When I went back to work after maternity leave, I found myself trying to multitask while pumping at work in a little back room. I was trying to type at the same time before eventually spilling everything all over my work laptop. I had wasted like 45 minutes and lost everything I had pumped, but no use crying over spilt milk. My keyboard was also fucked, but I tried to stay calm. I told myself I can just hook up an external keyboard and use it like that. “This is fine.”
For a few weeks that worked. I walked around with an ancient Mac laptop and a loose bulky Microsoft keyboard hooked up by USB. But, I kept having issues with parts of the Mac keyboard that still functioned randomly turning on and interfering while I was working.
Finally I got frustrated and found a recommendation on an old Apple forum from someone on how I could just completely disable the Mac keyboard. So I just went for it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I ended up absolutely just fucking up the whole laptop, and it wouldn’t even turn on without crashing.
I panicked and tried asking somebody who at least knew a little more than me about tech for help. They were like “it’s probably not a big deal as long as you didn’t go into the terminal or something, haha.” I didn’t even really understand what that was at the time, but that’s exactly what I had done.
I didn’t want to have to explain everything with the pumping, and the breast milk, and the external keyboard, and the terminal to my boss, so I tried going to a Mac store in a mall way out in the suburbs. I fucking hate the mall and I hate the suburbs, but I went.
They couldn’t fix it, but they gave me the card of some guy in California who maybe could. I was seriously going to ship this absolutely fucked almost 10 year old laptop across the country to fix it, when finally I just went to our IT person and she was like “Why are you trying to fix this? This thing is ridiculously old, let’s just get you a new used laptop and move everything to an external hard drive…” Thank God for that lady.
Anyway, that was how, in my early 30s, I finally decided to seek treatment for my lifelong ADHD.
And even once I did that, it was still like a 6 months uphill battle before the psychiatrist I was seeing finally accepted I wasn’t “faking it.” Or at least before he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to just go away without getting treatment.
When I went back to work after maternity leave, I found myself trying to multitask while pumping at work in a little back room. I was trying to type at the same time before eventually spilling everything all over my work laptop. I had wasted like 45 minutes and lost everything I had pumped, but no use crying over spilt milk. My keyboard was also fucked, but I tried to stay calm. I told myself I can just hook up an external keyboard and use it like that. “This is fine.”
For a few weeks that worked. I walked around with an ancient Mac laptop and a loose bulky Microsoft keyboard hooked up by USB. But, I kept having issues with parts of the Mac keyboard that still functioned randomly turning on and interfering while I was working.
Finally I got frustrated and found a recommendation on an old Apple forum from someone on how I could just completely disable the Mac keyboard. So I just went for it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I ended up absolutely just fucking up the whole laptop, and it wouldn’t even turn on without crashing.
I panicked and tried asking somebody who at least knew a little more than me about tech for help. They were like “it’s probably not a big deal as long as you didn’t go into the terminal or something, haha.” I didn’t even really understand what that was at the time, but that’s exactly what I had done.
I didn’t want to have to explain everything with the pumping, and the breast milk, and the external keyboard, and the terminal to my boss, so I tried going to a Mac store in a mall way out in the suburbs. I fucking hate the mall and I hate the suburbs, but I went.
They couldn’t fix it, but they gave me the card of some guy in California who maybe could. I was seriously going to ship this absolutely fucked almost 10 year old laptop across the country to fix it, when finally I just went to our IT person and she was like “Why are you trying to fix this? This thing is ridiculously old, let’s just get you a new used laptop and move everything to an external hard drive…” Thank God for that lady.
Anyway, that was how, in my early 30s, I finally decided to seek treatment for my lifelong ADHD.
And even once I did that, it was still like a 6 months uphill battle before the psychiatrist I was seeing finally accepted I wasn’t “faking it.” Or at least before he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to just go away without getting treatment.