I got sucked into “real” board games about a decade ago. Some of my newfound friends from Twitter were into them, so we got together one night and started playing Catan, the gateway drug to the board game world.

Catan isn’t bad, per se; it’s just there are so many games that are much better than it, so we moved on to other games. After my move to Sweden, for a couple of years, I didn’t have too many friends to play with. In my last year there I’ve found a board gaming group and played regularly with them for a while, discovering many new games and making new friends. Since I moved back to Hungary, I haven’t played much but I want to change that this year.

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Here’s a non-exhaustive list of games I enjoyed over the years and still enjoy many of them:

• Race for the Galaxy (and its expansions): A card game, in which you’re each building your own galactic civilization, with different planets, goods, capabilities and so on. It took years of regular play to finally get bored with it; it’s that good. The mechanics are not complicated, but it does have a learning curve. We tried teaching it to a lot of people over the years, and it was interesting to see how fast some people learned, while others kept struggling with it and never really got a hang of it. While luck does play a role in it, the better you get at it, the less it matters. The base game doesn’t have much interaction between the players — whoever had the most points at the end of the game, wins — but the expansions do add some.
• Bang: A spaghetti western in a card game. Each player takes one of the four distinct roles: Sheriff, Deputy, Outlaw or Renegade. The Sheriff and their Deputies want the Outlaws and the Renegade dead, the Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff and the Renegade wants to be the last person standing. Only the Sheriff’s role is known, it’s up to you to guess who’s playing who. Spoilers: everyone will keep insisting they’re the Deputy.
  You shoot at each other, dodge bullets, hide behind barrels, drink beer to get back life points… It has quite a bit of luck in it, but that never gets in the way of having fun, and you can play it with up to 8 people.
• Agricola: You’re a farmer with a spouse, and you’re building your own farm, through 14 distinct rounds. You sow and reap crops, build fences, buy animals, expand your house and your family throughout the game. Like Race for the Galaxy, it’s kind of a multiplayer solitaire, but it’s a lot of fun. The only downside of it is that it takes about 15 minutes or so to set it up and even more to pack things away.
• Love Letter: Best played with 4 players, this game consists of only 16 cards and a bunch of heart tokens. You’re a young lover, trying to win the affection of the princess. There are 8 different kinds of cards in the small deck and the game is mostly about being able to correctly guess who has which cards. It has quick, 5-10 minute rounds, so you usually play a bunch of them.
• Codenames: This is the best party game, hands down. Two teams are working on finding their picks on a 5x5 grid of words. Each side has one Codemaster, who knows which words belong to their group and wants them to guess right: the only thing they can say is a one-word clue and a number. So if the table has “Athens,” “Berlin” and “France,” and all those cards belong to their team, they can say “Europe, 3”. It’s that simple, and yet this was an easy and unlikely example; more often than not you’re lucky if you can connect two words. Best played with 6-10 people. It’s been translated to a bazillion languages there’s even one where you have drawing instead of words.
• Someone Has Died: I played this game at XOXO 2018 and fell in love with it within minutes. It’s an improvisation storytelling card game: one person takes the role of the Estate Keeper, who the rest of the players will have to convince that they deserve all that money the recently deceased had. Everyone gets a role, a relationship to the deceased and two story cards. In the first round, you proceed with your introduction, weaving your cards into the your story. It has four distinct rounds, and the winner is the person who is deemed to have been the most convincing by the Estate Keeper. If storytelling games are your thing, you’re gonna have loads of fun with this one.
• Sushi Go!: This is a draft-and pass game: you deal a certain amount of cards, pick one and pass your hand to the next person until they’re all on the table. It’s fast, and it’s fun: each card has a type of sushi and a given amount of points; many of them only give you points when you have more than one of them, or combine them in a particular order. Best of all, the graphics are really cute. There’s a new version, called Sushi Go Party! with even more cards and support for up to 8 players (the original only goes up to 5).
• Kingdom Builder: One of the most versatile board games I’ve ever played. You have a board, made of hexagons, which you build out of four randomly picked tiles. Your primary objective is to build settlements and build your kingdom. However, the three ways of getting points are drawn from a deck and therefore each game requires wildly different strategies.
• Pandemic: A co-op eurogame in which you work together with everyone against the game itself, to stop a global pandemic killing humanity. Each player gets role with distinct powers. It’s fun and it can be quite challenging as well; the game lets you pick the difficulty.
  You can’t talk about Pandemic without mentioning Pandemic Legacy, a version of the game in which you play 12 to 24 games total, while the game changes in permanent ways. You name viruses, you tear up cards and so on. This requires you to have a regular, dedicated group of friends, but if you have those, it’s heaps of fun, I’ve been told. There are even two seasons of it out by now.
• Fury of Dracula: Scotland Yard on steroids. One player takes the role of Dracula, moving around in Europe invisibly and building up an army of vampires, while everyone else is hunting him. Working against the clock, you have to be wise and try to find and defeat him. It’s a bit long (about 2-3 hours), but don’t let that deter you.

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What are your favorite board (or card) games?

I’m a freelancer; I don’t have an office. I can’t work from home; the silence is deafening, I need the background noise, and I need to be among people. The place I work from every day is a café about 25 minutes from my home; it’s called Flow. I am a person of habit: I wake up, I get dressed, I go to Flow and start working.

Flow is one of the many, many specialty cafés in Budapest. Don’t ask me about their coffee: I mostly eschew caffeine — my ADHD meds mostly replace caffeine — so my regular drink is an iced decaf latte with oat milk. It’s one of the most pointless drinks ever, but I like it.

So I don’t go to Flow for their coffee, but for everything else. It’s big; ceilings about 5 meters high and plenty of space, unlike most cafés. They have fresh pastries delivered every morning; if I get there early enough, I can nab one of my favorite chocolate rolls. And I kinda know some of the people running the place. They used to have great wifi as well, until the people responsible for it installed a network filter on it, blocking random sites and making work impossible. Thank God for unlimited 4G and tethering. They’re vegan, and I’m a carnivore, but they do have delicious tapioca pudding desserts. That, and plenty of power outlets.

Before Flow, I had another café as my base; before that place, another. I tried coworking spaces, and I was even part of one for about 6 months before the community around it started to dwindle.

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On weekends or where I’m traveling, I go to a Starbucks. They usually have decent wifi, and their decaf is the same everywhere. They’re ubiquitous; you can find many of them in most major western cities these days (except for Sweden; there, I’ll go to an Espresso House instead).

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Working from cafés is in many ways is not ideal, but it’s the thing that works for me. What would be ideal is a proper office, with coworkers — but I can’t give up freelancing for so many reasons. And it’s not like I’m alone here; I get to hang out with other friends who work remotely.

So cafés it is.

I started University last fall, and I used that as an excuse to get a 2018 iPad and an Apple Pencil. I had to take notes, after all, and why not do it digitally? The university thing didn’t last, but something else happened after a month or so: I started drawing.

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I wasn’t that into drawing as a kid. Sure, I doodled just like everyone else, especially at a young age, and I do remember doing at least one pastel drawing, but that was about it. Hell, I was not much into visual arts either, or so it feels like, with the notable exception of photography. So it surprised even myself when one day, on a whim, I paid $10 for Procreate and promptly spent the next few days glued to my iPad and drawing every waking minute of the day.

A few months before that, I did a series of portraits at XOXO 2018 and they felt like a natural starting point. I started tracing these photos; open them in Procreate, set the opacity to around 50% or so, create a new layer, pick up my virtual graphite pencil and start drawing over them. I think I did about a dozen of these; you can find some of them on my Instagram. Looking at them months later, I think they don’t look too bad for a newbie.

Tracing felt like cheating — even though I know it’s not — and the next step was to find something or someone to draw. I was already aware of a place in Budapest called Painters Palace, a great art community that has weekly figure drawing classes. It’s full of amazing people, and they have a fantastic space.

I fell in love with figure drawing the very first time I did it. Drawing the naked human body is may not be the easiest thing, but it’s loads of fun. It didn’t take me long before I started modeling as well; I did it twice so far, and I plan to do it more in the future. My Instagram has a few early drawings posted, and I started posting my huge backlog to my art account.

Another thing I started doing was drawing hands from reference images. I have a couple of these published so far with at least one more to come.

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There is some irony in the fact that even though I do almost all my drawing digitally, I use pencil and charcoal and I’m consciously trying to make them look like analog drawings. That being said, I don’t have much desire to use “real” pencil and paper, at least not right now.

All in all, it’s a great outlet for creativity and I’m very happy I discovered it.

I was going to finally get back to work on my latest series before I distracted myself with other things, like tweaking my blog (word counts! reading time! endlessly tweaking the CSS!) as well as continuing to cross-post some of my writings from here. One thing I noticed is how my writing has improved over the last month (at least in my opinion). I was also mildly horrified how bad my spelling and grammar was before I started using Grammarly. Through this process, I fixed many early mistakes in those posts, though I don’t think I will edit them much beyond that.

A few days ago I bit the bullet and subscribed to Grammarly Premium, which fixes commas, sometimes tenses and other things one might mess up. It’s not a magic bullet, and I often disagree with its recommendations, but overall it’s definitely worth the money for me. If you want to save 40% on your subscription, register a new account and simply wait a few days. They will email you a discount on your first year.

I also took the opportunity to edit my series about ADHD into one big longread. It made me realize that breaking things down into smaller chunks really helps with writing, but at the same time editing them into one long article is not an easy process and I still suck at it. This is something I want to get better at as I want to write more long-form articles.

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About ten years ago, before social media really blew up and blogs were all the rage, I hated when people metablogged. A lot has changed, of course, but I can’t help but see the irony that right now I’m doing pretty much the same thing: writing about writing, for me a form of progressive procrastination and a way to hit that 300-word mark and keep my streak.

In 2019 I feel like it’s allright, as long as it’s not overdone. I better find something else to write about for tomorrow, though.

This post was not sponsored by Grammarly, even though I’ve written about them plenty of times now, so they should really consider doing that.

Owen wrote about his journey with AD(H)D and I figured I could tell my story as well, especially since no two AD(H)D stories are the same.

A note on terminology: I use ADHD, the DSM-IV and up uses ADHD as well, with a note that not everyone is “H.” Instead, it has subtypes: ADHD-PI, ADHD-PH and ADHD-C, but even these names have alternatives. Naming things is difficult, y’all.

In the beginning…

I was what they call a “problem child”. From kindergarten, I had poor social skills: I would get bullied a lot, and I didn’t have a lot of friends either. The first 8 years I attended a grand total of 5 different schools, which didn’t help either, neither did the fact that I was fired from the penultimate one for said lack of social skills and my old school did not take me back for the same reason. I’ve spent most of the last 3 years homeschooled, and by homeschooled I mean being home mostly by myself, learning the material on my own and having tests at the end of each semester to get grades. I was a smart kid as well, and while I’d like to think I wasn’t too obnoxious about it, I’m sure that didn’t help, either.

(the homeschooling thing is a whole ‘nother story which I’ll not go into it here, but let me just say, it was, in some ways, genuinely helpful for me)

My parents were not great at handling all this. They saw something was wrong early on, but couldn’t for the life of them figure out what exactly, and how to fix it, so in many ways, they just made things worse. I was raised in a fairly strict fundamentalist Christian household, so they’d mostly respond with various forms of punishment, and yes that included corporal.

We have to take a small detour here: besides my ADHD, I’ve had undiagnosed anxiety issues and OCD as well. When most people hear OCD, they think of the shit you see in the movies: people closing the door precisely six times, obsessively cleaning things, etc. While there are cases that are like that, a lot, I repeat, a lot of people live with OCD where it mostly happens in their head. For me, that manifested in a lot of crazy irrational fears going around in my head on loop 24/7 and a sense of helplessness of me not being able to counter them. My OCD wouldn’t get diagnosed until well into adulthood; I might write more on it later.

Getting diagnosed

This detour is crucial because ultimately my OCD was what lead to a huge meltdown I had when I was 12. I was out of it for days, full of crazy fears (another story for another day) and my parents did not handle that too well either. After a few days, they took me to an inpatient psychiatric clinic, which was a pretty traumatic experience (once again, another story for another day) but they did finally diagnose me with ADHD and gave me medication for it (Ritalin IR 10mg, once or twice a day, can’t quite remember). After this, I became homeschooled for the rest of elementary school (see above). My parents say I improved with medication.

I went back to attending school in grade 9 for four years of high school. The first year was hell; I still had no social skills and still got bullied a lot. But something started to change in the second year, and by the end of that I had a group of friends, reasonable social skills, wasn’t bullied too much anymore, and the last two years of high school is something I genuinely enjoyed.

Around the age of 16 or so, to the recommendation of my psychiatrist, my parents stopped giving me medication. My parents claim they switched to placebo and didn’t notice a difference; to be fair, neither did I at the time. They said I “grew out of it,” which was a popular notion at the time. You also have to keep in mind that ADHD medication, research and pretty much everything usually lags at least 10-15 years behind the US in Hungary (and to a certain degree, in Europe). We know better, nowadays, that a lot of ADHD kids don’t “grow out of it” and struggle through adulthood.

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I worked as a journalist through high school and started freelancing with a translation agency as well, who hired me full-time after my graduation.

Things went mostly well for the first few years; everything was new, and novelty is a huge motivational factor for ADHD. Working in the same office together with people is helpful too, not to mention deadlines. They did let me be a generalist and work at my own pace when client work was not involved. This was both a blessing and a curse; I didn’t feel any unnecessary pressure, but in hindsight, I procrastinated a lot and beat myself up for it (I still do). I don’t subscribe to the cult and fetishization of productivity, but that’s a fact. A bit of nudge from someone goes a long way. I was suffering in a lot of different ways as well; I’ll get back to these things later in this article.

Getting rediagnosed

I was 21 when somehow, I genuinely don’t remember how, I stumbled upon a book that’d change my life: You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder. I read it, and I immediately knew, I still had ADHD.

I went through a long and arduous process of being rediagnosed, not unlike the one Owen describes, so I’ll skip the description of the process. For me it took weeks, and it kinda sucked, but in the end, I got my diagnosis and started medication once again. Ritalin IR, 10mg, twice a day.

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Let’s take a break here and talk more about ADHD itself and how it feels for me. Strap in; this might take a while.

Talking about ADHD and what is it anyway?

Let me start by saying that it’s hard to talk to people about your ADHD and its symptoms. A lot of people will brush it or its symptoms off with things like “oh yeah I procrastinate too,” “yeah sometimes I forget where my keys are” or “yeah I can’t motivate myself to do boring things.” I could go on.

ADHD is not about whether you procrastinate, forget your keys, or have a hard time doing boring things, among other things. To get a diagnosis, you have to meet a certain set of criteria, and they have to do with a lot of different things and more importantly, the severity of them. That is what most people don’t realize when they say things like the ones I listed above. You can find DSM-V’s fairly good criteria listed here.

I will explicitly not go into the “is ADHD being overdiagnosed/are our kids being overmedicated” debate — that’d be an entire post in itself.

ADHD is the utter, extremely frustrating inability to focus on something that you consciously wants to. Your brain, through a variety of factors, decides what to focus on by itself and you have very limited say in that. This is one of the reasons Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is a terrible name: I don’t have a deficit of attention, I just can’t focus it like neurotypical people do.

Biologically, people with ADHD have the prefrontal cortex of their brain all messed up. That’s the part regulating thoughts, feelings, impulses. The linked article gives a really good overview on that as well.

The other big biological factor is not having enough dopamine in your brain, which is where most stimulant medication help. This ADDitude magazine article has a good overview on them.

A large part of ADHD is what they call Executive Dysfunction (ED). This article has a good overview of it; the parts that I find affecting me are issues with inhibition, working memory, emotional self-regulation, self-motivation and to a certain degree, planning. Let me extend on these.

How ADHD feels like and looks like to me

Issues with emotional self-regulation manifest in me with a sense of being constantly bombarded by and feeling helpless against overwhelming emotions, especially the negative ones. I am particularly extremely sensitive to rejection.

My long-term memory is pretty great, however my short-term (working) memory is absolutely terrible. With my attention frequently being as bad as a butterfly — insert “look, squirrel!” joke here — it’s very easy to get lost in my thoughts and forget things.

There are things that help with this. Medication helps. Writing todo lists help. Breaking things down into subtasks help. Sticking to said todo-lists is eternally work-in-progress.

“Oh I don’t need to write this down, I will remember it” is the biggest lie I keep telling myself, and I still fall for it. If I know I need something done and/or remembered, I’ll 1. add it to my calendar 2. add it to my weekly todo list 3. make a reminder for it 4. if it’s more important, make 2 or 3 reminders for it, because sometimes I just ignore the first reminder and forget about the whole thing.

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Problems around inhibition and impulsivity are abound. A lot of times, particularly with people, I either just close myself up completely or end up at the other extreme: blurt things out without thinking or start oversharing (people who know me and are reading this are heavily nodding at this point). For me, this applies to anger as well. I am the kind of person who suffers a lot silently in a relationship and then one day just blows up. I won’t attribute this entirely to ADHD, and this is something I did and do work on in therapy.

I’m impulsive in many things, but it’s not all black and white. Being impulsive is not bad in itself; but what you’re being impulsive with determines a lot. I used to be very impulsive with money for example; if I’d have money left after my day-to-day expenses, I’d spend it on some electronics. A few years after I started earning money I discovered YNAB and budgeting — since then I’m like 50% less bad with money.

Up until very recently, I had a hard time saving money, though that’s also wrapped in anxieties you inherit when you grow up poor. Most of my working life, and especially in recent years I’ve been fairly privileged in earning a good chunk of money, though.

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This brings me to my next topic, which explains many things, like the issue with saving money: I have a very myopic sense of time, not unlike one of a young child. It’s hard for me to think long-term in general: for me, there is now and not-now. Now is what needs my immediate attention. Not-now is something I can worry about later. Sure I could save up, but that’s not-now, and that simply doesn’t exist.

Being a freelancer means having to manage my money and deal with sometimes irregular finances. Last year I got my first real long-term client, and that helped a lot. I could plan for things, and I have stumbled upon a stupid easy technique (besides budgeting) to stop myself from spending money that would be better saved for later: putting almost all my spare cash into deposits. It’s still available, and it’s only a few clicks away from being able to access it again, but those few clicks goes a long way to stop myself doing it. (They also earn an insultingly small amount of interest.)

Regarding motivation, one of the things that drive me most is a sense of novelty, which becomes my downfall as well. The dopamine hit it gives me is addictive. I find and start a new thing, I get immersed in it and I do it almost obsessively. Then the novelty wears off and I just stop doing it. I have a bazillion failed pet projects and abandoned hobbies.

This addiction to novelty generates what I call “ADHD boredom”, though I’m sure there is a proper term for it. Let’s say it’s the weekend, and I got nothing scheduled, which is really, really bad. Now, I lie to myself, great! A free weekend! I can do anything! I can just rest. This is a trap. Having free time is a trap.

I can’t “just rest”. I am not capable of that and yet, even now I keep lying to myself that I can. I need to do things. And, while I could do about 10 different things — work on pet projects! draw! write! cook! etc. — oftentimes I can not bring myself to do anything. My brain, being the dopamine-junkie it is and frequently understimulated, wants something new (see also the section about spending money on shiny electronics above), and it just decided that. This is where we, once again, come back to the fact that I have a serious issue consciously focusing my attention on something.

And this is why I’ll frequently end up on the couch, mindlessly watching TV series or movies, and not even enjoying them, it’s really just to pass the time. It’s anything but living. I want to do so many things and it really sucks that I just can’t oftentimes.

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I used to be really disorganized, although that has improved a lot over the years, with the todo lists and other techniques I’ve mentioned above. Don’t get me started about all the shame I picked up in school from teachers criticizing me for having a messy desk or my parent’s constant frustration of the mess in my room. Decluttering often makes things worse; nowadays I strive towards organized chaos.

Structure and habits is an issue; it is a constant fight between being very rigid with my schedule/life/habits or just winging everything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really good at improvising things, but it gets exhausting. On the other hand, starting a habit and sticking to habit is capital-h Hard, and so far I’ve found that for it to work long-term, it needs to be somewhat flexible, or I’ll just stop it after a few months if I get that far. That applies to writing as well; I don’t know how long I can keep up the 300 words a day thing. For now, it works, but I know there will come a point where it’ll feel like a prison (hey Owen can we have that vacation days feature sooner rather than later?).

Deciding things can be really hard, excruciatingly hard. So far the only solution I’ve found is to, wait for it, just pick something. I know this is not helpful at all, but that’s where I’m at.

All of this makes getting things done difficult, especially the mundane and monotonous. The techniques I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraphs help. Deadlines help. I still procrastinate a lot, and to a certain degree I’ve accepted it, and I am working extremely hard not to beat myself up because of it. And oftentimes it’s productive procrastination; I do something useful and needed while avoiding something else. Like, writing this article.

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If you want to know more about what ADHD feels like, read this because I feel like I’m just repeating things from this article. I am legit scared to open it now before I publish this because that’d make this post about twice as long.

Being on meds and also, ADHD is not alone

Taking stimulant medication the first time in my adult life was life-changing. It’s not a magic bullet, but as I’ve mentioned above, it helps a lot in many things. It brings me to a baseline, just a tiny bit closer to neurotypical people, in terms of being able to get things done, especially the mundane, tedious things of life. It removes a certain amount of “fog” I feel in my brain without them.

It’s important to note that ADHD does not exist in a vacuum. It can be and more often not is comorbid with a lot of other mental health issues. Anxiety, Depression, OCD and so on — you can find a good article and list here. Everything I’ve just described can mostly be explained through the lens of ADHD, but definitely not exclusively.

The rest of my story

Last time we saw our protagonist — about two dozen paragraphs ago — he got rediagnosed and started taking stimulant medication again. What could have possibly gone wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. A couple of months after starting my meds again, my lifelong untreated anxiety issues reached a breaking point, and I started having panic attacks. It forced me to seek help finally and so I did: I started a medication that helped me a lot, but I also had to take another break from Ritalin, one that would last a bit more, than a year. During that time, my anxiety issues improved, I moved to Sweden in January 2013, and I also started going to therapy.

Through a stroke of luck, I got to a government-funded psychiatrist pretty quickly in Sweden. What seems unreal looking back is that I literally walked into his office, told him my history over the next 90 minutes, discussed what medications I need and he simply prescribed them. I would later learn that this is almost an exception and a lot of places in the world want some sort of proof in writing, and they won’t just take your word for it.

And so I was back on Ritalin once again, and it certainly helped things.

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It’s 2019 now, and a lot has changed. I’ve done therapy for almost six years. Right now I’m taking a break, one that’s necessary given that I finished up two relationships with two therapists within two months at the end of 2018 (long story).

I cannot stress enough how much therapy — once you found the right therapist! — helps, not just with ADHD, but with just about… everything? Nothing can replace doing the hard work of sifting through all your past issues and traumas that shaped you, especially in your childhood. It’s been life-changing for me, and I highly recommend it to literally everyone, if you can afford it and/or your insurance covers it. Once my break is over I will very likely continue the work.

There are also ADHD coaches, which I don’t have much experience with, but they are a thing, and many people find them helpful, though costly. Leave a comment if you’ve ever had one! I’d love to know more about those experiences.

The ADHD medications I take has changed a bunch of times during those years, and right now I’m on a lowish dosage of Elvanse (Vyvanse) combined with some Guanfacine. I really wish instant-release Adderall would be available in Europe because based on my experience with all other past meds, I have a hunch that it’s the thing that would work for me the best, but until then I’ll work with what’s available.

Elvanse has a very different effect on me compared to Ritalin (I tried both IR, then XR, then a combination of both). The latter was effective, but it did raise my already high anxiety levels, and we could never quite compensate for that. There’s also the fact that high anxiety gives constant issues with my stomach acid. Ritalin had what my psychiatrist calls the “throat to the knife” effect; it helped me to get things done partly by giving me a specific kind of anxiety, not unlike to a strict parent standing over my shoulder threateningly. It does kinda work, but it is also not quite right. Oh yeah, and it also made me increasingly depressed and miserable.

Switching to Elvanse was a revelation. I no longer have a knife to my throat, and my anxiety and depressiveness improved a lot. I’m also a lot less miserable and much happier in general; one of the things I noticed is that I’m laughing a lot more again. The downside of it is that many of my ADHD symptoms are a lot worse, especially my working memory and forgetfulness. I feel downright stupid sometimes. But for now, for me, it’s definitely worth the tradeoff.

Let me finish this section with the important disclosure that while I share these experiences with the hope it helps others, it is a very well known fact among psychiatrists that people react to stimulant medication in wildly different ways. What works for me may not work for you. A good psychiatrist can help you find the right medication and the correct dosage.

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I did not list all the meds I take here, and stimulant medications are not the only medications for ADHD. Again, find a good psychiatrist.

I would love to geek out more about ADHD medication with others and trade stories in private; find me on social media, I’m KTamas just about everywhere (except on Instagram).

ADHD: a success story?

I am really good at solving problems and I have no issues whatsoever boasting about that. The other thing I am also really good at is learning new things, and learning them fast. If something interests me, I can jump on them, study them obsessively and get productive, fast. That’s literally at least half of why people hire me, even though “I don’t know X but trust me I will learn it in a week, several people can attest to that” is a hard sell sometimes. But I make it work.

I’m a freelancer, and half of my work comes by word-of-mouth: I work with people and then they recommend me to other people. I’m pretty damn good at selling myself because I have no shame or impostor syndrome when talking with prospective clients (I reserve those feelings to the rest of my time on earth). I’m also somewhat extraverted and good at networking. Going to conferences and networking the shit out of them is the other way I get jobs. That’s my “secret” for having a successful freelancing business for three years and counting.

That, and the fact that — by far and large — I do good work, or so my clients tell me.

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Many of the traits and skills I described are frequently attributed to ADHD, which would bring me to my next point: ADHD doesn’t get to define me. It is a diagnosis and a label. Used wisely, it’s an explanation but never an excuse.

I struggle with some other mental health issues with as well, and none of them are isolated; as I’ve mentioned before, comorbidity plays a significant role. Indeed, before saying goodbye to my last therapist, he told me that in the grand scheme of things, the issues I attribute to ADHD are the minority of my actual problems in my life right now. And I’m pretty sure he is right.

Closing remarks

There are a lot of things I have not touched upon these articles, but I hope it will at least get you thinking. It’s still something that in some ways is still underdiagnosed.

ADHD is not a life sentence; having a diagnosis, a good psychiatrist, a good therapist, a good coach (ideally, all of them) can improve things tremendously.

The origins of ADHD is something that’s still unclear, with many theories going around and consensus on it. It seems that in some way it’s hereditary, but the jury is still very much out on how much of it is nature and how much of it may be nurture. It does run in my family; several family members and some of my siblings have it. I’d be lying if I’d say I’m not worried that some of my kids may grow up with it, too. One of the books I’m recommending below has an interesting theory that very much fits my life story; however that doesn’t mean it’s the definitive answer.

A very important caveat to everything I wrote about, and especially the part on how ADHD feels like to me is heavily colored by the fact that I’m a guy. ADHD for women can and does look very different oftentimes; ADDitude magazine has an article to get you started reading up on it.

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I’d be remiss if I wouldn’t acknowledge the fact that, depending on where you live and what your financial situation is, all of the above can be very expensive and a lot of people simply can’t afford that. I know I am in a very privileged position to do so, and it sucks that I don’t have a solution for those who don’t.

I hope you found these posts informative; I’m happy to answer questions in the comments, social media or in private.

Epilogue: a reading list

A while ago, I compiled a list of books that helped me learn about ADHD. Maybe it’ll help you, too.

You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder
It is the classic self-help book and an excellent first read to get you into the topic.

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder
This is an excellent book to follow up the first with if you are not overwhelmed already. It is technically the second book in a series (the first one being Driven to Distraction) but stands on its own.

Your Life Can Be Better: using strategies for Adult ADD/ADHD This is excellent and practical, structured into concise chapters. After you get your dose of theory (and strategies) from the first two books, this gives you a whole lot more that are helpful.

Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It
I believe this is one of the most important books I’ve read about ADHD. It has changed my view on it profoundly, and I consider it a must-read. It has sections on both childhood, and adult ADHD and his two chapters about nurturing your inner child are something I re-read every couple of months.

The book poses the theory that ADHD is a combination of being born with an above-average sensitivity to outside impulses and early childhood trauma, primarily the lack of proper attachment/attunement to the caregiver parent (typically the mother). Again, this fits me; but it may not fit you, and it’s not that mainstream. Then again, mainstream is still pretty scattered — pun not intended — on the origins of ADHD.

I have a blog (you’re reading it!). It’s got history: I set it up in early 2009, and I have almost 600 posts, mostly in Hungarian. I had one before that, between 2005 and 2008, but it was lost due to a variety of reasons, including my failure to properly back things up. Small bits of it are still up in the Wayback Machine, though. It was all in Wordpress, which does its job, though even in 2019 it can be a pain to update things.

From Wordpress to Jekyll to Hugo

About a week ago I decided it was time to migrate it to Jekyll. I was bored, and it gave me a good excuse to play with a static site generator. Plus, doing this kind of conversion became a rite of passage for people working in tech these days.

This is not a complete guide; you can find hundreds of them with a quick google. I will, however, provide a general overview of the process with some helpful pointers and links.

I started by migrating all the comments to Disqus with their official Wordpress plugin. After that, I used a Jekyll exporter plugin that converted all my posts into markdown… except it stripped all the embeds.

I used to blog a lot about music, so I had a lot of embeds, mostly from Youtube. In retrospect, I could have saved myself some time by patching the exporter or finding another one. In the end, however, I ended up fixing every single post by hand. I replaced old, pre-iframe flash embed codes with updated ones and changed the newer, but still http ones to https. In most places, if the video was not necessary or wasn’t available anymore, I added the song to the post via Spotify. The chances of a given song being up on Spotify in a few years feels marginally higher than on Youtube right now. I had a few other embeds that I could fix with newer code (Soundcloud) and others that I couldn’t (Deezer), but most of the time I could find the given song or playlist within Spotify. All of this had the benefit of walking down on memory lane, reading 10-year old blog posts and cringing a lot. I was so young.

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I’ve found a reasonably decent theme for Jekyll, which felt like a good starting point, though it didn’t have built-in support for tags or archives. I started googling how to implement that, and around the same time I was venting about my embed issues on the XOXO slack. That was when David chimed in about his experiences on doing this exact same process, except he ended up using Hugo, another popular static site generator that’s kind of like Jekyll except faster. The theme of his blog had everything I wanted: a fancy archives page and proper support for tags. So I figured I might as well continue my journey: switch to Hugo and use his theme as a basis.

Jekyll is written in Ruby and uses a simple templating language. Hugo’s code is in Go, and it uses Go’s own templates; they definitely have a learning curve, even if you have coded in Go before. With some help, googling and a lot of trial and error, I got the hang of it and managed to change things to my liking as well as the look and the color scheme of the site. I converted most of my posts’ front matter with a script and fixed the rest with a few search-and-replaces. With 8-10 hours of work behind me — half of that was fixing those embeds — I had my new blog ready to be hosted on Github Pages for free. I use a modified version of the sample deploy script they have in Hugo’s documentation.

Getting Rid of My VPS

I had a small VPS at Linode for years now, hosting my pet projects, my blog and a bunch of static sites (like my home page) over the years. It also had OpenVPN installed so I could watch iPlayer for free until BBC started cracking down on that. By now it only had my blog and those static sites; I figured if I could find something for the latter, I could ditch the VPS entirely.

I don’t remember how, but I came across Netlify. They give you free static hosting with extremely generous soft limits (100 gigs of storage, 100 GB/month transfer). You just point them to a Github repository, and about 30 seconds later you have your site ready, with support for multiple custom domains and SSL.

I spent an hour or two moving everything to Netlify, changing the necessary DNS entries and in the end, I was ready to say goodbye to my VPS and save a grand total of $7 a month in the future. I made backups of everything and then, somewhat emotionally pressed the “Delete” button on Linode’s control panel. I wouldn’t be surprised if I would get another one eventually for a side project or something, but for now, I’m happy with my all my stuff hosted around the internet for free and stored in git repos.

On the Future of My Blog

There is a lot more content to come as I started writing regularly. Feel free to subscribe to this blog in your favorite RSS reader.

Hugo gives me a lot of ways to tinker; I am already thinking about replacing the commenting system, adding reading time, word count and so on. I might write something on this in again in the future.

This post was not sponsored by anyone, just in case some of it reads like an ad for Github or Netlify or whatever.

I’m sitting in a wine bar and waiting for my friends to arrive to hang out. I spent my free time today working my converting my blog from Wordpress to Hugo — with a detour of Jekyll — and moving my static sites to Netlify so that I can shut down my barely-used VPS. A full write-up about this is coming soon.

I have about 20 minutes before said friends arrive so this will be one of those stream of consciousness posts where I just start writing and see what comes out of it.

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For the longest time, I did not like neither beer nor wine. Sure, both are acquired tastes, but I tried plenty (especially beer) and it just never clicked. To this day the only beer I drink is alcohol-free lager since it’s the one that tastes the least like actual beer and it has the advantage of, well, not having alcohol in it. If I wanted to get tipsy or drunk I would go with shots or cocktails. That changed in recent years, though; I finally got a taste of wine, dry red wine, to be exact.

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I mentioned a bunch of times already that in 2012 my untreated anxiety disorder got to the point where I started having panic attacks and forced me to seek treatment. One of the side-effects of all this is that my stomach was shot. I had severe discomfort/pain for months; at one point, someone accidentally figured out that the primary cause was high stomach acid and antacid pills help. Slowly, I started recovering. To aid the process and my digestion (in retrospect, maybe my anxiety as well), my old GP, who was somewhat old-school prescribed me a deciliter of red wine, every day, after lunch. It’s not like I had anything to lose, and it’s not enough alcohol to get me tipsy anyway.

So I did that for like two months, and after a few weeks, I started not hating red wine. A few weeks after that, I was a convert. Since then it became my go-to drink of choice.

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I don’t know much about wine. “It’s good” or “It sucks” is as far as I can go. I did develop preferences over the years; by far and large, I like a good Merlot or Pinot Noir. Above all, Shiraz (Syrah) wines, mostly from Australia and New Zealand are among my favorites.

When I lived in Sweden, I had the luxury of having a selection of 100s of different wines from at least 20 different countries. See, in Sweden, there is a government monopoly on selling alcohol above 3.5%; you can only buy the serious stuff in state-run alcohol shops. The pros and cons of this system are beyond the scope of this post, but one huge pro was the selection I’ve mentioned above.

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I’m back in Hungary now, and though there are stores where you can get import wine, most of the wine here is local. Which is not a bad thing, of course; Hungarian is a wine country, and our wine is renowned for its quality. I do miss being able to pick from all the different countries, though.

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My friends started arriving. Time for me to order a glass of Syrah…

Last night I went to bed feeling I might be getting sick, and I woke up most definitely sick. It feels like something in-between a cold and full-blown flu, and I mean, whatever, it’ll pass. What bothers me is the timing: I started working with a personal trainer last week and been to 4 classes so far. Now I’ll have to skip a bunch, and that’s bad when you are building a habit.

I have at least one more post ready in my SF & XOXO 2018 series (to come), but right now I’m struggling to write end edit the ones that come after them. So I’m taking a break today to reflect on writing, and in particular, writing here.

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This is my 31st post here, and I have not skipped a single day. I joined the day Owen opened signups. It’s the second longest personal writing streak I have — the first one would be the one I did when I moved to Sweden and blogged about my life daily for the first few months. I’m sure I skipped days here and there, but I wrote a lot during those days.

I used the term personal writing intentionally. Back in 2003, shortly after I started high school, I started working for a tech news site covering mobile devices, phones and PDAs.

(remember PDAs? I was really into them and had several over the years, even smartphones, and this was years before the iPhone. That’s where most of the money I earned went.)

I kept track of what’s up with the tech world and wrote a news article about whatever I’ve found interesting and fit my scope. For the first two years or so I did it for free; after that, I earned roughly 75 cents per news article. I wrote a few features, reviews and interviews as well (can’t remember how much I made from that, but not a lot).

In many ways, it was the dream writing job. I could write about anything I wanted, and the money I earned with it was significant for a 17-year old still living with their parents. I do feel somewhat ripped off financially in retrospect, though.

I stopped working for the site not long before I finished high school — I sort of lost interest. I think it had run its course.

Some habits do stay with me to this day from that era. Keeping up with the news is one of the reasons I got addicted to RSS and Google Reader. I read The Verge’s and Ars Technica’s feed religiously to this day, even though it is no longer necessary and I skip reading like 95% of it.

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All of the writing I mentioned above has been in Hungarian, though. This is the first time I am writing a significant amount in English, a language that’s not my mother tongue. Now, I pride myself having a good grasp on the English language, and have been fluent in it since I was 15 or so. I don’t even have the stereotypical Hungarian accent; it sounds like generic American English to most ears. When I lived in Sweden, I spoke English 90% of the time. I can and still do think in English a lot. When I’m alone and am talking to myself, that’s often in English as well.

And yet, writing is a different beast entirely. I don’t think I’m bad at it, but I’m conscious of the fact that I’m not great either, and have a lot to learn. I run everything I write through Grammarly and Hemingway, and they help, but they’re not silver bullets. I started reading On Writing Well (thanks, Owen), since nonfiction writing is my thing. And posting here at least 300 words every day itself helps a lot.

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So here I am, 31 days later; a month done, who knows how many to go. And I enjoy it a lot, even though I have no metrics on how many people are reading these posts of mine (I like having an audience and will not apologize for that). For now, I’ll go back to editing and rewriting my series. I have work to do.

I was planning to finish my post about ADHD today, but poor time management and unexpected troubles at work got in the way, so this is one of those posts that I’ll just start writing, and the words will come because they usually do. That’s all I have time for today.

I have to say I am unusually proud of myself about yesterday’s post. I had something written already the day before yesterday, but I wasn’t too happy with that; it was long and disorganized and lacked structure. I took a break, and the next day I started looking at it with fresh eyes. I started editing it, stumbled upon a good article in my research that provided me with an idea for structuring those 34 or so paragraphs. A journalist friend helpfully pointed out that adding subheadings helps to break the text up. I cleaned up a few things in the post with the help of Grammarly and Hemingway.

Two hours or so later, I had something ready to publish. I could have written twice as much, given the time, but I would have had an even harder time structuring that, and it felt way too long already. I also didn’t want to break my streak, which meant I had to publish it that day. So I decided I got to a point where I was reasonably and pressed “Publish” (and then quickly fixed five more things I discovered after that).

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I’ve re-read the Cult of Done Manifesto and to be honest, I don’t agree with many of its points, but at least one of them I find very, very true:

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

I feel like the constraints WriteTogether gives you help you get writing done. You don’t have any excuses: at least 300 words, each day, or you lose your streak. It’s harsh, it could use some refinement (and likely will), but for now, I like it.

See you tomorrow, hopefully with Part 3 of my series done.

Yesterday I read Owen’s “Goals” post and at first, I thought I don’t have any, but then I started writing them down and turns out I do! Without further ado, a list, well, many lists.

Short term / immediate / ongoing goals:

• Keep writing 300 words a day (duh)
• Find another steady freelance gig that’s roughly 10-20 hours a week. I have a few leads, and I already have a long-term client with about 20 billed hours per week
• Keep working with my personal trainer, thrice a week for an hour, which I literally just started (as in, today)
• Somehow start losing weight. For that, I need to change what and how I eat and I don’t yet know how I’ll manage to do that
• Keep drawing, at least once a week, ideally more
• Fix my sleep schedule which is pretty fucked up right now
• In general, keep up with my todo list (eternal goal, really)
• Keep dating
• Be more social/active in general
• Cook more

In 3 months, I want to:

• Lose at least 2 kilos
• Have some idea on how I’ll get my eating habits in order (we’re setting realistic goals here, people)
• Get my sleep schedule in order
• Have that new freelance gig worked out
• Have been on at least another date (again, realistic goals)
• Have started working on the oral history article I wrote about
• Have held at least another dinner party
• Be still writing 300 words a day, still drawing at least once a week, still working out thrice a week (this goal never ends)

In 6 months, I want to:

• Lose at least 5kg
• Have started getting my eating habits in order
• Consider doing therapy again. I’m on a break right now, but if I think I need more time, I’ll give it another 6 months
• Have been on at least 3 more dates
• At least halfway done with that oral history article
• Have held at least 2 more dinner parties
• Still writing, still draw, still work out, etc.

In a year, I want to:

• Lose at least 10kg (stretch goal: anything above that, really)
• Have my eating habits somewhat in order
• Restart therapy with a plan of stopping certain anti-anxiety medications
• Get my cholesterol back to normal levels (if not I’ll likely have to start medication)
• Have $REDACTED in savings
• Published that oral history article
• Re-evaluate my life concerning where I live, and see how much longer do I want to stay in Hungary and also the work I do
• Be in a relationship (yes I know this is not how this works, but one can dream)
• Be in some sort of leadership role in my church
• Hold dinner parties at least once a month
• Write, draw, work out, etc.

In 3 years, I want to:

• Lose 30kg (which is my target goal)
• Have healthy eating habits
• More money saved, obviously (as a freelancer it’s hard to plan for even a year, three years feels impossible)
• Have stopped taking said medications above
• Be married (we’re thinking big!)
• Have my living situation figured out, possibly left Hungary or it’s on the horizon
• Do dinner parties/write/draw/work out, you know the drill

In 5 years, I want to:

• Not live in Hungary
• Have my weight still under 100kg
• Still have healthy eating habits
• Maybe buy a house?
• Have a solid grasp on where my career is going, by this time I’ll be 35 after all
• Have a kid
• Eh who knows about habits when you have a kid, but at least keep working out

Okay, I could go on, but I think this is a good start. Keep me accountable, please?