m doing that I’ll do nothing else until I finish said project. This means I might manage to clean an entire room or bake four kinds of cookies in one day before my focus breaks. It works to my advantage sometimes, I can get a lot done when the hyper focus and motivation both kick in at once.

There’s more to ADHD than just focus or lack of focus though – the answer I didn’t have in college to why I didn’t need caffeine to survive finals? My ‘normal’ is like being caffeine buzzed. If I drink caffeinated beverages, I slow down and even fall asleep. For me, this also means things like night time cold meds that are intended to knock me out have no effect.

Why I sit here and worry that my friends don’t want me around when they have other plans for the day? That one’s called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. And it’s a nuisance like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t actually want to be upset when my friends have other plans or feel like someone hates me because they didn’t answer when I texted/said something. My brain just dumps every reason someone could have to hate me at once and I have to find my way to the reality of the situation – that not everything has to include me and whoever I was talking to probably didn’t hear me.

Seeing Kavi Sharma’s story include her having ADHD felt like looking in a mirror. She reminds me so much of myself. She’s not trying to be a bad student, she’s just so excited for what she wants to do that her brain won’t let her focus on anything else. Hyperfixation at its best and worst.

As a last note, don’t treat people with ADHD like they’re a nuisance. It’s not our fault we can’t sit and focus the way we’re ‘supposed to’ – believe me, we’re as frustrated with ourselves as you are with us. We would love to be able to sit and focus on something without drifting off or wandering off to another task. We would love to be able to switch tasks without completely forgetting to finish the first task.

That’s my perspective on living with ADHD.

-Kari

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