u/keepfighting90

For context, I'm 35 and got diagnosed with ADHD in late 2023. I've been on Vyvanse since then and it's honestly been a life-changing experience. I actually feel like a normal human being (mostly).

I've been working with a therapist to try and understand the root causes of some specific behaviours of mine, as well as just getting more clarity on how ADHD affected me in the past. It's been an incredibly eye-opening experience, especially because the more I delve into the impact of ADHD on my life through the years, the more I realize just how much it affected my personality, my approach to life and consequently, how much I lost.

Some of the big ones I discovered:

• Making comments that change how people treat me. I've always had a habit of making weird, offbeat comments about situations/myself that sound funny in my head but lead to people making fun of me or treating me like some goofy weirdo. This had a major impact with girls I was dating or trying to get together with, and also happened with general friendships/relationships as well. The best way I can put it is that it's almost like I wasn't seen as an adult. Not really an issue anymore since I've been with my wife for a long time but there's been a noticeable change in the way people treat me post-medication - way more seriously, and with way more respect because I know when to say certain things and when to just not say anything
• Losing interest in my hobbies. This got worse as I got older. I used to love reading/writing/traveling etc. But overtime, I found myself having an impossible time focusing on reading and finishing a book, or writing a story or even getting the same joy I used to from traveling to countries I've been wanting to visit
• Inability to focus and concentrate on academics. I did really well throughout middle school and high school, but my grades dropped off a cliff in university because I found it so hard to motivate and direct myself, and neglected learning and studying. I had to stay an extra year to graduate because of courses I had to retake. I didn't even go to my graduation ceremony because I forgot about it. I have nightmares about it to this day.
• Ignoring financing and budgeting. I just couldn't bring myself to consistently pay attention to my finances - I would keep putting off paying credit card bills, not look at how much money I had left to spend, and even paying tuition. There was a time where it affected my credit really badly (thankfully much better now), and almost permanently ruined my relationship with my wife (then gf)
• Career trajectory/progress. Before medication, I have been at best mediocre at all my jobs because I would just get bored really fast, and stop trying or putting in effort. It's led to be jumping from job to job, and often getting let go because of poor performance. I always struggled to understand why I did this, and why I couldn't bring myself to try to at least be solid at my job. Post-medication, it's been a pure 180 - I find myself locked in on my tasks and projects, and I've been getting consistent praise from my bosses
• General stress and anxiety. We already know about this one - all the overthinking, overanalyzing and procrastinating leads to constant stress and being anxious anytime the smallest thing doesn't go according to plan or how you expect it to

Probably more I'm missing lol...but these stick out to me the most. On one hand, I'm glad that I was able to catch this condition and start to mitigate it. On the other though, I feel sad and frustrated that I spent so many years of my life, my prime youth years too, struggling and being a hollow shell of myself, never quite knowing why I acted the way I did, hating myself for it, and still not being able to change.

So I've developed some pretty debilitating ADHD over the past few years, and one of the many consequences of it was a severe impact to my reading. I gradually found myself a) having an extremely hard time to conventionally pick a book I want to read and b) actually sticking with the book I'm reading without losing interest less than 1/3 of the way through and having FOMO over another book. After getting diagnosed and going on medication, I was able to mostly fix the second problem - but I was still having trouble actually deciding what to read.

The old "pick what looks good/what you're in the mood for" just stopped working for me, and it didn't help that my home library just kept getting bigger and bigger, compounding the analysis-paralysis.

So I basically just removed the choice from myself and left it up to random chance. I put all the books I've really been wanting to read into an alphabetized, numbered list, and used a random number generator to spit out a number anywhere from 1 to xxx. Whichever number came up would be the book I would read - and finish.

I actually found this to work really well for me, since all the books in the list are ones that I would love to read and just haven't been able to because of choice paralysis. And the randomness of it took out the nagging voice in my head constantly thinking that I picked the "wrong" book.

Anybody else have any unusual methods like this to choose what book to read? Probably doesn't apply to normal folks that can just pick up a book what looks cool to them lol.

Goodreads is by far the most popular and most-used book cataloguing and rating site, and for a lot of us, it probably also is a major source of finding what to read through the Lists feature. So for those of you who use Goodreads - how much weight do you put into the ratings on the site? Does a higher/lower score influence whether or not you want to read a book? More importantly, if there's a book you've been wanting to read, does a lower score dissuade you from reading it?

Personally, I'm finding myself paying less and less attention to Goodreads scores as time goes on, and using the site almost exclusively just to catalogue what I've read. There are so many books I've loved that I've seen rated on the lower side (3.7 and under), and lots of books that I thought were terrible or mediocre having 4+ scores. I just don't really trust the scores anymore.

There's very little conventional action in Frederick Forsyth's classic political thriller. Other than 2-3 instances of violence, it's almost completely free of the kind of incident you'd see in similar thrillers. The book, in fact, is made up almost entirely of characters...making plans.

And yet, it's still one of the compelling and exciting books of its kind I've read in a while. It's a classic cat-and-mouse game between the law and the lawless, pared down almost exclusively to process, method and detail. The whole book, in fact, is pretty much just those details, a cold and clinical examination of how the ultimate assassin plans for the ultimate kill. "Clinical" is the perfect way to look at it, as even the main sections of the book are titled as "Anatomy of a...". There are only a couple of scattered moments of violence, and even they're portrayed in a quick, off-hand, clinical manner.

There's something incredibly satisfying in the way Frederick Forsyth captures these seemingly mundane details and turns them into exciting storytelling, whether it's the eponymous Jackal assembling/disassembling his gun over and over to perfect the speed and execution, or spending multiple pages on examining the impact that building angels and wind speed might have on a bullet in a town square, or figuring out a way to take on the identity of a dead child from decades ago. It's just really smart and clever storytelling with minimal exposition and spoon-feeding.

"Competence porn" is something that we all seem to love, and The Day of the Jackal is one of the best examples of it. This extends to the law enforcement officials that are after the Jackal too - there's no genius Sherlock Holmes-type character, just smart, competent professionals following protocol and process to get shit done.

The book is written better than most modern thrillers as well, in a crisp, no-frills style that avoids sounding dull or wooden. There's some commentary here on the impact of nationalism and colonialism and although it's not really the focus, it's still interesting to read about the French occupation of Algeria.

It's not a perfect book by any means, and shows its age in some ways. The female characters exist pretty much only to be sex objects (I don't even know what the point of the Baroness character was other than for the Jackal to bang her lol, because there were numerous other ways that part of the story could've developed). TBF, pretty much all the characters are little more than devices to move the plot along.

But that's not really the main appeal here. If you're looking for a perfectly-crafted political thriller, this is one of the best. A deserved classic.