In other words...

Hi, my name is Alissa Steiber, age 18. I read your story and it made me cry. I am a former eating disorder patient of five years. I have been walking the road of recovery for two years now. I want you to know you are not alone, I don't know who you are and I feel very depressed about you. Please, don't give up!! I know what kind of hell you are going through, I been there too. I am praying to God to give you the strength you need to fight this horrifying battle. You have to look inside yourself and see how beautiful you are. You have to realize you come first and need to help yourself first. You also need to realize you can't fight this alone, I know how hard it is! I look back when I weighed 80 lbs., and thought I was fat, I can't fight anymore, and wanted to die. I am so grateful to my family and doctors that I am alive today. I still struggle with my body image and it is hard. Sometimes I want to give up all over again, but I pray to God for strength. Once you make it over the hardest part of your struggle you will see it's worth fighting and living for. Remember your family is hurting for you, God is wants to help, pray and ask, he saved my life. Only you can want to change, and I will always think and pray for you!

I understand and love you too.
Alissa Steiber

P.S. Sometimes I want to give up again

Now how does this translate to everyday work and school ? Because the ADD person cannot tell what is important and what is not we all act on the LAST IN LAST OUT system. If you are skeptical about this then closely observe the ADD person and see just how many times a minute the ADD person redirects his attention from one task to some other (this could be just responding to a noise in the other room) . Now think about how many times you have given the ADD person a laundry list to perform by saying ...."when you get through with what you are doing I want you to....." see what I mean.

Now how do you deal with this ??? Here is what has and still works for me.

1. Exclude as many distractions as possible. At work I wore industrial ear plugs and found that they were great at filtering out the distractions and allowing me to concentrate on the people that were talking.
2. At home I surrounded my self with "meaningless noise" I listened to music through headphones, here again, we are screening out distractions and allowing the brain to devote all it attention to the task at hand
3. I work on tasks only as long as I can make progress and when the "fog" closes in I quit.
4. I only read what I have to because I like most ADD persons I also am somewhat dexletic so reading is a real problem.

BTW did I tell you I have been a practicing Facility and Mechanical engineer for the last 35 years??? So not reading every little detail about every little subject will not stifle a career much to dismay and amazement of my High School teachers.

I also flunked every algebra, trig and physics course I ever took until I learned to do it different than the book. But my stress analysis always worked. ( at least no structure ever caved in)

OK I am tired now so let's recap and get out of here......

ADD is a information management problem not a lack of intelligence.
ADD Can be controlled by alienating the distractions.
ADD persons work on a "Last in -Last out" system.
ADD people are not well served by those who insist that they be trained "act normal"

Thank you for listening

Ken Phillips

P.S. This letter took me 1:30 to compose using all the features of MS Word 6.2