This site has just woken me up!

by Sarah
(Spain)

Wow-- I feel an enormous sense of relief! My friend is training to be a social worker and while we were chatting on the phone earlier she said she's convinced I have ADHD. (I'll get to the spiritual link soon!)

I'm impulsive, reckless, spontaneous,I find it hard to listen to people without zoning out, I get confused and stressed with simple tasks, I interrupt people and can't help it, I blurt things out without thinking, I fidget, I can do a million things at once but I can't focus on more than one- if I am listening to the radio and someone interrupts my concentration I feel angry and irritated, because its so much effort. I am always late, I constantly forget what I am doing, I lose something every single day- keys, phone, purse...I have racing thoughts that I find very difficult to ignore (although the power of now book teaching us to stay in the present moment has really helped me on that score). I bounce from 1 activity to the other, I read magazines backwards and whilst writing this I am bouncing between each paragraph rather than finishing one and moving on to the next!! I am obsessive with lists and calendars and I have 2 alarm clocks because I have been told all my life that I am so disorganised, erratic and chaotic that I am a mess, and I put in 100% effort to organise myself but it's organised chaos, it really really does not come easily. I want my parents to read this site!! I start things (I am a writer) and I don't finish (I now have 7 books I have started and need to finish!!); my motivation lasts approximately 3 weeks, and yet when motivated I am absolutely full of creative energy that feels like it comes from a higher source- I am high, I am elated, I am so positive and full of energy, then it disappears and I can't write or focus again- I wish I could bottle it! I don't know if these symptoms are linked to ADHD but also, despite being extremely sociable and outgoing, I have sudden days of paranoia, anxiety and agoraphobia, that arrive from nowhere and leave just as quickly. I thought I might have bipolar but actually when I looked into it it's nothing like that, more just odd days where my brain is racing and thinking and worrying so much that it drains my energy, so I'm thinking it could be ADHD related.

Back to the topic, most of all I am very spiritual. In the mornings I need a period of an hours solitude and silence before I can speak (also before sleep). As a child, my mother said I was rude, but I my brain simply 'doesn't work'- I can't explain it any other than saying I'm in another place, another realm. I'm here but my consciousness is elsewhere. I've spent my life with feelings of being trapped in this body- that these 5 senses are simply decoding electrical impulses that come into our retinas and ears from outside the body, so this therefore is some kind of hologram and I should be 'out there'- it's a constant feeling of suffocation. I've felt this way forever, without understanding science and quantum physics, which I am now very interested in as I can see this huge overlap between science and spirituality, as if we are on the verge of a great discovery! I am very intelligent but I would never get a good IQ score because I'm about 90% right-brained, I have no logic or reasoning skills, failed my math exams multiple times (my brain literally stops working when numbers are involved) but I am extremely creative- I write books, features, songs and poetry, I play guitar, I paint, I like to make things, I knit, etc. This right-side emphasis is very much related to spirituality, although obviously with ADHD people may have a math gift or a physics gift. But spiritually, most people are right brained. I have premonitions regularly; such as knowing my uncle would be murdered the day he died as an 11 year old. I am a pantheist and feel an enormous love for and connection with nature- when I was a child I would cry if people picked flowers or carved their name in trees, and say 'they have feelings too'. My friends ridiculed me but actually now one of them is very spiritual himself and thinks I was aware of the interconnectedness of everything and consciousness, so that's what I meant although I couldn't articulate it.

I am also hypersensitive to other people's emotions- I can feel them as if they are my own. I cry watching the news as if it were someone in my family, I feel the pain. I sense things have happened to friends and family based on the fact I am feeling what they are feeling, even if they are miles away. This seems to happen more with boyfriends, because the closer I am to a person emotionally the stronger the bond is, it seems. With my ex, who was a bit of a 'player', I knew every single time he had flirted with another girl, sent a text, received an email. I knew to the minute, and I would freak him out by telling him exact times :) I sense energy, both negative and positive, sometimes that scares me- I also see entities, specifically one in particular who has been 'visiting' me since I was 17 (I'm now 29). Along with the impulsiveness comes the fact I'm very sensitive to my 'path', I have always had a very strong gut feeling and am led by some unknown magnet- for example one day last year I decided I was moving to Spain. I packed a bag, gave my possessions to charity, and, as a single mum with a 7 yr old daughter, came to a place (I had NO plan and no money, just a faith I would be shown) where there are people living off the land as they have done for centuries, where people love and understand nature, where I have been given the opportunity to learn about self sufficiency and organic farming, to have quality time with my daughter, to have a work life balance which means I have time to paint, meditate, enjoy the world- and all of this was GIVEN to me because I followed my gut, as CRAZY as it seemed at the time, and much to my family and friends' horror. But I JUST KNEW it was my path. I'm sure a lot of you have this too. The spiritual experiences could go on forever, I've felt that I am in the wrong paradigm my whole life. In fact I remember as a child this deep longing to- what I can only explain as to 'go home.'

I have to say I think the drugging our children (there's a film of the same name if you search on youtube which EVERYONE with ADHD or any other 'illness' should watch. Two hours ago I was still asking myself the lifelong question- 'what's WRONG with me?'. Then I checked out the symptoms and a huge smile spread across my face because I needed to know what makes me different, and now I do. A few minutes later I typed 'ADHD spiritual' into Google (my friend had mentioned she had made her 'diagnosis' also as a result of having 2 ADHD colleagues who she says are both extremely spiritual, with all the signs I talk about above- so, more proof there's a link).....and here I am, suddenly knowing I have what the doctors call ADHD but what I call awareness. It looks like we are all spiritually advanced, wonderful human beings who deserve the freedom to express their gifts and teach them to others to promote light, love and peace in this world we are hurting so much. Put down the ritalin and embrace who you are! And thanks so much to this site and to all the stories I was reading. You're all inspirational, you don't have 'problems'.