People say I have ADD, but they don't understand- oh, look! A chicken!

Well, I have fallen down on the job slightly, not having posted in 4 or 5 days. Tisk tisk.

I suppose I have the fairly reasonable excuse of being in a show at the moment which is sucking up a large portion of my time. 13 hours of rehearsal (not to mention outside character work) since my last posting...yeah, that's pretty reasonable excuse.

But I've also just been feeling uninspired, rather 'blah'. I think it's mainly a combination of being tired from rehearsals, being disoriented from my unpredictable schedule and a low level anxiety about the show (we're opening in a little over a week - eep!)

Related to all of this is my increasing awareness how much of an impact my ADD has on my everyday life. And goddamn is it frustrating. To give you the background, I was diagnosed with ADD fairly late in life - when I was a sophomore in high school. By that point, it had worked domino-like on my life and created an indestinguishable tangle of related problems. I will resist the temptation to go down the cliche path of the high school sob story, and simply say that shit was fucked up.

Back to the present. The real world has been tough. College was great - it had it's rough points, but I pulled through and even graduated with high honors. And really, it was the perfect setting for me, given the ADD. I was in a place where life was structured, but varied and engaging, where there were lots of people and a limited number of distractions (I was in Ohio, for christsakes.) And every day responsibilities were minimal - I was cooked for, the space I was responsible for was small and easy to keep clean and I didn't have to deal with bills and the like.

Anyway, to really get back to the present - I have begun to realized just how much time I spend jumping from one thing to another, almost never thinking exclusively about one thing. And it sucks. Part of my problems in the last year and a half have certainly been your run of the mill post-graduation identity crisis (do I really want to be an actor??) but a lot of it has also been that I feel almost incapable of juggling all of the things that I need to.

I know that I should find a doctor post-haste and get back on medication, especially since I'm lucky enough to be insured on my father's plan. I've had a year and half to do this and am going to lose the insurance in 3 months. I've made essentially no real progress on this. Which is the horrible thing about ADD - getting your shit together enough to get help can be so incredibly hard. Especially since doing all of this has become such a dreaded thing for me that I've gone into code red Avoidance Mode.

To my credit, I work every day to be aware of when I'm distracted and I try my best to work with it. I write lists, I try to be aware of situations that easily lead to wasting massive amounts of time...(like reading blogs)...I've asked C to help me (which she's been amazing about.) But I am still often left with such a sense of frustration and shame at my inability to accomplish the things that, given my abilities and intelligence, should be easy.

Of course, feeling down on oneself never helps to boost productivity or improve focus, so I try like hell to stay positive and praise myself for everything I do get done. But I just haven't been as good at it the past few days. My inner cheerleader is pooped and cranky. And thus, the blah.