hitting the wall

So I've had my first "official" meeting with my advisor on my exams, which went relatively well although she's correct in that I should go through everything I've read with a fine tooth comb playing "fun with Arthur as an imperial monarch" - which could be fun, should be fun, and really should get done sooner rather than later because I need to read Boethius and the Book of the Duchess and get onto reading several accounts of Arthur's death before I can move on to chronicle versions of Arthur and other forms of early English imperialism and even consider working on something to do with my minor field.

That said, I've basically run into a wall. Exams, if I haven't mentioned, are in 3.5 months. I really should be getting more done than this. The issue I've run into is my ever-ongoing ADD, which I didn't really realize was ADD until quite recently (aka, upon finding out that my brother and both my parents have been diagnosed with it as well). I'm not normally the first to go jumping for a pharmoceutical solution to my brain issues, so I'm trying to figure out how to cope. I know my usual pattern with things. I usually can't focus on anything until I've got a deadline staring me in the face. Once I have said deadline (and it can't be set by myself or be artificial in any way - I have to have a grade or other such thing (professorial approval, perhaps?) riding on said deadline - fake ones don't work), I seem to mentally work out about how much time I absolutely NEED in order to get through whatever needs to get done by said deadline, and then get it done in a super-focused mode, where I tend to tune out all of life and everything that isn't immediately concerned with whatever the current project is (which is why abstracts for conferences tend to get submitted on the due date, papers get turned in about one hour before drop dead time, etc). I'm not particularly pleasant during those times, as anyone who's seen me in a fit of paper-writing can attest to.

Anyways, up until now this sort of work pattern has suited me just fine - I've adapted to it, and I understand where my strengths/weaknesses/limitations are. I get things done (somehow). And for some bizarre reason the things I do under intense pressure and stress at the last minute are usually the most brilliant things I do.

So now comes the exam period, and I'm completely stuck - I have no clue how to get myself to focus and work on anything that needs to get done unless I've got a meeting scheduled with one of my examiners - when there's no upcoming meeting I have a tendency to spend a lot of time watching the news getting furious at the President for the 1,983,579,084,375th time, trying to read something, getting frustrated because I can't concentrate, getting listless, dragging myself out to a coffeeshop (of which this particular part of PA is in short supply) to try and read and getting frustrated, going to Barnes and Noble for the same reason and getting caught up gazing longingly at the Zizek I'd love to read and have no time for because it's not on the list, and then coming home feeling defeated and frustrated and crying over every little things on whatever rerun of 'Scrubs' that happens to be on. I can't quite get myself to work at any other time --- other than in the bathtub, which for some reason seems to work marvels on me. I've even gotten to the point where I'm dumping more hot water in the tub rather than getting out when I realize that the water's gotten ice cold. Problem here: I seem to be cursed with hideously dry skin to begin with, and even with the bath bombs and whatnot that I've been using, bathing every night on top of showers on whatever mornings I'm required to be "awake" or "alert" or "ready to teach" is making my skin so dry that getting through ballet class Tuesday night was downright painful. My skin kept cracking.

So I'm stuck now, wondering if for the sake of my Ph.D. (and my poor fiance's sanity) I should haul up to the campus health center/psych ward for the fifth time since I started grad school to try and see if they can come up with something helpful or worthwhile, or at least give me some sort of diagnosis that I could take down to the nurse practitioners (because God Forbid an elite-ish Northeast school could ever possibly get us an honest-to-God DOCTOR) and get a prescription for something to put my brain into the type of relatively-focused state getting through exams is going to require of me. But then that feels like giving up, and after my previous experiences with psychotropic drugs (only Klonipin remains friendly), I'm really not happy about that idea.

So I haven't managed to get anything read in like 24 hours now, and I keep sitting on the couch hearing the clock tick down seconds until the exam, and I keep feeling like the seconds are adding up and I would kill for them to either stop or hurry up so I can be done with this hell somehow and happily slurping a Three Coast Ale at Bells in K-zoo after my presentation. I'm really excited for Kalamazoo this year - I'm presenting a paper that came out of an idea I had in a Chaucer class that then turned into a paper on a slightly different topic for another class on heretics the next semester that then flipped gears again, got vaguely empire-focused and is now playing with anti-Welsh rhetoric and is a far cry from Chaucer, but that's usually how my paper ideas go. It's the first thing I've gotten to work on that seems as though it could turn into a diss chapter or a publication or anything, and I'm starting to feel publication pressure as well. Hopefully when I submit something for publication I'll be able to organize my thoughts better than I did here...

So what the hell does one do with crippling ADD, examiners who are unable due to understandable circumstances to give much meeting time, and 132 more texts to get through before May 1st??