To Be Honest

Inattentive ADHD

For me, ADHD feels like fog, sleepy white fog. It's always there and sometimes it clears up and allows me to watch a movie, sometimes it goes opaque right as a teacher is explaining to me how to do a homework problem. This fog makes it easy to retreat into my own brain and think about whatever I want, but it's difficult to focus on the outside world for too long. I often fail to understand, see, or listen to what is important to me. I will myself to see past it when it is urgent, but it requires so much effort it's impossible to do for too long and it takes me much longer to understand my surroundings.

Focus, memory, and organization.

I spend a lot of time in my head.
Usually when I'm talking to someone, it feels forced and I only really pay 50% attention to them at best, I listen for a bit and scatter. I also make really poor eye contact or too much eye contact that I lose focus. It takes me a bit to register what they are saying and figure out the best response.
I miss body language queues (rarely), mostly the micro-expressions, simply because I'm struggling to really pay attention.
I'll usually always have a self-critical monolog running in my mind, often causing me to lose focus on whatever it is I'm doing. If I'm talking to someone I often just stop talking as I forget what I was saying, usually due to the other voice in my head grabbing too much control.
I often lose things by putting them down somewhere and just not registering I did so and/or remembering where I put them.
I make a lot of careless mistakes at work, particularly when repetitive tasks are involved. Even when I actively try to make it not happen, it just keeps happening.
I am a very erratic worker. I'll sometimes do a big chunk of work, almost always on something I'm truly interested in.

More often than not, I'll procrastinate and put things off until the pressure of consequences builds up so that I do it. Usually when I have only just enough time left. Every now and then I underestimate the time required....

I'm very prone to getting suddenly interested in a topic/project and have an initial flurry of activity and then the interest can rapidly fall. Usually when I have to do a bunch of procedural stuff to actually make it happen. I've rarely finished time consuming, big, projects.

I have a strong tendency to take the immediate reward over a future reward. This makes choosing to do things that improve my life hard to do.

I have poor memory for names, places and discrete factual information.
I have a great memory for concepts and abstract ideas.
I'm a bit sluggish at switching tasks, so moving my attention from one task to another. I will often lose bits of information when I do so and when I switch back I have to figure out some stuff again.

When I get excited, I start getting impulsive tendencies of talking over people and babbling my ideas in a semi-coherent fashion.

It's not easy to arrange my thoughts into a logical order and explain my ideas and reasoning to people in oral communication. I often forget parts, explain something, then realize it doesn't make sense without explaining something else and it is a bit of a mess. At that point I just want to give up and wished they could just read my mind or see what I'm talking about. With periods of sudden loss of words, usually because of those pesky other thoughts.

My ability to hold numbers in my head and do simple math is a bit terrible. I totally understand the concepts and can do complex written math (not complex like a mathematics expert lol). I just can't do much in my head, that many other people seem to be almost fluent in. I'm 20 and still use my fingers to count sometimes lol.

I get a bit frustrated sometimes, particularly towards the evening and/or when people interrupt me when I'm pleasantly monologging away in my head.

There are more things. It is also all wrapped around being on the extreme end of introversion and almost always having a streaming monologue going in my head that often interferes with what I'm doing.

I'm worried I'll fail uni partly due to the above symptoms and partly due to being rather depressed at the time (due to consequences of my symptoms).

I had a constantly recurring thought that I was different but not sure why, for most of my life.
When it comes to introversion, I don't want to be introverted all the time. I can't not be without the help of anxiety & depression meds. I hope this is part of my compensatory personality to hide/mask ADHD symptoms and reduce socially derived anxiety. I remember as a child I was more outgoing and extroverted, so that gives me hope that I can attain that without these meds and be happy & carefree like I once was.

OH, also there is butt loads of emotional turmoil, so much that I sort of became numb to it. When I think back now, I realize that most of my behaviors were thoroughly emotionally driven. What I was missing, and still am to a lesser degree, was emotional control. I longed for it even.

edit 2: OH OH I also am really disorganized and have trouble organizing things in a logical way, I'm constantly trying to find better solutions and often stress about not finding the right one and feel as though life is moving too fast, my thoughts are moving too fast for me to grasp them and figure out what the best solution is. This applies to both my inner life and outer life. So I tend to have a messy space for the week and then get frustrated and reorganize, clean up, only for it to happen again. My memory is also similarly messy. It's particularly frustrating when you know you aren't and can't do anything about it..

Mental Fog or valves are great metaphors for it. It's like I've got a valve in my head for every topic/activity I can do. When I try to focus on something or go to do it, I've got to turn the crank on those valves to get the juices flowing. This can be things like pulling up memories, physical abilities, or ways of thinking.

When I go to crank those valves, if it's interesting or fun and I'm making progress right away, it's easy to keep going. However, if I've got a valve already going for something fun, it's really easy to switch over to that instead. Even if I don't have anything running already, I will inevitably funnel to something more immediately rewarding.

When I panic from procrastination, it gives me that drive to crank away until the valve is fully open, and then usually whatever I am doing is all engrossing until I'm done.

When I'm busy doing something, I've spent all this effort getting just the right calves going, and when someone interrupts me, it can be frustrating sometimes because all those valves just close almost immediately and I have to crank at other valves to deal with the interruptions.

When I need to do something immediately and the valves aren't cranked, I try to get what I need from my brain, but I just can't crank fast enough and I don't want to anyway, so I just do...anything. When I try to think about what I "should'' do, I get nowhere and it just fuzzes out. Because of this, I've learned to hesitate over long in any situations that allow it so I have time to crank those valves.