Introduction

Hello there,

    My name is Pablo, spanish Master Student at Auckland University. I’ve been diagnosed, twice in my life, with ADHD (first when I was around 8 y.o. and then 2 years before going to college). But it’s easy to identify these moments in my life because they are the ones my parents decided to go to a specialist due to my bad grades… and probably that’s what will happen to you or most ADHD’s around there.

    Un/Luckily for my parents, I wasn’t born with hyperactivity. Just with an annoying impulsive personality. But that could be part of me, as well as jumping from sport to sport, changing my hobbies every 1-2 months, wanting passionately to do something and then drop it… could be thought as a modifiable attitude. Of course, it wasn’t.

    Coming back to the topic, my name is Pablo and I’m going to share some anecdotes that may help you go through your life (who knows, right??) and/or help you understand better how ADHD life is as I lived it. I will try to generate at least 1 or 2 posts per week but, as you will understand, routine is not one of my strengths!

 

Essentials

Hello again!

This time I’m just going to go straight to the topic. My first anecdote and tips to stop losing your belongings… and YES. My mother was also super angry with me. Buying a jacket every winter is not good for the family economy!

Last summer I was traveling around the Philippines and so, I stayed some days in El Nido  (wonderful place, you need to try the cave diving and kayaking around during sunset time). My plan was coming back to Puerto Princesa on Wednesday and taking the plane the next day at 15:00. The plan was perfect until I woke up on Thursday and suddenly realize I didn’t have my passport anymore.

The previous day, I took this amazing van with 12 other people, feeling comfortable, I left the bag where I normally carry my passport in one of the seat pockets. Of course, when we arrived at Puerto Princesa I  forgot it there…

Luckily I recovered my passport 1:30 hour before departure, but I still get tachycardia every time I explain this story (really stressful morning).

This experience helps me introduce you some of my tricks, for those who have ADHD or for the distracted ones. This is what I call the rule of the “Essentials”.

In your daily life, you normally want to make sure you got 3 things: keys, wallet & phone. These refer to the “three pocket rule”: ALWAYS leave these 3 in your pockets at every moment. At some point, it will get innate to do this. For other objects, you can just crowdsource, as long as you leave them in the view of others you will have a higher chance of someone noticing it and telling you are forgetting something you/save it for you. In the case, you want to keep your belongings hidden and out of sight, either keep them with other people’s ones so here we can go back to crowdsource again or tie them to your leg, arm…

When you are traveling the same. I always recommend to people to travel light. But when it comes to the “Essentials”, these are your passport, visa, and phone. If you lose one of these, your  travel will become a nightmare, and I explain why:

  • PHONE. If you are an ADHD you already know you won’t be able to fully plan your holiday on your own. Of course, you can survive without but, believe me, it’s gonna be really annoying and expensive!
  • PASSPORT. I don’t really need to give too many explanations about why you shouldn’t lose this one… Just don’t lose it.
  • VISA. This is the most interesting one. It is difficult to find things that you can’t buy… As long as you don’t lose your visa, don’t need to stress too much about losing other parts of your luggage cause you can buy new things.

Other people don’t really understand why people ADHD are so calm when they lose something and they tend to get irritated by this. Final advice: Don’t get too attached to material things and never lose your Essentials…