Building a Better Me

“Who are you that lies
When you stare in my face?
Telling me that
I’m just a trace
Of the person I once was
‘Cause I just can’t tell
If you’re telling the truth or a lie
On you I just can’t rely,
After all you’re just a piece of glass”

“Piece of Glass” by Caedmon’s Call

“I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don’t want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It’s high time that I accept all the great things about me.”

C. Joybell C.

Criticism is a hard thing to deal with when you have ADHD.

First, we have to deal with our emotions. This can be hard because the way our brain works makes it hard for us to regulate our emotions as well as our reactions to those emotions. It tends to make what we do and say more authentic, but also makes it harder to stop us from saying things that we shouldn’t.

This often leads to a few different paths. We can become defensive and fight back, usually verbally. We can shut down because the emotions are too hard to deal with. We can become overly apologetic, feeling the horror that we might have slighted someone else.

Then we have to deal with how we actually feel once that initial emotion comes out. Where we come to our senses and realize what we’ve done. This can often lead to us getting angry about having a mistake pointed out, followed almost immediately by an apology.

The worst, though, is having to deal with the fact that because of the trouble we have with paying attention and focusing, we make mistakes all the time. This can lead us to coming up with varying strategies of how to deal with all the mistakes we know we’re going to make. Some of us live our life by a daily routine, one that we fear veering off of lest we screw up and open ourselves up to criticism.

It also makes us our own biggest critics. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to reconcile the things I knew I should be doing with the things I actually did. Why it was so hard for me to follow through on things. Why I kept making poor choices that I should have known were bad choices, but did them anyways, just…impulsively. So I would criticize myself all the time, especially since, all the time, I’d hear so much about the potential I had, but could not get even close to living up to. I didn’t just feel like I was worthless, I felt as if I was a waste of so much potential. But now that I’ve learned the source of a lot of my idiosyncrasies, I feel I can better understand myself and try not to be so hard on myself about things.

Now, I’m not trying to use ADHD as an excuse for things I’ve done, merely as an explanation. By understanding the nature of my actions, I can have a better idea of things I can do to help myself. I also hope I’ll be able to deal with criticism better, both from others, and especially from myself.