Your daughters a daydreamer, she’s lazy and could do better if she tried. You could do it if you want to, but you just don’t care. You don’t think, or you think of only yourself. These are only a few of the many comments I have heard over the years. Hello, my name is BBunny and I have ADD. Unfortunately when I was a child in the 50’s and 60’s they did not know what ADD was. I went through my school years as a daydreamer, a person who was always on the outside looking in at everyone else have a good time, hearing the same message over and over again of how lazy, stupid and crazy I was.
Ever since the age of 20, I sought one professional after another trying to find out the reason I was having such a difficult time living a normal adult life. Why I was and felt so different from my peers. I went to psychologist after psychologist with no hope in site. You see I found out that most adults are diagnosed when their kids are diagnosed, but I did not have any children. The answer I got from most professionals was “you still live at home, your mothers controlling, you need to move out”. Even though I knew they were right in some way, I always had the what if’s. What if i can’t make it out on my own, what then. What if I loose my job, how will I make it. You see,I always had the feeling that the other shoe was going to drop at any minute. Their wasn’t a day that went by at my job, that I wasn’t hearing negative feedback about my performance either from managers or co-workers.
I read some literature on ADD, and remember thinking of how it described my life. I was seeing this female Psychologist at the time, and mentioned my suspicions to her, only to be blown off as if to say “what makes you think you are smarter than me, or can diagnose yourself”. Once again I went away from her office feeling hopeless. Then,in 1996, the bottom was starting to fall out. I was about to loose my job, I didn’t have a social life to speak of, my life was a mess. In desperation, I sought the help of yet another Psychologist, one that I picked from a group out of the Yellow Pages. I sat in this caring mans office for a whole month, never telling him of my suspicions, going over my whole life, from school to the present time. After the fourth visit, he asked me to do some homework.
He asked me to read the book “Driven To Distraction” and come back the next week and tell him what I thought. I can remember reading, and crying at the same time. My name was written at the top of every page. It was all so clear, I had ADD. When I saw him the next week, I asked him how he knew. He replied that he knew from the way I described my life from childhood through adulthood, especially the problems I now was having in my career. He also said the way I talked was also a clue, because I would start on one subject and end up in another, never coming to the point. I now call that my Edeth Bunker Syndrome, remembering how Edith use to talk to Archy and how he would pretend to shoot himself in the head.
I went through many stages, that my therapist said were like C Ross’s stages of dieing, because in actuality, I had lost a life. Although my first stage started with anger. I was angry that of all the therapists that I saw since they knew what ADD was, not one of them recognized the signs, even when they were presented to them in black and white. Finding out I had ADD made me realize that my career choice was not a safe place for me, so I resigned my position of 16 years, and began a journey of redirecting my career. I was started on Ritalin, and for the first time found I could read novels with comprehension and enjoyment, was less impulsive,and distracted. I
entered a bachelors degree program at my local State College, and with the help of meds and a few accommodations, am getting A’s. Although my life is not perfect, I have depression, and low self esteme from the years I spent being undiagnosed, and am having difficulty finding a job, it is still better than it was. One day I hope to be working in the social service or counsceling field, so no other adult will have to go through life the way I did being misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Instead of getting mad or feeling embarassed, I now can laugh when my neice and nephew lightly rap on my head saying “Earth To Aunt Bunny”.