Life of a college kid is pretty simple. Sleep, eat, study, party (sorry mom), and repeat. As easy as that sounds, it really isn’t. Especially if you’re #blessed with an attention deficit disorder. Many people blow it off and act like it isn’t that hard to deal with, but being a college student in 2016 is hard enough without having your mind switch topics every two minutes.
All the info-articles about college kids with ADD or ADHD tell you that you were “smart enough to get by in high school so it went unnoticed” (no conceitedness here by any means). That being said, we didn’t exactly pick up any award-winning study habits in high school. So in college, studying is literally painful. We could sit there for hours and not accomplish one thing (which I’ve done many times). We could try to write a paper that we know will be a piece of cake, but can’t stay focused long enough to get through the intro paragraph. The library has become a place where we memorize what's written on the tables, rather than the chem notes we brought to study. Even right now, as I’m writing this, I have to constantly remind myself what my point was, in order to remember what I was typing. It’s a pain in the butt, at the very least. This has led me to perfect the art of procrastination and my personal favorite, bullsh***ing. It’s not exactly a rare occasion to crank a four to six page paper out in regards to a book I’ve never read.
Anyways, what were we talking about? (Haha get it? ADD joke?)
It is much harder than people think to channel all of your focus on one thing when you have ADD/ADHD. You know when you pull an all-nighter and you can’t keep your eyes open for the life of you? And you get that confused feeling when you jolt yourself awake? It takes you a second to recognize your surroundings and remember what was going on before you fell asleep. That feeling is similar to the feeling we get when our minds jump subjects on us. No matter how interested you are in the subject, becoming engrossed is certainly harder with ADD.
Bottom line, having an attention deficit disorder makes learning new material quite a bit more difficult, especially in college. Having ADD forces you to become an active passive listener (nodding your head and smiling, but having no idea what’s being said), and goes hand in hand with procrastinating (you won’t get anything done if you try to work on it, so why not just put it off).By this time, we've all learned to cope with our scattered selves, so on that note, keep on fighting, you fellow troopers. We've got this.
