I identify strongly with vast swaths of your post, which reaffirms my plans to begin some medication management within the month. (My psych provider was a bit concerned about my blood pressure, so he/she had me visit a PCP who wants to monitor my blood pressure for a month before he signs off on proceeding with stimulant medication, or I'd be on it now).
For me, I was diagnosed when I was in 4th grade, but my mother didn't want to medicate. I was able to more or less cope a little bit while school and such gave me structure - I was able to cope as long as school provided me with strong structure. But as soon as all that structure started to dissolve I began to struggle quite a bit, and three years ago any structure provided by others all but dissipated.
Spoken like someone who has never really had to deal with severe focus problems.
That's a lot like telling someone who is learning to walk again after an injury that they don't need those fancy "crutches" or "slings" that pansies use - people with real gumption just hop out of bed. If they break their noses a few times along the way, they just need to remember that they aren't taking the path of least resistance, and that it's a sign that they aren't weak people.
I'll probably be starting medication management in about a month, after 31 years worth of trying to make it work for myself. It was manageable previously because I had lots of structure provided to me to lean on - from school, from bosses, whatever. Now that I'm the one providing structure for myself and others, I've found that I simply can't function. I've tried for three years to self structure with all the self-help you can think of. I don't want to be medicated forever, but I really need something to help me focus just a little bit so that I can develop good habits.
The entire email transation between a sender and a recipient usually looks like this:
Sending Client [--A---> Sender SMTP Server [--B---> Recipient SMTP Server [--C--> Recipient IMAP/POP server <---D----] Recipient Client
Connections A and D are easily possible to encrypt, provided your provider provides SSL/TLS on their SMTP and IMAP/POP servers. Most usually do. Connection C is usually local to a single machine, or for large email providers will go over an intranet of some kind.
What is at issue is connection B, which goes over the public internet. That is almost always in clear text, as most of this infrastructure was designed 30 years ago and hasn't evolved much since then. If you are sending email within a single provider (e.g. [email protected] to [email protected]), such delivery can be trivially encrypted.
For me, I was diagnosed when I was in 4th grade, but my mother didn't want to medicate. I was able to more or less cope a little bit while school and such gave me structure - I was able to cope as long as school provided me with strong structure. But as soon as all that structure started to dissolve I began to struggle quite a bit, and three years ago any structure provided by others all but dissipated.
Thanks for sharing.