- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
As an AuDHD person, the college dropout story is relatable to me, except for the YouTube career success. I grew up in a madhouse during my traumatic childhood, and going to college free from my backwards, overprotective, overly strict parents was essentially like falling off a cliff. I was already burnt out during my last year of high school, and I was too excited with the freedom and ended up wasting time playing video games and skipping classes regularily because I had little energy to function as an adult. I still struggle with burnout to this day due to being an overworked IT contractor for years.
I read that comment when you posted it! Doing my best to learn I guess, even before I accepted this might be a thing lol
I have no idea if stimulants will work well for me. I’ve definitely used caffeine to self medicate most of my adult life so maybe? But either way I know it won’t be a magic bullet, just one thing to try if a doc recommends it I guess. I honestly don’t know what not being able to mask would look like for me, but I work from home on a computer and have very accepting friends so hopefully the adjustment wouldn’t be too rough? I try not to downplay (or play up) my own struggles but all things considered I’ve lived a pretty chill life I feel like. Lots of self-repression and some serious struggles socially at times but you know, not outright horribly traumatic? So maybe that helps idk.
Thanks for your prolific support and advice all over the site! I just got new insurance so I’ll have to see what it will cost to see someone this summer. I hate to say it but I want to see if I can get the ball rolling on this diagnosis stuff without telling them I’m trans… (is that a horrible idea?) Let’s just say I don’t want to be on that list given the way the US is going lately… My gender is none of their business and even barring government action, telling your doctor you’re trans unfortunately seems like an excellent way to get subpar medical care. Or maybe I’m needlessly paranoid but I’d rather be paranoid and wrong than the target of fascist repression or plain ol discrimination.
To be clear, my childhood wasn’t severely traumatic, but stressful enough that I had forgotten most of my childhood.
I have been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD at an early age. Of course, the doctors said at that time that I would never be able to experience any emotion besides anger and sadness for my entire life, so I would be careful with the information you give to them and try to find a good psychologist/psychiatrist. I have had to jump between multiple as often they were on a grift to get me on a particular med that didn’t work for me. This was during the med change after dropping out of college, but I had other doctors before that wanted to use me for profit when I was younger. Others were just backwards and refused to update themselves in their profession.
I have been on the max dose on methylphenidate since middle school. It does work for me, but I have taken it so long that I believe the effects are not enough to overcome my severe burnout. When I quit my job, I am considering going off meds for a week and sleeping all day. When I have had breaks with my stimulant, its effects have improved again for another period of time until the burnout overcomes it again.
I went on antidepressants for situational depression after dropping out of school, and then I continued going through a med change and ended up back on a stimulant again, but this time Vyvanse. It’s effects were the same on me, but I believe I felt a bit weird (tingly in the brain?), so I think the side effects were worse on me. I went back to methylphenidate because I was poor and it was cheaper at the time. Going back on stimulants after around a year made me feel much more functional again.
I have also been drinking a lot of caffeine on top of my stimulants, sometimes even 600-1000 mg, because I have been struggling to do work. Once I drink around 900+ mg, I get a terrible headache and stomach ache, so I try to avoid that range.
Rant incoming
I haven’t been able to take a vacation for so long, and I feel a 6 month vacation would be necessary for me to recover.
A lot of the people in my job are quitting and moving to other positions as my workplace, a $200 billion indie company, refuses to invest in more IT people even though they spent millions on an IT audit only to find out we are more than 50% understaffed, meaning we would have to over double our IT team, including contractors. My coworkers say one day we are going to be all just contractors.
Meanwhile we have problematic higher-level IT teams that treat production as the testing environment and constantly break things. They’re a bunch of dinosaurs that were grandfathered in to higher positions and have no experience outside of the company, thus they are a bunch of egotistical morons that refuse to hold themselves accountable or admit they made a mistake, turning every email that could have been 5 minutes to resolve a user’s issue to an hour long argument. They also make decisions such as “let’s delete Visual C++ off of everyone’s computers because it is a sEcUrItY vUlErNaBiLiTy!1!”, and then everyone’s softphone stops working, which I called way beforehand and no one listened to me.
A script was requested to disable settings on a network adapter that have been causing disconnects and reconnects in our environment, and an old contractor in our team that was hired to be in the networking team with no experience mentioned they attempted a small script. I then added to the email that I already have an improved version already in production to run on new machines, and they congratulated the networking guy, circlejerked each other exclaiming how well they are communicating, meanwhile completely ignoring me.
These glorious geniuses also use ChatGPT (prohibited at our workplace) to create scripts without any modification to match our environment needs. We have also had scripts from the higher level IT teams that are completely broken and that have been running in our environment. I didn’t even know PowerShell starting my job, but I managed to quickly learn to write scripts at a professional level and had to fix all of these broken scripts made by our lovely Newtons who had a frozen apple fall on each of their heads.
The company also uses the worst software ever because they buy everything a shell company tries to sell them. Meanwhile they are harping on us regarding tickets and making every project a number one priority, so honestly what’s a priority at this point.
I honestly feel the work I have to do would be very difficult for even neurotypicals, and it’s amplified due my neurodivergence and ongoing, worsening burnout. I’m going back to college next year in a last ditch effort to turn my life around.
I have been going very late to my job, and I use the restroom a lot out of anxiety and stress. It’s a 35+ min drive to work and a 45+ min back home, and it absolutely sucks. I think I have managed to keep my job as I have made a lot of PowerShell scripts that have helped the company immensely, which I even received a large pay raise and multiple gift cards for. I feel as I have always relied on my ability to do work at a perfectionist quality to make up for my shortcomings.
I went on Jornay during my current job, which seemed to help me get to work on time a little easier, but I had to go back to my old meds because it was very expensive, and it would really suck when I forgot to take it the previous night.