5 Things Normal People Don’t Do
By: K Cornerstone
Tags: Womens Health, Adhd In Adults, Adhd

Even though I’ve titled this “normal people” I’m not really sure what a normal person is, or if there even is anyone who could be classified as normal, but here we go anyway….

Normal people don’t have a dialogue constantly running in their heads. They also are not constantly talking out loud to themselves or singing out loud especially in quiet places like a car trip. — I didn’t realize that I did this or that it was an ADHD thing until my husband pointed out how much noise our son makes. He’s actually ADHD diagnosed whereas I’ve avoided being formerly diagnosed because I’m not sure what that would do for me. He got diagnosed because we had him tested for dyslexia and the ADHD testing came along for free. We realized that we were both telling our son quite often to be quiet. Stop making weird noises. In the car if he’s alone with you, he’ll talk and talk and talk and half the time I’m really not sure what he’s talking about but he just doesn’t stop. And then one day I was self reflecting a bit on a drive and realized the whole time my daughter was in the car with me on the way to drop her off I was either talking to her or singing random songs- sometimes songs from Hamilton or just my own lyrics set to popular tunes….about the current weather, the annoying drivers, whatever happened to be going on at the time. Ooops. Normal people don’t purposefully take a bag of colored pens to meetings because they know they will get bored and need to colorfully adorn the pages of whatever paper happens to be in front of them. They also don’t make sure that there is some sort of surface to doodle on. Normal people can take notes with just the important information. They don’t have flowers and animals and zentangle type things depicted all over their papers amongst the actual notes. They also apparently don’t feel the need to color in all of the empty spaces in the titles of note pages. I was taking a theology class for work the other day and was honestly appalled that one of the other women hadn’t even taken notes for class that day. My paper on the other hand looked like a clown threw up. Without at least one writing utensil though, there’s a 75% chance I’m really not going to pay attention to whatever you’re trying to get me to learn or understand. Normal people don’t have 100 different projects half completed lying around. A hallmark of ADHD is not having any follow through. We keep an interest in something until it takes too long to do, we get stuck, or something more interesting comes along that sounds more fun. Now we do also have the ability to hyper focus so we can actually keep a hobby, but as I’ve found for myself, that hobby has many mini hobby projects very few of which I’ve completed with 100% accuracy. I used to really enjoy sewing, but the last little bit of the projects I would work on would drive me crazy. If that dress I made for a child was just a bit too long, I would get too annoyed and never hem it. The quilt pieces lined up really well for about 75% of the quilt and then I started getting annoyed at how long it took to finish it well. I actually have completed a handful of quilts (1 twin size, 1 crib size, 1 full size, and 1 throw size if you’re interested) in the past few years once I realized my ADHD quirks. However, they all took an insane amount of concentration to complete well. In the cast of the one that was supposed to be for my bed, I got so sick and tired of piecing it together, it ended up being full sized instead of queen sized. Normal people are able to stay focused on a conversation. It’s not that we think the people we are speaking with are boring, on the contrary, we do enjoy learning about people, it’s that there’s so much going on around in the same room. There’s the internal dialogue in our heads from point one. If we are in a new place talking to them, we have got way too many things to look at while we are talking. I love to sell on eBay and so I often take note of interesting items to check on eBay later. It helps me to see what other people like and if those things would sell on eBay, I’m not a thief, promise. If they have an interesting hairdo or outfit, sometimes that distracts me. I’ll wonder where they got their clothing and if I could pull off the same look. How much did they spend on it? How much did I spend on my outfit? Probably not much as most of my clothes are thrifted, I wonder if they like to go thrifting, would they be surprised to know that I didn’t spend more than a few dollars for each item I’m wearing today? When they say something I’d like to comment on, but I’ve learned that people hate to be interrupted and don’t get ADHD minds where we will totally forget what in the world we were going to say in response unless we say it right now, I then spend time repeating a little mantra in my head to remind me of what I was going to say and then only half listening to the rest of what they’re saying. I used to be envious of this one woman I know who is such a good listener and I’ve tried to be a bit more like her, but I felt so awful about myself when I did that, so I gave up. Normal people have way better follow through skills. Did you see what I did there? I started talking about this point earlier, but rabbit trailed somewhere else and needed to come back to it. Going off on tangents is another thing ADHD minds do with amazing speed. In our heads it makes perfect sense how we got there, to everyone else, maybe not so much. Finishing this, coming up with five points is way harder than you think for someone with ADHD. We always have a million ideas swimming around, but it’s hard to pick which ideas are the best to put down. Without a looming deadline, we also have a hard time completing papers, paying bills, turning in work, etc. Give me a deadline and I will do it….right before it’s due. I’ll pay the bills on the due date. If you don’t give ADHD minds a deadline we will most likely never get it done. The adrenaline it requires to get something done at the last minute makes the boring task seem just interesting enough to actually complete it. I’m actually pretty pleased with myself that I finished this article in only two writing sessions.

A normal person, if they even read this far, is probably rolling their eyes at me right about now. For those of you like me, you can finish things, too, just take all the shiny objects out of the room first.