It appears that this site is more ADHD than ADD. Weirdo that I am, :P I have ADD - Inattentive type.

I'd like to hear from other Inattentives. What are your biggest challenges? How do you cope? How much does ADD affect your life?

Hi Overload--
predominately inattentive type, dx'ed almost a year ago after 45 years of...well you kow the drill.
biggest challanges mainly are finishing what i start. unless im REALLY motavited or my interest is captured like in a steel trap i tend to get bored & leave it (whatever IT may be) aside for something else that may pop into my head.
garage is quickly filling with stuff ill get to "later"
's funny cause i read a lot but i really have to be sucked in to finish therefore tech manuals, medical or drug info (ADD related), even long posts here rarely get finished.
i tend to zone out in conversations that dont interest me, which led to my father-in-law question his daughter about some of my habits (was pre-dx then & had no idea what the trouble was)
coping in the workplace usually was thru finding jobs that didnt keep me in one place too long--i.e. traffic mgr & loading dock foreman, vet. tech, musician, wrecker driver & now janitor at a hospital.
these were the jobs i stayed at for at least 2 years, & 2 of them overlap.
im subject to fits of anger, lo-o-ong bouts of depression sometimes brought on by what i view as 45 yrs of wasted opportunitys, sometimes brought on by nothing at all. impaitence & a "why bother, someone else will do it & probably better than me".
this i wonder is why some of the inattentive types maybe arnt heard from often? i know that logic paralyzes me sometimes. didnt mean for this to get so wordy, but i hope this is what you were looking for?

Thanks for your response, broK. Not wordy at all, I appreciate all of it. You sound a lot like me. I would often start things and not finish them until I finally grew so frustrated with it all that I just stopped starting anything.

I didn't want to start something, yet again, knowing I wouldn't finish it. So I just quit. I still do this with books sometimes, though. If it doesn't captivate me, it gets tossed aside for another one that beckons. I'll often have several books going at once. lol

While I don't really drift during conversations, I somehow miss parts of what's being said? Weird. I'm listening but I'm still missing it? Meetings are the WORST! I will literally strain to stay focused on the topic at hand but ultimately drift off to neverland. It feels like I'm trying to hold a float underwater.

Easily bored. There are times when NOTHING excites me. I also deal with depression, which is sometimes brought on by taking stock of my life. Why can't I go to school? Why can't I get motivated? Why can't I focus like normal people? Why am I such a scatterbrain? Arrgh. Sometimes I just wake up depressed for no reason at all.

I am directionally challenged. I can almost get lost taking out the trash!

Ironically, what plagues me most right now is working in an unstructured environment. I tend to be very organized at work and am very confused and frustrated when others are not. I need procedures and processes in order to function properly. I can run from the building screaming bloody murder when things lack structure and organization. It is excruciatingly overwhelming.

oh man, meetings :eek:
i do all i can to avoid them & if i have to go i do all i can to try not to have to speak. sometimes what helps me focus at meetings is making notes, also when a lil funny strikes me i try to whisper it (our meetings are usually 20 people at best) if i just sit there eventually the words will fade into a bunch of noise so i have to try to stay active tho on a bad day my brain will either chatter among itself (i call that the comittee) or will begin to feel like im trying to think thru mollasses.
there are people at work who try to convence me i ought to go back to school
i try to make light of it saying im too old or too busy. i tell my wife im too stupid.
mind you, im working with a P-doc on a meds program & am looking for a therapist (other issues) i can afford but thats a little tougher in my town

I too start many projects and never finish, I have done it since childhood and just kinda thought it was normal. GUess not.

I hated logic for the simple reason that you have clearly state the process step by step or i could say the same about programming and even math, I hated to do the process i just sloved the promblem, right now in school is the teacher would gives us a lab in this case configuing rotuers to make a network, i had everything right but i forgot to put a loopbakc address on the network, for the life of me how did I miss a step now the network won't work. Then i'm like how the heck did i miss that.

Say that would be my day to day job i would've figured that out eventully at school or at certain times i'll just miss it. I got this one prof actully i'm gald i got him, the way he apporches the questions gets me more involed with the class and the book stuff, for exmaple we talked about mac and ip addresses for homework reasearch mac and ip spoofing in case you odn't know someone usues your addreses to make other thick it's you and your machine, that helps keep me motivated and shows me how boring things like arp and rarp and mac/ipaddress could be a intresting read.

I know i just bored you but it's working me

I'm AD(no-H)D and find staying on-track with everything difficult - not just from day to day, but second to second.
So things get done rather non-linearly.
I tend to do a zillion things in parallel, gradually chipping away at all of them.
Depression and anxiety were my biggest problems in life.
Both ruined life until I reached 35-40.
I guess the good thing about being taken to the edge by them so often - is that your tolerance threshold becomes enormous - and dealing with whatever life has to throw at you becomes a breeze.
Guess you could say nothing scares me any more - nothing, not even death.
It's like co-habiting with two semi-tamed dragons.
They're always there, just not dangerous.
Some nice things would be suffering less frustration, and having richer, more relaxing, more fruitful, better sustained and less random thought processes.
IOW, a cure for this life-wasting condition.
In case it's not immediately apparent, I LOATHE having ADD.
To me, there is NO GOOD WHATEVER in it.
It's difficult to understand quite how anyone could possibly regard it as an asset.
I know that's likely to get me burnt at the stake by some of the staff here, but there's little gain in lying about the way you feel.
We're all entitled to our POV's ... I just hope it doesn't get me banned.

I am ADD inattenive and have all the usual problems that accompany it. Just ask my wife when she is trying to have a conversation with me. When she starts talking I get about the first 10 seconds of the conversation and then its like listening to Charlie Browns Teacher. What whaa waaa ! Starting and finishing projects can be a nightmare also. Finding the right medication has been a continued problem. I can't tolerate perscription stimulents or antidepressants very well, exercise seems to help, but thats about it . Capt Kylos

I guess the good thing about being taken to the edge by them so often - is that your tolerance threshold becomes enormous - and dealing with whatever life has to throw at you becomes a breeze.
Guess you could say nothing scares me any more - nothing, not even death.
It's like co-habiting with two semi-tamed dragons.
They're always there, just not dangerous.
Some nice things would be suffering less frustration, and having richer, more relaxing, more fruitful, better sustained and less random thought processes.

well said perfect

I have ADHD-Combined type, which leaves me with both the hyperactivity AND the inattention, so I'll be glad to comment on my experiences with the inattentive side. Definitely my thoughts are like Grand Central Station- multiple arrivals and departures at the same time. I have many parallel activities as Heidi-S has commented on. As can be imagined, they are incomplete activities. If I'm trying to vacuum the house, I get sidetracked seeing that a dish needs to be put away, etc. I'll get the vacuuming done, but in a sort of piecemeal fashion after my self-driven interruptions. When I'm lucky, I can hyperfocus and then get one thing done in one stretch. (I can do this at work, thank goodness). But I definitely go through blinks and mini space-outs, and at home, I have lots of unfinished tasks at any given time. When I read books, I have to go back and re-read, and right now I am in the middle of two novels and two non fiction books. So that's four books, none of which are completed. I take books out of the library and sometimes many of them barely were looked at, other times, I completed them, although usually with some degree of skipping around. It's frustrating, because the inattention is inconsistent in that there are indeed times when I can complete tasks quite well, then fumble again. It goes back and forth. I think this is part of what makes non ADHD people think we're just "lazy" because when we do in fact complete tasks, then people think we're able to do so consistently all the time, when in fact we can't necessarily. But that's just it-inconsistency in attention is what the issue is, so yes, sometimes we can do fine, but sometimes not-it's the nature of ADD.

I have determined I have innattentive type.It took me forever to realize what is wrong with me and I still cannot break the innattentativeness.It can become aggrivating to start one thing and end up finishing another thing..sometimes.I have tried reading books..lol started also..I have gotten to the point of why even start anything new. Heidi I can completely understand you!!