introspection

I have had what you might call a quiet period with this blogging lark.
 

A lot of the motivation and inventiveness necessary to write something entertaining - or even just to start to write - comes from the amount of mental energy I have, which is of course linked to the physical difficulties I have (MS), but I think there are other reasons for my hopeless output levels too.

I'm now fairly convinced that I have the ADD version of ADHD. And, after having a suspicion, I took an online test for Autism and came out as a high probability (scored 149) of being on the spectrum with that.

What piqued my curiosity was that I had started recognising what people on the Mastodon social network were posting - under the #ActuallyAutistic and #ADHD hashtags - and seeing traits that I could identify with myself. 

I hadn't given it a moments thought beforehand, because I knew next to nothing about it. In fact, I don't still don't know an awful lot about it.

As far as I knew, I was just the way I was, and it hadn't crossed my mind before that I had any other specified and recognised condition. And to be honest, I thought I already had quite enough conditions anyway.

By the way, forgive me if my terminology is not quite right. The realisation and self-examination that led me to investigate these possibilities in the last few months only took me fifty (ahem) years to get, and it has only really been my recent enforced resting from the busy-busy of my normal life that left enough space for any introspection. And of course the concentration I need to delve into it all a bit deeper and read up more about it all, so that I fully understand how these things are acceptably described and dealt with, is hampered by that tendency to have my focus of attention hop about somewhat chaotically.

Is it time for a calming break?

Awww...

Anyway, right now I am trying to concentrate on writing this, but I know it may only get as far as the drafts stage before I go off to look for a word in the thesaurus, get sidetracked by clicking the RSS reader tab, read an interesting science or space news story for five minutes (more like two minutes), see a nice photograph on another post having clicked away from the story half-way through reading it, click it to look for some more information, suddenly wonder what I might do for lunch, open a social media tab, think about where I'll take the dog for our walk later, wonder why I've got the thesaurus tab open and click to close it, completely forget what I was doing here until I stumble on the post draft again another time, wonder what I was driving at and if I can pick it up again, or perhaps I don't feel it's worth the bother and will delete it.
 

If I haven't already deleted it, right now was probably three days ago. 
If you're reading this, yay me! I finished a whole post!

Ideas and half-finished blog posts (or half-started, depending on your viewpoint on life) litter my notebook folders, which are themselves many and have labels like 'ideas', 'drafts', 'writing', 'mataroa blog posts', 'current drafts', etc.,etc., in a number of continuing efforts to organise myself that only gets more and more fragmented as I go.

The thing now is, having taken this first step, is what should I do next?

I have lived perfectly well, for quite a significant number of years, and managed fine with it. Yes, there are some behaviours which I can explain and give a reason for now (see Mrs S, I'm not just being awkward when I say I don't want to go anywhere or do things with 'friends', I'd much rather us be here by ourselves where I know everything is fine), and some things about my life before, for which maybe the reasons for them happening in the way they did is clearer to me now.

For example, I'm pretty convinced now that for a lot of my life I used alcohol as a means of masking. And when I say 'a lot of my life', I mean from about 16 to 43.

But you can't go back and relive those things, do them better (or at least different), so the question is whether there is any advantage to me in putting myself through any more official diagnosis process? In what ways could I be made 'better'? I quite like me as I am (apart from the complete inability to finish anything the first time, but that, as they use to say about a certain PM, is 'priced in' by now).

These are things that I may ponder. Or possibly I started pondering it but now I'm off doing something in the garden and have forgotten all about it again.