here comes the bird shark

I have worked at the same fast food place for 3 years where I've earned a reputation as the manager that won't sit down or take a break and will do the grossest and most labor intensive tasks, and yet last week my boss told me I don't do enough. The last performance review I was told I did too much and left nothing for my coworkers to do, and now I don't do enough because I'm not doing 75% of a close on my own anymore.

I've chopped the tip of my finger off and finished the shift. I came to work the day after my grandma died (the first day the new boss had met me as well which you'd think would leave an impression). I came to work in the immediate aftermath of a pet's death on three separate occasions, one of which was less than a half hour after I found his corpse, because nobody could cover my shift. I have sacrificed and given blood sweat and tears to this job over and over and I still feel like Sisyphus' redneck cousin.

To give some background on the man: he's very smart, you just wouldn't know that most of the time because he's incredibly reckless and a very loud extrovert, which I love about him and also irritates me to no end. The man can come out of an ambush of a mob of drunk tweaker rednecks with 4 new trucker friends and a lesbian he recruited to the group because they had the same haircut. He's a social miracle worker with incredible street smarts and I'll bring him everywhere new if I can help it, but if you want to be home before 3 AM on a Tuesday that won't fly with him.

So Turd, after about a year of giving me adderall every 2-3 months at gatherings and standing aside watching me and having almost a decades' worth of seeing the average person act up on his meds, decided to drop in the middle of a conversation, "Well, people who don't have ADHD like you and I-," and I was like hold up. I don't have that. I know I probably have autism I mean look at dad and his comic book room that shits genetic and bro was like I have seen tens of people without ADHD on adderall, and the only symptom I've seen from you is that you're having less trouble following the thread of conversation. And that really got me thinking. And I'm still thinking. Not because I'm stupid because it's thought provoking. Maybe a bit of both we'll see.

I never had problems concentrating as far as I'm aware, but I also only really paid attention to my level of focus when I cared deeply enough about a subject to want to stay focused on it. My dad trained (yes, trained) by brother and I to be able to pay attention for long periods. Being an older dad with his own special interests couldn't have hurt either. He sat us down to watch old black and white horror films (including silent ones once we learned to read), golden and silver age comic books with slow and outdated stories, but were still important to him for us to remember for lore purposes, and only books and parent approved TV (though incredibly lenient) until are age ended in "teen" and we were allowed to get a phone with a screen.

All that to say I never realized I might have an issue with attention until I had those experiences with adderall and started looking back on my life. When some of your first memories are of sitting in front of the TV and needing to sit still until the movie is over, you may not remember how your mind wandered but your body sure remembered how to sit still when you were told to pay attention. And it certainly does help one's focus when you're lucky enough that all your special interests tend to align with your academic choices. So I performed well on tests, sat still in class and at dinner, and no-one, not even me until now, would notice the constant fidgeting, the zoning out mid-conversation, wild topic changes, and poor listening skills when it wasn't something I cared about.