Shutting this blog

It's the first step in terms of dwelling less about my ADHD

Last month, I wrote this, that knowing that you have ADHD possibly makes things worse (did I follow Betteridge’s Law in the way I named it?):

Having got that idea, thought about it, and written it, now I “cannot unsee it”. I cannot unsee the fact that the more I think about ADHD, the worse things get.

Yes, the initial diagnosis was great, in that it helped me understand all the decisions and choices I had made in life since then. But, as I had explained in the above blogpost, over a period of time I found that the knowledge that I had ADHD meant that I was “doing fewer things”.

I would prevent myself from doing things because “I will never succeed “ / “this is not for me” / “i have failed at this before”. And that started limiting me.

And it still happens - like the trigger to write this post now, in the middle of my work day, is a thought that occurred to me just now that “today is a high ADHD day”, in response to why I’m struggling to focus.

Yes, sometimes it’s good for me to take a break on a day when I’m unable to focus. In aggregate, however, that means I do less, and give myself fewer chances to do things. So it’s not an ideal thought.

So I want to think less about ADHD. Yes, the awareness will remain, and it will help me deal with life better. However, I don’t want to make my entire life about it. And the first step towards that will be to stop writing this blog.

Does that mean I’ll stop writing about ADHD altogether? Absolutely not, since I still have my “main” personal blog which I’ve been writing for over twenty years, in various avatars.

However, it will help in terms of not dwelling that much about ADHD.

This is the second of two symbolic things I’ve done in the last one week in terms of my ADHD. Like I had written earlier, I have not taken the pills (Inspiral, a form of Methylphenidate. In the US it is called Ritalin) for nearly two years now. Funnily enough, I made the decision to stop taking the pills a week after I had gone to my psychiatrist and bought a fresh batch of the pills.

Thus far, I had not taken the pills. I had stashed them away, “just in case they might come useful some day when I’m unable to focus”.

Last Friday was one such day, when I was unable to focus. So I decided to pop a pill. I popped my stash (yes, I’ve been coding today), only to find that the pills had expired (in May of this year). I threw the whole lot into the trash - maybe I might have made some money selling it to some junkie, but the transaction cost of that is so high that net-net it would’ve made me zero money.

Oh, have I told you that I have written a book on transaction costs ? That came out in 2017.

Thanks a lot for all your support. This substack will remain here, and you can continue to mail me at adhdandco AT substack DOT com. I’ll not be writing here further, though!

Cheers!