The Long Way to ADHD
It’s 1991. I’m four years old.
I find myself backstage somewhere,
dressed in a scratchy sequined Christmas dress.
I stand under painfully fluorescent lights,
squeezed in line next to classmates
I’ve seen dozens of times
yet have the faintest idea what their names are.
I hear the excited murmurs of adults behind the curtain.
My chest tightens as I scan the room.
My classmates are gleaming with confident anticipation.
Their confidence increases my unease.
“What are we doing here?”
I wonder, as if I’ve just been shot into Jumanji.
Does everyone else really know why we’re here?
Apparently, yes.
I, however, do not.
And then…it hits me.
We’re supposed to perform.
Come to find out, we’ve been rehearsing this moment for months
during choir while I was daydreaming about handstands and naptime.
Tears of panic stream down my face.
I have no idea what we’re supposed to be singing.
I sob harder.
My saintly preschool teacher scoops me up
and proceeds to hold me for an hour in one arm
while orchestrating an entire preschool performance with the other.
I am not feeling very festive.
Fast forward.
I’m in third grade.
I have ginormous glasses, strappy headgear, and a bowl cut.
A real dynamo.
My teacher calls my mom to tell her I’m a gifted reader.
My mom is shook.
“Are we talking about the same human?”
Mom sees the kid whose head lives somewhere in the clouds of imagination.
The kid who walks on her hands more than her feet and performs dance routines for invisible friends.
The kid who cannot keep her room organized for more than four consecutive seconds.
The kid who has tsunamic meltdowns at the thought of another BORING grocery run.
Not exactly a child consumed by academic ambition.
But apparently, I can read.
Really read.
Why could I do something extraordinarily well
and still struggle with things that seemed so intuitive to other kids?
I join the gifted reading group.
I’m kicked out of the gifted reading group.
Apparently, I’m a fantastic reader only when the reading is fantastic.
Why can I focus so intensely on my interests but abandon ship
when the subject is slightly dull?
Why can’t my brain work like everyone else’s?
I spend the rest of my elementary and middle school years relying heavily on intuition,
pattern recognition, and being a sweet and obedient kid no teacher would actively want to fail.
High school arrives. Things get harder.
Instruction gets hazier.
Teachers are less accommodating.
If I’m not writing or reading something interesting,
I’m checked out.
The teachers’ voices drone on like the television in another room.
I try to listen. I really do. I hear a sentence or two, and my mind drifts.
So I study my classmates instead.
They seem interesting.
Their faces.
Their clothes.
The way popular girls flip their hair and boys fight for their attention.
I watch who is flirting with whom.
Who is gossiping about whom.
I daydream about crushes.
I build entire imaginary lives while sitting three feet away from a teacher
explaining something about molecules and atoms.
My junior year, I enroll in high school psychology.
Ms. Tulan seems young and cool.
She’ll probably have grace for my wandering mind.
She is a psychology teacher, after all.
But something strange happens.
Ms. Tulan begins teaching the class ALL about human behavior.
She explores relationships and emotions and motivations.
I’m enthralled.
The fog lifts.
I understand everything, and I want more.
Where can I research this on my own?
Maybe I wasn’t incapable of concentrating.
Maybe I was incapable of reliably deciding what my brain would concentrate on.
At seventeen, though, I don’t know any of this.
I just know that some subjects make me feel stupid and others make me feel like myself.
Despite average grades,
I write my way into college with an essay that is
authentic and human and engaging.
Apparently, when I am allowed to think and write about something in a way that feels like me,
I can make things happen.
College begins.
My professors quickly become privy to my terrible organizational and study skills.
I lose things.
I procrastinate.
I cram.
I somehow survive.
But they also notice something else.
I think quickly.
I think deeply.
I make connections.
When I’m passionate about something, I am all in.
They encourage those strengths. They write recommendations for me despite my limitations.
This becomes a pattern.
Grad school and my early twenties follow a familiar rhythm: disorganization, impulsivity,
deep interests, last-minute panic,
hyperfocus, intuition, strong and candid relationships with professors,
and an almost supernatural ability to skate across the finish line
just before the deadline.
It works. For years. Until it doesn’t.
Or, more accurately, it works until the stakes get high enough that the system stops working.
Fast forward.
I’m in my early thirties.
I’m married with two kids. I’m running a private practice, managing a home,
and trying to keep several human beings alive, dressed, fed, and emotionally regulated.
My husband, like me, has a brain prone to forgetfulness
and deep, consuming interests.
My firstborn daughter seems totally normal…just like me.
My second-born can’t stop running into things and babbles constantly.
She never stops moving.
“Maybe she has ADD!” I joke to my husband.
We laugh it off.
The mental tabs of life are endless.
My executive functioning is hitting its limit.
I can’t remember why I walked into a room.
My keys are perpetually missing.
The house is disorganized.
I make a list of things to remember and then accidentally throw away the list.
Someone is always hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, overstimulated,
understimulated, or deeply offended by the way her sister is breathing.
The music is too loud and then not loud enough.
Everyone needs something,
and I am apparently responsible for remembering all of it.
I’m scattered. Overwhelmed.
Maybe other adults are simply better at adulthood.
Maybe everyone else received an instruction manual
and mine got lost somewhere between
the preschool Christmas concert and the car keys.
Then, one day, my therapist asks a question that changes the story:
Have you ever considered ADHD?
Excuse. Me. What.
I am not a hyperactive little boy launching himself across a classroom.
I am a woman with a graduate degree,
a private practice,
and two wonderful children.
Yes…
I have 17 water cups on my nightstand and a perpetually half-full tank of gas -
but let’s be honest:
Does anyone really have the patience to stand there long enough to fill it all the way?!
Besides, I can focus.
Sometimes, I can focus so intensely that the rest of the world disappears.
I don’t yet know that this is part of the story too.
To be continued in part two….