I have never, in my life, encountered something that I was unable to conquer.

Ok, actually, I am still unable to conquer the act of knitting or crochet, but I haven’t quite given up on either. I’m just delaying the final report there…

But really, I have always been one of those people that looked around and said, “I think I’d like to do _______.” A year later, I have become the world’s foremost expert on _______, and moved on to become the world’s foremost expert on something else – usually leaving death, destruction and chaos in my wake.

Because when I’m done, I’m done. It’s actually not possible for me to pick it up again.

Most people exist in a comfort zone, and my methods are madness to them. Why would she expend this much time, effort and energy to ultimately walk away from it? I could go way, way into this, but the short version is that my brain – as a person with ADHD – requires constant stimulation.

Do you have any idea what constant stimulation means? It means that each morning, as I’m brushing my teeth, I am trying to come up with creative and exciting ways to brush my teeth. My brain is pushed into overdrive as I am thinking about the tedium of making a pot of coffee – will it be better {read: more stimulating} if I add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the coffee grounds, or will that simply result in a broken coffee pot?

The trip home from work is made into an adventure as I purposely lose myself in the worst neighborhoods in the city, causing my husband to have panic attacks.

“You’re where?” he asks.

“Sixth and Prospect.”

“What the hell, Sara?!? You work in Lees Summit, which is south of here, for crying out loud. How did you end up 7 miles north of here on your way home from work?!?”

“I was trying to figure out a new way home.”

“WHY? Why do you need a new way home? We live a block off a major highway, and you work a block off a major highway. GET ON THE DAMNED HIGHWAY AND COME HOME.”

He’s much more understanding, now, about the way my brain processes things. He has a special guide {he Googles “adult ADHD” way more than he’d like to admit…}. Recently, I made a comment about losing my mind. He said, “Don’t worry, honey, eventually you come to terms with – well, you – and then you resign yourself to the fact that you’re just never going to understand what the hell is going on inside your brain.”

There are good sides and bad sides to this. The good side begins with, once you have me, you have me. If I have committed myself to something, I have committed myself completely. There is no room for anything else.

The bad side to this is that when I am finished, I am completely finished. There is no picking it back up – it is agonizingly painful for me to remain in a task that no longer stimulates my brain. We’re not talking about, “I’m bored now;” we’re talking about, “I would rather fight a team of bloodthirsty mercenaries than decorate another cupcake.”

And it sounds like an exaggeration, but that’s actually an accurate assessment.

Two years in therapy taught me how to pick up the pieces when the stimulation is gone – otherwise known as “following through on your commitments.” Therapy taught me how to remove myself from the situation without leaving death, destruction and chaos in my wake. And most importantly, it forced me to recognize the situations to stay away from completely – the things that would always, no matter how hard I tried to affect them, end in disaster for me and the people around me.

Today I find myself in another one of those situations.

I am trying not to flog myself. I am trying not to scream and rail at the ridiculousness of the reality that I put myself here, even though I knew better. No one pushed or pulled – it was all me.

And I am trying to figure out how to remove myself without leaving death, destruction and chaos in my wake. I am trying to figure out the moral path that benefits the most people. I am trying so hard to rise above my frustration and ignore the need for stimulation – trying to put myself on autopilot in order to make this problem work to someone’s advantage.

And mostly I’m tired. I’m exhausted and I don’t feel like getting out of bed.