When I lived with family it felt normal. My family actually lied about my symptoms on a medical survey because my mom thought if I was diagnosed with AD?D I'd be unemployable somehow, like employers could get that in a background check?

Getting around other people made it more obvious I had some issues. Like, my partner and I will go on walks and they'll get annoyed if I point out an interesting animal or thing I'm seeing if they're in the middle of a topic. At work I always set reminders on my phone, sent emails to myself, and left stickies on my desktop. My supervisor pointed out he'd never seen someone do that as much as I do, and started requiring me to show up with a notepad in meetings. He'd tell me to do 2 things, and then have to ask me what the first thing I told him was as I left - then the notepad became necessary.

I worked to get onto an employee advocacy group at work and we do a lot of writing to identify systemic issues and propose solutions. I had 2 months to create a paper covering issues with hiring and on the last day - after I turned in the paper - I hit reply-all to add an additional thing that was critically important. Something I knew was an issue before I started the paper. For 2 months it was completely gone from my head. So I have whiteboards around my room, and I'm trying to move to using digital whiteboards to remember these things and organize them so I can even keep my supervisor and coworkers in the loop. "This is my MS Team Whiteboard for Monday stuff, buwhahaha"

I just remember being 25 and feeling like this didn't affect me so much. It still feels like I'm joking when I talk about it. ADD /sounds/ like a non-serious condition. But all these relationships have suffered because I'm forgetful and disorganized, and people are tired of my excuses. :-( I felt normal before.

2 days ago I had a big argument because my partner says I should be taking my medication. I usually don't take it on the weekends, because I shouldn't need to "focus" then, right? I hate that the meds for ADD are addictive, and sometimes it works when I need it - other times it kicks in a day later and it feels like a double-dose. That scares me.