{"id":12260,"date":"2020-02-07T03:15:10","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T09:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/?p=12260"},"modified":"2020-02-07T03:16:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T09:16:00","slug":"speaking-of-a-d-d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/speaking-of-a-d-d\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking Of A.D.D."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have so many things to tell all of you about and yet each time I\u2019ve tried to sit down to write a blog about them I get interrupted \u2013 From my husband being hospitalized unexpectedly last week, to me needing to fly to Washington DC this week for some really important meetings and to give a keynote speech at a special event –\u00a0 my life has been non-stop go go go the last two weeks!\u00a0 So much so that here it is 4:00am and I am just now getting to sit down to write tonight\u2019s blog post\u2026yikes!!!\u00a0 Actually double yikes if you take into account that I\u2019m so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open and the fact that my A.D.D. meds wore off hours ago!\u00a0 The chances of me being able to write a coherent blog post tonight are slightly less than\u2026wait, what am I trying to calculate again?? Does anyone else think a bowl of fruit sounds really good right now??<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About my A.D.D \u2013 when I was speaking at the event this week here in D.C. one of the people in the audience came up to talk to me after my talk to thank me for my being open about having A.D.D. because this person said they were struggling with A.D.D. themselves. They said they had noticed that I had called having A.D.D. one of my God given gifts and they wanted to understand what I meant by that.\u00a0 I let them know that I believe God had us born with weaknesses because God knew as we worked to overcome those weaknesses they are the thing that will make us stronger – that is the gift – the opportunity to become stronger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was in my late 20\u2019s when a trusted friend first suggested that\nI might have A.D.D. and that I might want to talk to a psychiatrist to see if\nmeds would benefit me. My first reaction was to feel offended that my friend\nthought something was wrong with me. But as I thought about that friend\u2019s\ncomments over the next week I realized that I genuinely did have trouble\nkeeping focused and that my mind was always racing a million miles a minute and\nit was frustrating to not be able to stay engaged in a conversation with\nsomeone without my mind being somewhere else. I could see that my lack of\nengaged attention was causing the people in my life to think I didn\u2019t care\nabout them \u2013 which wasn\u2019t at all the case in how I felt \u2013 I just literally\ncouldn\u2019t stay focused on the conversation, even when I was trying with all my\nmight to do so. It ended up making me feel negatively about myself and it\ncaused me to beat myself up thinking I was messed up because I couldn\u2019t pay\nattention. I would feel depressed and discouraged that I couldn\u2019t fix it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I thought about all that and my friends advice to me I\ndecided that I was going to push away all my fears of being seen as \u201cbroken\u201d or\n\u201cmessed up\u201d and I was going to go see a therapist to see if there was something\nthat could be done. I was scared to go and I was scared of what other people\nwould think of me, but I decided to do it anyway \u2013 I wanted to improve and get\nbetter and I clearly couldn\u2019t do it on my own. So I went. And sure enough I was\ndiagnosed with A.D.D and given meds to take. Those meds changed my life. They\nallowed my mind to focus and stay engaged. It allowed me to listen to people\nwith full focus which let others know that I cared about them and was\ninterested in what they had to say. The difference for me was night and day and\nit changed my life completely for the better. I have never once regretted the\ndecision I made to get help that day. Not once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now I try and share it with other people whenever I can see that they are struggling with their own mental issues to overcome but who are hesitating to seek out help for fear of what others will think or for fear of being seen as weak or broken. I want them to know that they don\u2019t need to be embarrassed or worried because getting help makes them STRONG, not weak! It makes them AWESOME for being smart enough to get whatever help they need to change their own life for the better. It makes them COURAGEOUS for facing their weaknesses head on. My hope in sharing all this is that even one person reading it who is struggling with their own issue will find the courage to do something about it and seek out the help they need to improve their life. It will be worth it…take it from me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

~Amy Rees Anderson (author of the book \u201cWhat Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel in Business & Life<\/a>\u201d ) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have so many things to tell all of you about and yet each time I\u2019ve tried to sit down to write a blog about them I get interrupted \u2013 From my husband being hospitalized unexpectedly last week, to me needing to fly to Washington DC this week for some really important meetings and to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[214,395,174,4438,4433,46,825,935,4436,970,91,4446,1713,515,1301,163,4432,4441,778,4434,4428,93,33,22844,144,378,4431,4439,2398,4427,1244,4444,4445,791,4430,112,4435,777,4429,4437,3388,4440,19932,17274,4443,4442],"class_list":["post-12260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-a-d-d","tag-amy-rees-anderson","tag-anxiety","tag-applaud","tag-attention-deficit","tag-attitude","tag-body","tag-brave","tag-broken","tag-challenge","tag-change","tag-compulsion","tag-concern","tag-control","tag-counselor","tag-courage","tag-courageb","tag-couragous","tag-depression","tag-disorder","tag-eating-disorder","tag-fear","tag-friend","tag-have-courage-and-be-strong","tag-help","tag-improve","tag-medication","tag-mental-disorder","tag-mental-health","tag-mental-issues","tag-mood","tag-o-c-d","tag-over-achiever","tag-overcome","tag-pyschiatrist","tag-self-improvement","tag-stigma","tag-strength","tag-therapist","tag-weak","tag-weakness","tag-weaknesses","tag-what-awesome-looks-like","tag-what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stronger","tag-what-others-think","tag-what-people-think"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12261,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions\/12261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}