What’s your favourite drink to have at the bar? Maybe you and your colleagues like a nice cold mug of lager or a stout after a hard day’s work in the summer sun. Maybe you prefer to unwind with a nice glass of wine and relax by yourself in a quiet section of the venue. Do you drink the same beverage each visit, or do you like a little variety? In my eight years as a part-time bartender in Esquimalt, I’ve had the pleasure of serving many kinds of drinkers.
The beautiful thing about going for a drink is that you can do it any way you want. You can go with or without friends, you can drink whatever you like, in whatever form you like. You might have a margarita during the summer, or a Cosmo around the holidays, or any cocktail at any time of the year you darn well please! That’s the beauty of it; the choice is yours. Wouldn’t it be awful if that wasn’t the case?
What if your drink was chosen for you before you even arrived at the venue? What if it was somehow magically never the drink you wanted that particular day? What if the bartender asks you, “Would you like something else?” and you say, “No, this is great, thank you,” because you were too afraid to speak up for yourself? What if the bartender said, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as an unwanted drink. If you don’t like it, maybe you just aren’t trying hard enough to enjoy it. Maybe you should leave the venue and give up your seat to someone who is more serious and actually appreciates the drinks I make.”
It may be hard to imagine experiencing an outing like this, but for many people, this is far more than just a hypothetical bending of the nightmare elbow, it’s what every moment of every day of our entire lives can look like. For those who suffer with ADHD and anxiety together, our minds, and, by extension, our lives, are like a comically cacophonous cavalcade of capricious chaos, where the captivating clobbers the conventional, and the candid and keen are cluelessly contrived as the callous and careless. To put it dryly, ADHD is a problem with executive functioning in the brain. It can make it very difficult to initiate and prioritize tasks, and stay interested in things long term. There are many myths and misconceptions about ADHD, which we’ll talk about in a moment, however, the second part of this discussion, anxiety, needs no introduction.
When we were children, anxiety was the monster under our bed that never went away no matter how many times our parents assured us we were safe. It is the darkness that always made us tremble, even when the room was illuminated only seconds before. Indeed, it is said that ships at a distance have every man’s wish onboard. It is also true that darkness contains every child’s fears, tucked tightly in its terrorizing tenebrous tentacles.
Now that we’re grown adults, the monsters have had a change of address. They’ve moved from under our beds to inside our heads, and they taunt us in the bright light of day as much as in the dark dead of night. They tell us to hate ourselves; they drive us to drink, smoke, and never leave the house. Not everyone has tasted the bitter and rancid notes of ADHD, but everyone has drunk themselves stupid on anxiety. When you have no choice but to chase one with the other, the result is a glass of putrid plonk that no one in their right mind would sit still for.
Speaking of not sitting still, ADHD can make you feel restless and impulsive. That would be the “hyperactive” part of the name. It can make it hard for you to focus on what’s important, while anxiety tells you that everything is important and you’re not going to succeed so you shouldn’t even try. The attention problems associated with ADHD cause you to miss details that are obvious to other people, while anxiety is constantly reminding you that if you can’t even manage the simple details of life, how are you going to manage life itself? While ADHD can make you wish you would succeed more than anything, anxiety is telling you, “How could you be so careless? Do you even want to succeed? Don’t you want to make everybody proud? Why haven’t you finished your work yet, don’t you know you’re a burden on everyone in your life? If you’re not strong enough to do ‘X’, why should you even be alive?”
Okay, that got a little dark for a second. Maybe your experience with ADHD and anxiety is different than mine, and if so, that’s okay. ADHD can show up differently in boys, or those assigned male at birth, and girls, or those assigned female at birth. ADHD has three distinct subtypes: inattentive, hyperactive/impulsive, or both. Depending on the environment you grew up in, you may have heard things like, “You don’t have ADHD, only boys have that!” or “ADHD isn’t real, it’s just Big Pharma trying to sell drugs to kids.” When you examine your life and you see all the ways you’ve been underperforming and falling behind, it can be hard to listen to people calling into question your everyday hardships, when the drought of pain and shame that pour from them is all too real.
Some people make jokes about ADHD such as, “Hi my name is Tyler, I’m going to Camosun College for… Oh, squirrel!” I chuckle when I hear these jokes, not because I find them funny, but because I wish it were that easy. For me, mild distractibility would be a great goal to strive for, but in my case it’s not, “Oh, squirrel!” it’s, “Oh, I’m 29 years old and haven’t finished high school.” It’s, “Oh, my bank gave me $200 in NSF charges this month because I just had to buy that one expensive thing, and I lacked the motivation to adjust my bill payments to compensate.” It’s, “Oh, I’m lying awake at 1:30 am in terror on a work night because I’m behind on my college classes and no matter what I try, I can’t muster the energy to get ahead.”
If you read this and thought, “Man, what a bunch of whining,” then, ironically, you haven’t been paying attention. Don’t worry, I know the struggle. Life is hard for everyone, after all, and even neurotypical folks, those with a properly functioning mug on their shoulders, have their silent battles that they fight every day. I choose to talk openly about this because the stigma of mental health in general, and ADHD in particular, is still very real despite huge strides made in mental-health acceptance. If you think it’s annoying to hear people complain about ADHD, imagine how annoying it is to have ADHD. It isn’t necessary to judge us for it, I can assure you that we do enough of that by ourselves, inside our own minds.
Many people with ADHD are painfully aware of the negative ways in which it affects their lives. I discovered my ADHD almost completely by accident. One day, while my doctor was treating me for binge-eating disorder (BED), she recommended I try a medication called Vyvanse, which is an ADHD stimulant medication that also works for BED because it suppresses appetite. After taking my first dose in May of 2021, I was in sheer and utter disbelief at the change it produced in my attention, focus, and motivation. If “Red Bull gives you wings” is true, then prescription amphetamine gives you rocket engines.
Nearly every aspect of my life began to see improvement. At my bartending job, where I was sluggish and forgetful before, now I was moving expertly from one task to the next. Where before I found it difficult to finish even shorter shifts, now I blast through my work and finish the day with more than enough energy to do whatever I want when I get home. I can sit in front of my computer and study for at least a couple hours at a time, where before I was lucky to do half an hour. It even made me perform better at playing video games. It was truly a qualitative leap in my quality of life.
Going on medication was the right choice for me, but it isn’t for everyone. As great as it has been for my own life, it still isn’t quite enough to manage all my symptoms. To bridge the gap, there are lifestyle adjustments that I make and maintain. I absolutely must get a proper amount of sleep every single night, even on weekends and days off. I schedule my important tasks each and every day, and I must develop a daily routine for each of my responsibilities.
One of the things I learned early on is that free time is my enemy. Unstructured blocks of time are wasteful and without purpose. Everything, even leisure activities like watching YouTube and playing video games must be scheduled. Everything must have a deadline; everything. I need the motivating power of time constraints and outside pressure or I will not succeed.
Once my schedule is in place, I will break down the large, abstract tasks I have into smaller, bite-size chunks that I can easily do. The mental reward I get from completing chunk number one helps fuel the completion of chunk number two, and so on. If the task is still too big and frightening, I think even smaller. If I need to clean my room, I start with garbage first, then cans, then clutter items. If there’s too much trash, I will gather it all in one place first, then consolidate it into bags so the pile looks smaller. If I want to get stuff done, I must think “small and smart.”
When I’m working at the bar, it can get pretty busy and hectic. When I have a lineup of customers, a glasswasher full of dishes, a pass-through fridge that just ran out of cider, and a keg of drought ale that just ran dry, things can get out of hand, especially when my inner taskmaster is drunk on the job. My anxiety is an obnoxious patron that I have to cut off, and I have to focus on what I can control: the next little task. If I keep moving forward, eventually the night will end, and I will have succeeded once more.
Putting these things into practice is easier said than done. After all, the skills required to build an amazing life despite ADHD are exactly the skills that are impaired by ADHD. But, if you start small and reward yourself for each little bit of progress, you can improve. You will study for longer, make better drinks, and give better service, which will lead to better grades and happier customers.
Who knows? It just might be enough.