I spent much of yesterday morning in Weston Super Mare with dear friends, enjoying a stonking – apart from the insipid sausages – full English breakfast. It’s always good to get together to eat, drink (coffee) and be merry, as it was in a summery seaside resort. Summery in November, I ask you. We don’t really try to put the world to rights because there is just too much going on in our worlds. You might find it hard to believe but I don’t actually like to talk about myself in company, where I tend to deflect and change the subject. This, I accept, is pretty rich for someone who constantly writes about myself but that, as Bruce Hornsby once said, is just the way it is, some things will never change. But this time, I kind of did, as we got onto the subject of my long-awaited ADHD assessment, which is little more than two months away.
I’m afraid I have had to abandon my holier-than-thou principle of never spending money in the parasitic world of private medical care, simply because the waiting list for an NHS assessment is between 3.5 and 4 years. That after spending 18 months trying to get on the waiting list. A friend who works for the NHS tells me that the latest waiting times are up to – and I am not making this up – six years. I simply cannot afford, for the sake of my mental health, to wait that long.
I’m very open about my mental health and my ADHD referral because a) I’ve nothing to lose by telling the world (well, my loyal reader) and b) it might help someone else, but God knows how. I need to know if there is a reason why life has been so difficult. Anyway, my friend said, “You can’t keep still, can you?” in a very nice way. It didn’t bother her at all, which is great because it wasn’t always that way. They have always seen the symptoms.
Brought up by my lone parent mother, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents (yes, this is right) and I drove my grandfather absolutely mad. Almost every time I went to their house, which during primary school time, was six days a week when my mum went to work, grandad would spend a considerable amount of time telling me to “stop fidgeting” and asking whether I could “sit still – please!” and, suffice to say, I couldn’t. Yesterday, with friends out for breakfast, I was reminded, in a very friendly, understanding way that I was constantly fidgeting and tapping my foot. And I was. In between typing these words, I am fidgeting, like I have, as my grandma used to say “ants in my pants”. There is not a single thing I can do about it. When my dad came over to visit from Canada, it quite understandably, drove him mad, too. After all, there was nothing wrong with me: I was just a fidget and I should stop fidgeting.
I wake up in the night and I’m fidgeting again and my brain is constantly ticking over, drifting from subject to subject until I get up and, on a particularly bad day, I’m knackered all day afterwards. It was like this at school, at work and even today nothing has changed. It’s like a motor in my mind and in my body. And I just want to find out what, if anything, it is. Actually, I know what it is. I just want someone qualified to confirm it.
Anyway, I must leave it here. I have to start making shapes with my feet and they must be equal in terms of left and right and if I move my left foot four times, I must move my right foot four times. Otherwise, things would not work properly. Something similar happens when I am stroking my stubble or grinding my teeth. It’s not normal, is it? But who’s normal? Certainly not me. How about you?
