I've convinced myself that there must be something wrong with me. Some sort of mental or psychological disorder. Its something that's hung around in the back of my head for a while now, but now I'm almost sure of it.
First, I'll say that my memory is lacking severely. I can watch a movie and forget a lot of it by the next day. I remember very few events from my childhood. I could possibly count them on my two hands. Of those events, I don't really remember anything in vivid detail. Everything is a blur for me. I've had relatives mention things to me, "oh, you remember so and so?" and I have absolutely no recollection of it, despite it being something that should have stuck in my mind. And I'm talking like.. in my teens. I'm 22. I remember nothing from when I was less than 10 years old other than that I played baseball at some point and I used to have some scary nightmares.
My memory seems to really hinder my experience in school and my ability to learn, well, anything. Even things I'm really interested in. I've forgotten almost everything I learned before college, and even most of what I learned in college. Actually, scratch that, I usually don't remember the page I just read in my textbook. This leads me to something else. I never really feel like I'm focused on anything. I can sit down to read a book in a house with complete silence, start reading, and just constantly be distracted by my thoughts or just anything. I'll get up and walk around if there's nothing else to do. I'll start thinking about anything and everything. Its not a lack of motivation to learn or read, and its not a lack of interest. Its something else.
This inability to focus carries over into many things other than reading books. I feel like I'm never focused in a conversation. I can be talking with someone one-on-one, and I won't even be listening to them. I'll be drifting off into some other world. Staring at the wall, blindly saying "yeah, mhmm." Even when I put the effort into it and consciously try to focus, I find it difficult. Since we're talking about conversation, I generally have problems conversing. I stumble on words frequently. I often can't think of the word I'm looking for. I often blurt out the wrong word--something completely irrelevant to what I was thinking of. I have a lot of trouble with conversing and I know others can tell to some degree but I don't know how much. I'll often just stop mid-sentence because I either lost my train of thought, drifted off into some other world, or just can't think of the right word. I feel like my cognitive abilities in general are lacking.
I've never been good at anything. My coordination is terrible. I've never been able to beat friends at video games. I always end up in last place in everything. I am pretty much the LEAST creative person in the world. Beyond my inability to focus and remember things, I just have a hard time understanding a lot of things. Intuition is not a quality that I possess.
Lately I've considered getting checked out for ADHD. I think there might be something that goes beyond ADHD, unless I'm just being crazy, but I do exhibit almost all of the ADHD symptoms and that could explain a few things. I experience all of the typical ones, you know, the ones that most people do, when they jokingly say they have a little bit of ADD, or a lot of people think they have it just because they get distracted from their homework. But then there's the other ones. Things like "fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat." I can never sit still in a seat. I'm constantly fidgeting, with my hands or my feet, squirming around in my chair, feeling like I absolutely NEED to get up and walk around some. When I had an MRI done and had to lay still for 20 minutes it was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do, to keep my body still. A lot of the symptoms are just things that everyone probably experiences, but they seem to be magnified for me.
I don't know if I have ADHD; I don't know if I have a learning disability; I don't know if I have something else; what I do know is that something feels off. I've ignored this for my entire life but I'm really starting to think that I have a screw loose up there or something. And it feels weird as hell talking about this too. And to even begin to explain it to my doctor seems like a nightmare.
