OK, here goes · ADHD Harmony™

OK, here goes

I'm Paul, from Queensland, Australia. I've intended to put an introduction on here, but you know.... it's so hard to engage sometimes.

My absolute #1 biggest challenge is hyper-empathy. I constantly find myself in situations where I so badly WANT to help someone, but I'm out of my depth or I try too hard and get overwhelmed (in the middle of trying to function and do everything else) and then I go into a HUGE shame spiral.

Yeah, it keeps happening. I work for a Managed Service Provider (IT Services) and it is a massive undertaking for an ADHD person. I am furiously building scaffolding to try to prop myself up and compensate for my poor working memory, time blindness and other executive function challenges.

The tools that work for me are my own Dashboards. I create them for ME and actually use them, unlike every other platform which simply gets forgotten forever.

But I feel like it's a losing game furiously building scaffolds to prop up everything I do. I can never actually keep up and get to a state of equilibrium or productivity, even with AI tools like Claude to build virtually anything I can dream up. And I have a LOT of ideas. I make all kinds of timesaving scripts and larger projects, which does save me time but doesn't stop the pitiless waves washing away the sands of time....

I tried to go into a new role at an MSP with a whole new mindset, I made dozens of custom podcasts in NotebookLM from Deep Research on ADHD and related topics, I made a folder of images for thinking prompts (such as "Am I providing a hand-crafted Mercedes when the customer only asked for an Uber ride down the corner?" or "Am I building a boat to cross a bridge" ?)

I went deep, really deep and I got the perfect start to the job - slow introduction and got myself out of burnout from the previous role. I'm among friends (have known the Boss guy since early '90s).

Mentally felt I was in a good place - the mental stress load was mostly gone, however my body hadn't got the memo yet that we aren't in stress hell anymore. But it's got to get worse before it gets better, right? I'm nearly 54 and there's nothing WRONG with me, been poked and prodded and tested for a year but everything came down to stress. Also had over a year of practically no sleep, which certainly didn't help.

But at the end of the day I'm still incredibly anxious to prove myself, the high level anxiety has just become the new normal, and the shame spiral is a constant feature in my life. I'm trying not to be that guy who says yes to everything. I am prioritizing myself.

I go through life constantly apologizing for my limitations while being an extremely high level thinker, planner and strategist who is in all probability putting in 150% more effort than anyone around me. Constellation thinking is a curse, makes it hard to concentrate fully on the task at hand.

10 comments