Next week, I have an appointment with my Primary Care Physician. Just a routine checkup to see if everything is okay. It's been eight months since my GB surgery and I am feeling pretty good. I am down eighty pounds from my top weight and have stabilized nicely around the 200 mark. I am happy with that. No more Type 2 Diabetes, no more sleep apnea, no more high blood pressure. All is well. Sort of.
Now that my weight and all the ancillary problems that went with it are (hopefully) behind me, I feel that it's time to address another lifelong health issue I have been ignoring. A mental health issue. I want to be tested for ADHD. I've been a classic 'underachiever' type my whole life. Unable to concentrate on things that did not interest me, I was a poor student with terrible study habits. I have always 'lived in my head,' so to speak. Lots of stuff going on upstairs, but lacking the mental discipline to really utilize it properly.
It's been frustrating to say the least. There have been times I've been able to overcome it. Deadlines always helped me focus when I was a news producer or when I had to finish an article in time for publication.
So, I ask myself...am I lazy? Am I just not properly motivated? Am I looking for an excuse to justify wasting so much of my life not creating? I'm not sure.
I'd like to find out, though. Maybe I can find a way to help myself. So, I will ask my doctor for her advice. I feel like I may have bought myself some time by having my surgery. I don't want to waste it.
I share in your frustration and in your condition. While self employed I was an 11th hour miracle worker and in the endentured servant sector I was the miracle worker under pressure. Left to my own time I am a lost cause of underacheivement stuck in my head.
ReplyDeleteDon't overlook the timing of our education and how we were as lost in that as in ourselves. It was the end of expressive awareness in teaching; it was the hayday of Michael Keatonism.
The humanities were devalued to the point of degradation; I say this from brutal personal experience. Excessive pressure toward hard sciences and math was the mode of the day; all the wit and ascerbic humor you had, all promise you showed for media and entertainment meant tnothing to that administration. Focus is tough to acheive in an astmosphere of indifference.
I was a working freelance commercial artist while in school. I won 2 writing awards. I played 4 instruments by high school. I taught anatomy and disection in elementary schools in a pilot program. But I had no interest or promise in math, physics or computer science. My proctors in the gifted program had nothing but disappointment to express; there was no room in the system for a renaissance man. The 80's were for MIT and Wall Street.
While I have no doubt there is an internal, personal mechanism at work here, and I loathe blaming 'They who would be Them' for what is, at it's core, personal shortcoming, there is room for examination of shortfalls in understanding, development and direction for the creative sorts rather than only the pragmatic and dutifully overacheiving.