What Do a Trip To Ireland And ADHD Have In Common?

And 7 words I'll never forget

Every now and again I’m reminded that I have ADHD, and no one am I reminded more by, than myself.

Most of the time I don’t notice it but when it does come into my periphery it tends not to distort my vision a little, it engulfs it. I was reminded once again of how I wish my brain worked differently on my recent trip to Ireland.

My grandparents are both Irish and after my grandad passed away last year, I felt a sudden urge to go. We’ve always been proud of our Irish roots in the family, my mum especially and my grandparent's house was always full of totems from their past lives. Richmond sausages (which were made in Liverpool for Irish immigrants) were always on the go as was Gaelic football. The coffee table would be littered with Irish papers and my grandad would know more about what was going on in County Clare than he would Manchester. It was like walking through a door into a different country at times.

My wife surprised me for my birthday last year with 2 flights booked and headed for Ireland. I was finally going to go! After initially being booked to head over there in April we rearranged due to work commitments for September. We would go to Limerick where my nana was from and head over to County Clare, and more specifically Crusheen where my grandad was from. We couldn’t help but fly into Dublin when we realised that Ireland was playing World Champions South Africa in the France 2023 rugby World Cup which they, of course, won and make a night of it.

The trip was everything I wanted it to be. We hired a car and travelled over 500 km over the course of a few days which granted us the ability to see more than I’d hoped for. We visited Doolin and watched the Atlantic Sea smash into the cliffs. We visited the beautiful Cliffs of Moher and were taken away by the brutality and geology of the cliffs (my wife has a geography masters), and we went to Spanish Point where we had probably the best toastie I've ever eaten. There was still one thing that I wanted to do though.

My grandad was an orphan. He was born out of wedlock and considered back in them days to be a ‘bastard’. His mother, whom he would never speak to abandoned him. He would eventually find out who she was at least but as for his father he never even knew his name. We can all be thankful that practices such as these are disappearing. Albeit not soon enough. My grandad was taken in by a lovely couple called May and Jack as well as two other boys who my grandad would stay close to until he died.

I was on the road to find out where his home was.

The village was beautiful, and my immediate words were why would anybody want to leave here? Everywhere you looked it was green, there were forests and lakes, winding country roads and the houses, isolated on their own little piece of land stood proudly. I can only imagine what the sky would have looked like there. We almost gave up trying to find the house as our flight time was counting down. We had instructions from my mum as to what it looked like (nothing like she described), my auntie (nothing, but different to how my mum described it) and a lady in the local shop who knew where the house was (somewhat right). We decided to give it one last throw of the dice as the road it was supposed to be on was en route to the airport to catch our flight. We cautiously stopped at what could have been ‘the two, two-storey houses’ which the lady from the shop said (wrong colours windows though) and took a turn down the road. This was the last road and if my grandad's house was to be there it would be the first house on the left. As we drove down the road we spotted a house, but it wasn’t on the left it was on the right. I decided to stop.

This was one of those moments in life where all the stars align.

We looked at the house and after some silence, my wife said, ‘That’s the house’. There was a rusty gate which my mum said there would be and a tree that had been chopped down. I saw a man walking towards us in the rear-view mirror of the car and decided to step out and walk towards him. I didn’t know what I would say to him, he was walking towards me and was covered in cut grass. I’d interrupted him during his work it appeared. He began to lift his helmet off and greeted me with a kind hello, a familiar hello.

There was only one man who knew where my grandad's house was, and he was walking right towards me.

Out of sheer chance, the man walking towards me was a man named James who used to look after my nan and grandad when they both visited Ireland every year. I’d met James for the first time at my grandad's funeral and was taken aback by his kindness and the gratitude he had towards my grandad. My family couldn’t speak highly enough of him and there he was, at exactly the moment I needed him the most walking right towards me to tell me that this was his house.

“Would you like to take a look inside your grandad's house”? he offered.

The trip was marred with tiny incidents reminding me that my brain was beginning to feel overwhelmed.  It was the Autumn of 2021 when I decided to look for help regarding getting a diagnosis of ADHD. My wife and friend had always been convinced that I’d had it and urged me to get a formal diagnosis from somebody qualified to do so and when it did come it wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t feel any immediate relief, more of vindication and I somehow felt a little prouder of the things I’ve achieved in the past with this apparent handicap I have. I scored high for the inattention section of the diagnosis and just missed the boat on the hyperactivity, but I’m always reminded of the words she said to me. “You’ve just missed out on the scoring for the hyperactivity (like it was a game) but, you need to be careful going forward as you’re showing potential signs of burnout”.

I remember lying, unintentionally, on the test when I was asked about my impulsivity, and I said I wasn’t anything like that. I don’t know why I lied and didn’t really notice I’d lied until a couple of weeks after our chat when it became clear that I was in fact, very impulsive. Maybe I knew I was impulsive but felt that somehow it showed a lack of discipline and didn’t want to admit it however, it might be the symptom I notice the most now. I have this urge to all the time be doing something. It completely engulfs me, and it becomes more apparent the second I decide it’s time to sit or lie down and chill out. I’ve got up in the middle of the night to water the plants, like if they had to wait another moment they’d dehydrate to death! My brain is constantly on send. It’s like a thought factory that’s just pumping out instructions 24 hours a day and, in any order, relevant or not it wants. I can go from playing the piano to checking my work diary, to searching for something on Google to watching a YouTube video and ordering some clothes in a few minutes. I know exactly now what she meant by burnout. It wasn’t physical, it was mental. Being mentally exhausted is hard to spot. If I’m in the gym and I can’t press anymore I can be sure my shoulders, arms and chest are taxed. When juggling all these impulsive thoughts and acting on them, how do I know when I’ve gone too far? When is it time to try and rest and recuperate? I find it a little harder to know when I’ve gone past that line.

I went to Crete this year for a 10-day break and felt after it, the most refreshed I’d felt in years. I knew I was putting too much pressure on myself and that’s where the idea of this newsletter came from. It was just my thoughts, my interests written down. A form of meditation and if somebody so happened to read it hopefully there’d be something practical or interesting, they can take away from it. I decided to follow my interests and do and write only about those. Since coming back from Crete in July my addiction to adding extra work on top of an already high workload has crept back in. I’ve purchased an online piano course that consists of over 40 hours of video. I’ve purchased a writing course to help me with my newsletter and social media content. I’ve purchased an annual membership to an investment newsletter that has thousands upon thousands of PDF pages from all-time great investors that I need to find time to read as well as complete the courses they have. I’ve purchased Tiago Forte’s second brain template to help try and offload what’s in my brain to free up more bandwidth. That comes with hours and hours and hours of tutorials and getting to know the software. I have to read for a certain number of pages a day (which I never hit) and feel horribly guilty for being lazy when I don’t. On top of all the extra curriculum I give myself I’m also a newly appointed co-owner of a construction company and with that a bucket load of real-life adult stuff that I can’t shy away from anymore. There are probably more but like most adults, I only get a few hours a day to actually do the things I want and with the evening being taken up by going to the gym and feeling exhausted I get up at 05:00, a few hours before work to get done, in peace the things I like to do such as this newsletter, reading, stock analysis and of course, water the plants. I’ve not even mentioned housework and socialising.

In Ireland, I left my wife’s luggage on the plane (her fault for making me responsible), forgot the pin to my credit card and almost couldn’t hire our car which we’d paid for, had a shower with my non-waterproof watch THREE times with each subsequent shower shouting the words “For fuck’s sake I’ve done it again” and lost my coat. I kept jokingly telling my wife that it’s hard being me, but I somehow feel she has the shitter end of the stick! I can’t fill in forms, check myself into the airport or look for places to eat. I rely on her for all those things. It’s not that I physically can’t it’s just 1. I fucking hate doing all the above 2. It bores me beyond belief and 3. It would literally take me ages to do so. When Abbi does make me do it, she stalkingly watches over my shoulder and shouts at me when I divert from the task which I inevitably do. “CONCENTRATE” she yells.

My grandad's house was a beaten-up old white cottage with overgrown shrubbery around it. Looking out from the house offered a tranquil, peaceful view of rolling green hills and trees for miles. It made me happy to think that, with everything going on in his life he got to look out at that every day. Inside was like stepping back in time. In fact, nothing had changed, apart from decay since the 1970’s when May died. Upon walking through the door, you were in the centre of the room which I’m told was the kitchen area. There was a beautiful old cast iron wood fire and a table with old VHS videos and Gaelic football posters. There were two rooms to the left, one a bathroom and the other a bedroom no bigger than 2 x 2m. To the right was a living/bedroom about twice the size. When thinking that 5 people lived in this house my thought was “I hope they got on with each other”! The old ceiling looked as if it could fall down at any minute, and the original timber windows were rotted. There were spider webs over almost everything inside of the house and it looked more like a set from a Halloween film than a home, but I felt nothing but happiness. James was there telling us stories about the house and how their days would have been which made it even better. For the first time on the trip, I wasn’t thinking about all the things I needed to do I was happy being where I was with whom I was in an old beaten-up house.

James invited us back to his house for a brew and even though we knew we wouldn’t have time we couldn’t refuse. We were accompanied by his dog chops. An overly eager Springer Spaniel. James made us a brew, insisted on us having some brack cake with Irish butter on it and pulled out a booklet he’d had made. It was everybody from the mid-1800s who went to the local but now shut down school. This included my grandad. I found a picture of my grandad dating to the 1950s with a small phrase underneath it from my grandad himself when asked to comment on his time at school. “Always getting told off ha ha. I remember when I ripped up some books and told the teacher the school was infested with rats”. I don’t think he left Ireland; I think he was kicked out!

We were in James' kitchen exchanging stories when he said something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He said that my grandad was a gentleman and that “No matter what, he was always happy with his lot”. My grandad battled cancer 7 times, had a leg amputated and had only 6 working fingers but I never, ever saw him grumble. Not once. We mock the stiff upper lip, just crack on attitude of yesteryear as if it was some kind of curse but I never saw anything of the sort. He inspired his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and those who knew him.

Since being back I’ve been in my own head. The funniness of my calamities has worn off and there’s a sense of embarrassment and anger that’s crept in. I’ve found myself wallowing at my apparent disadvantage. I’ve researched which ADHD books I need to buy and re-listened to the Huberman special on ADHD to try and get to grips and wrestle with this annoyance. I’ve written this newsletter to vent, to share and for reference.

So what do I do when I’m reminded of my ADHD? There are a million things I could do but only one of them has made me feel something in the pit of my stomach. Moving forward, there’s only one thing, one quote, one reminder I need to tell myself:

“Are you not happy with your lot?”