I’m not saying this post has anything to do with ADHD, except for the fact that I have ADHD and I know for a fact that I will not get to the end of the blog post I intended without interruptions and distractions.

I must now confess that I have completely forgotten what I was going to blog about. And then I remembered. And then I remembered why I keep forgetting it.

It’s a blog post I want and don’t want.

I’m not sure where I stand in my own universe right now. All of the things I thought I would be good at I now know I wouldn’t have been.

Tik Tok and Instagram are filled with successful people with ADHD and pretty good looks and smiles are making so many videos now. Most of them are just telling their experiences and hoping enough people relate to build their audience.

How many times can you watch a different person tell you how hard doing the kitchen chores are.

But now that I think of it, the more and more people exhibiting life struggles for the same stereotype symptom.

I now confess that I am high on weed and little sleep. On weed, I am always thinking without the instant negative feedback but at the same time that negative feedback was frequently right and I don’t like being on weed in public because I feel stupid and I let that bother me.

More recently I have come to accept the character I have become. I don’t know if television imitates life or life imitates television but on TV, every family or community sitcom has the brother-in-law or cousin or crazy uncle that shows up every now and then asking for money and always believing the scams are the next big thing.

I used to say I judge a television sitcom by how dumb the dumb character is. Some are really dumb but still pull it off. A lot of the dumb characters on sitcoms are not believable. Not people you would probably keep as friends. The first example I discovered of this trend was I dream of Jeannie. I was much younger and less judgmental but I remember thinking he was just the right amount of dumb.

The next door neighbor on Newhart was too dumb. That’s where my plan fails because you heart was a significant sitcom in the development of who I am.

I just realized I think I might have mixed up the two dumb characters from new heart and I grew up genie. Were they the same guy?

I was trying to remember to post about today being a possible significant marker in my life.

The day I got my Arizer vaporizer.

Ding. That reminds me of a story. I did the initial website for the guy and hung out with him and his wife. (If they’re not married I apologize. I took a chance)

I had one of the early beta and 3 upgrades to the newest Extreme. I would say it’s near perfection and that’s why they haven’t needed to make newer versions anymore. They make a lot of other cool stuff.

I was at their house several times trying to seem like I fit in. I’m more comfortable as the computer support person or web designer that I am at making friends but ironically all my customers were friends or became friends.

Like so many things in life, we tend to remember the good things and try our best to forget the bad ones. When I say I was good at making friends that were customers, there were probably quite a few that just didn’t mesh.

I coined the phrase click or clash and for me anyway it’s usually a pretty quick observational decision. Some people get just click with right away, and others you need to take ecstasy before you can stand being in the same room.

I do sincerely try to be friends with almost everyone I meet but that’s not what people expect and not everyone wants to be friends with their commuter 64 salesman.

When I take this moment to reflect, all of my friends stopped to being close friends pretty suddenly. Later in life I learned I thought I was funny and well liked, but I was a bully to people in high school including my friends.

Only recently I’m starting to realize that my emotions didn’t work the way I thought they did. I thought I could pretty much figure out what people were thinking or how they were feeling. I don’t mean psychically, but I seemed to be able to sense emotions in other people.

It was much later in life I realized I wasn’t sensing any emotions for me. I needed there to be somebody else. I like to be needed and I like to be the one that brings the smile.

Having a father that would spontaneously explode into loud anger seemingly at almost anything if it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I feared him and spent very little time with him because nobody knew what ADHD was back then. I was just the kid that couldn’t hold the flashlight for 2 minutes while he was fixing the engine or keep holding the ladder for more than 2 minutes while he was up on the roof.

I wasn’t what I thought he would have preferred in a child. I figured out quite a bit later in life that is in his 40s he was a pretty cool guy. Drove cool cars and had several hobbies that we never really paid much attention to I’m sure he would have loved to have a son join him then again hobbies are designed to distract you from your home life. (Grin)

I have developed fears that make starting anything I can’t finish in 3 hours or less.

My ADHD is complicated because I have a brain that struggles with object permanence, which up until a few days ago I thought was only a term for dogs that didn’t quite understand the idea that their owners would be back.

A lot of people with ADHD and without, struggle with various memory issues especially as they age. My grandparents on my mother’s side and my parents all suffered from the memory fading into nothing, But it’s not Alzheimer’s it’s the other one. People seem to be very attached to dementia if it means they won’t have Alzheimer’s..

As a child of two dementia parents, I can tell you it’s not that different from their perspective. I have always had memory issues and I recently found out there was a word for it but I haven’t been able to find it since.

There’s always a name for it these days.

I don’t want a long list of symptoms and syndromes to make that a major part of my life story, but I personally find it fascinating when one of my oddities is showing up on TikTok as a common dysfunction.

From what I’ve seen, most people with ADHD seem to have ADHD and..

My father was confused by me, and I don’t think either one of them would have ever gone near computers if it wasn’t for me being their son. It was a world they didn’t really want to be a part of or fully understand. What I’m saying is my parents didn’t know or understand what I did for a living after I left retail.

I’m sure they were proud in their own way that their son was running his own business, and I suspect a lot of people didn’t think it would last 30 years. Most don’t.

As long as I don’t tell the full story that sounds impressive. It’s still impressive and pride worthy to me, I wasn’t very good at the important office stuff. Working retail sales was an ideal job for me because I sincerely believe that salespeople have a great job as long as they believe in the product. Helping confused people make a choice they don’t understand that will be good for them is a gift both to me and to them.

I made a career on talking to people older than me about almost anything but computers when I was at their house working on their computer.

I grew up trying to be perfect in as many ways I could because it was clear I was far from perfect. I do not have good balance or whatever skills sports needed. I remember 6 seconds was my record for pull up.

I was last picked on team selection. I couldn’t throw or catch and I always had to walk into the bushes if I ever threw a frisbee.

I wasn’t even good at video games all the way back to pong. I lost at almost all games including mini golf and pool, even though we had a pool table for 7 years.

It didn’t really occur to me that I was losing it everything until much later in life. I loved game night or sports events because of the company and the interaction and the smiles.

I couldn’t even win at Checkers.

Who knew all of that was a part of ADHD as well. Some people are the opposite of me and do very well in school and take up violin and piano and have 10 hobbies but all of those were too hard if they were the same on day three and day four and they five. I can really only focus on things that I either find interesting, or I find ways to make it interesting. The moment it turns to a chore, it’s very hard to focus on in a universe that has so many other things to look at not all of which have to be shiny.

Of course I didn’t know any of this until I was 27 and read a recommended book on ADHD and it blew my mind before I even got past the case studies.

But that was back in the days when it was called ADD and by comparison very little was known about it. There were no chick talk presentations back then. And I had trouble reading.

I had much difficulty reading anything that didn’t interest me and almost as much difficulty reading things that did interest me but that I understood on page one and there was still 15 pages to read.

I don’t fully remember reading any books fully in all of the school. I did read a lot of the first third of a lot of books.

I would literally lose my place between the last word on a line and the first word on the next line and I would end up rereading the same line over and over. Then when I finally snapped out of that I had lost the enthusiasm.

My ADHD causes a lot of problems when I lose the enthusiasm and some of the time it’s that negative voice in my head that proofreads my thoughts after I say them instead of before and then nags me inside my head until I agree and feel bad that my idea wasn’t as good as I thought.

But I still did think a lot of good ideas, at least I think. Something I like to say is we are all perfect until we share.

If you write something or film something or have an idea in your head, it exists in a state of perfection at least for a moment. Sometimes forever. We only learn that we are not perfect when someone else tells us.

Most of my childhood was spent inside my head inside my room. In the country it’s easy to be more than an hour away from your best friends and if nobody has a car you see them at school and that’s it.

I think I overthought. Let me say I definitely overthink friendships and I probably lose a lot of them because of that. I lose a few more because I say stupid things to my friends sometimes.

… Mojo lost right there.

end of part one.