I’ve been doing some thinking about my life and how it has been affected by early intervention into my mental health.

Very often I’ll read online from people who have been diagnosed later in life with mental health issues that they wish that their parents or somebody did something about earlier in their life. Well, it could sound nice at the time when you’ve finally been diagnosed with something to say “Only if…” but there is a bit of danger that comes with being diagnosed early.

My experience with this started before I was aware of a lot of things going on. I talked about it in my “a little bit about me” series of articles on this website. But later, I realize that the genesis for my parents caring was that there had to be something wrong. Either I was too difficult or my responses to things were somewhere out in left field, I don’t know. But it is something that I guess has stuck with me. I remember being told so many times when I start acting up from my parents “did you take your meds?”. It takes away from self-accountability to be told that there’s something inherently wrong in you that’s causing you to act in a certain way.

That’s not the only thing that I’ve been thinking about lately in terms of my mental health in early development. In terms of my ADHD I know that structure and managing one’s environment to help yourself is very important along with accountability. In my house as I was growing up we never had much structure and predictability. We kind of sometimes had dinner at the table as one example of structure, but it was very rare. Managing my environment was pretty much offset to if I yelled that I wanted something my mom or dad would go and get it like if I wanted some food they would bring me the food from the kitchen. They said that they did this in fear of incurring my anger. I can totally see that angle because I was a handful to say the least when I was a kid.

I’ve never seen myself to be the kind of person that would classify themselves as a victim. But I feel, and emphasis on feel, that due to the offloading of responsibility of my actions to the “There’s something wrong with you.” or “You’re not your labels anymore Jack you’re just Jack.”, that last one is a more recent thing after all of the numerous diagnosis that I’ve had, has led me into a mindset of saying things that insinuate that I’m a victim without directly saying that I’m a victim. And I’ll just say it right here that I’m not a victim I don’t like being in a position of powerlessness over my own self. There are patterns in my life that I’ve played out but haven’t totally been aware of. I’m beginning to become aware of them and I’m going to start to break said patterns.

I need to add that my parents were and are wonderful people that care so much about me and love me greatly. There was no manual on how to raise me. I know people use that line a lot, but I REALLY required a manual. My father is still doing very awesome at supporting and helping me! Shout outs to NavDad!

Fears are something that have plagued me for my entire life and still do to this day. I am deathly afraid of all insects, it doesn’t matter if they sting or bite it just matters that they’re an insect and they exist. The ego is something that solidifies these parts of your personality that attempt to defend you from things that are “Already set in stone.”. My fear of insects is one of those things. Anytime that I encounter an insect in my house or outside I just panic I feel uncomfortable I feel sticky I feel hot and I also feel hyper vigilant. it’s ridiculous to think that me as a giant human compared to most of these bugs that I’m afraid of just runs away or goes to the other end of the room when one is in my environment. I need to realize that I’m not powerless against insects I could squish them if I want to. But every single time I tried to my ego starts shouting at me that you can’t do this you can’t do this. It’s gross, they’re gross, they’re foreign looking, they’re alien looking, they’re weird. This prevents me from going outside and taking place in many healthy things that would be great for me.

Same thing can be said about my identification with my diagnosis. If I don’t have ADHD, then who am I, why do I operate the way I do. Now to spin the beginning of this article on its head I’m going to thank my parents for bringing me to doctors that diagnose me with the things that they did. It led to the one correct diagnosis of ADHD which has opened the door to assistances in my life. But now is the time where I can’t let my ego fully take over and let me play a passive role. I can’t just blame it all on one diagnosis in hopes that the world will understand, and things will “Get better.”. I can make my world better for me. I am literally the only important cause. I know that sounds selfish, but I need to be entirely selfish. I need to start to build respect for myself inside myself by being selfish and accomplishing things that I normally wouldn’t do or would off-load the burden to other people. I can still offload a certain amount because that falls in line with how you need to manage ADHD, you need to externalize certain things.

Well anyway, speaking of ADHD I kind of lost focus on what I’m talking about, but I think I got out of my system what I’ve been pondering about and thinking about. cool thing is I wrote all this article using my phone’s voice to text. I’ll probably reread over this after I hit publish, so you don’t need to point out any weird inconsistencies or spellings, they will be fixed. Hopefully this little article / journal thing helped you or spoke to you in some way and I guess I’ll see you in the next one I write.