ADHD, MDD and Story of my life

[Rahul]

My name is Rahul(M23). I just found out a week ago that I have ADHD and also that there is a name for daydreaming I do, and it's not normal. I have always felt weird and unique because of this. However, after reading the stories of some of the members here, I do think that my MDD is not that severe and relatively manageable(despite it eating a lot of my time). I have always been a topper in school and an outlier in many aspects and have always felt like a genius about myself.

My current life is shit right now tho. Despite having all the time and resources and a clear path in front of me, I have struggled to get things done and have wasted the important last 2 years. Not getting things done and struggling with self-discipline, eventually pushed me into internet addictions and that further deteriorated the situation. The thing is up until when I had to learn a skill to get the job where I had to put hours honing my craft or practising doing the same thing, I never had to work hard or make a schedule and work accordingly sitting at one place. I came first and did well in school out of sheer intelligence or memory or smartness(whatever you want to call it). Since I never needed it I never learnt the value of hard work and discipline in getting things done.

Things started to change as I became an adult, however. I started a few endeavours based on my interests but soon abandoned them as my curiosity died out. And it is important to be focused and consistent at something at least for a few months to get meaningful results or acquire a skill. It was very hard to push myself to do things, even when I was fully aware of how important they were to me. I found myself procrastinating and daydreaming all the time and got very little done in a lot of time. I was constantly annoyed at myself for not producing desired results and wasting my time. However, I didn't completely accept the problem in myself and took refuge in scrolling through Twitter and youtube watching and reading about cutting-edge stuff to feel good about myself. But as months passed and nothing important got done, the problem became more and more apparent. I found myself stagnated and addicted to those platforms and slowly my confidence also took a downward turn. I started self-loathing and blaming my laziness and inability to manage my behaviour for whatever happened. All these, coupled with some serious health and family issues(including financial issues) pushed me into a severe depression that is hard to get away with. These days I am finding myself sometimes googling stuff like "painless ways to suicide" for fun! (as I don't even have the courage or the naiveness to do something like that). While sometimes I am scrolling through youtube to watch something to get all this shit out of my mind at least for some time to feel good, but then I will regret all of that before going to sleep for not starting to solve my problems and taking refuge in fragile momentary pleasures. In the end, there's no escape!

Fortunately for me, I was Journaling all this time and reflecting on what went wrong with myself and issues with my behaviour. There's still no single answer to that. It might be a combination of a lot of factors. For example, I think there might be some genetic aspect to it as I have seen some of these behavioural traits in my father and his brothers or it might be just because of my laid-back attitude to discipline and hard work from a young age that I carried to adulthood that I could have fixed but I was depressed and addicted before I figure them out, so it all got hard and complex.

One major milestone among those reflections was on last week when I learnt about ADHD and MDD. I can not describe my feeling after finding out that I was suffering from both of these issues. In hindsight, I can clearly see how MDD aided my procrastination, wasted time and kinda kept me away from reality or How I have had symptoms of ADHD at least from age 15. ADHD explains a lot of what happened to me and the troubles with my behaviour problems. It was kind of liberating for me as I was able to convince myself that it was not me (or at least not me alone) responsible for what happened and ADHD played a huge part in everything. That surely reduced some amount of anxiety that came from constant self-loathing and gave me some room to think about the actual problems. 

Right now, I have far more clarity about everything and can see things more clearly. And I still have a visible career path in front of me where If I manage to put consistent effort towards it at least for a few months I can easily win back my trust and come out from all of this. But that sounds like a fairytale at this point in time. I have lived this stagnated life for around 3 years now and that's a lot amount of time. Even setting aside the regret that comes with wasting that amount of time, the bad conditioning of the mind and the body that has happened during this time and addictions that are still alive are all hard to break free from. Besides, being in my early 20s, I have never experienced what progress or success is like in the real world. I have never been through this cycle to feel or believe that everything will be better in the end. And remember the health and family issues I told you about, they are still there and some new major issues are on my way in the next 2 months. It all really seems insurmountable. Whenever I start working on something, I'm having anxiety attacks about all the problems in front of me and new ones coming on my way. Things are looking really really bad for me if I don't put my act together within the next month.

And If all this was not enough, ADHD and MDD are always going to be there to make the matter worse.