Last week I wrote a mentor and friend of mine in an attempt to explain my strange ways and inconstancies. I was horribly wracked with uncertainty and insecurities while composing it, but to my surprise it was well received, praised for its “clarity of language, the depth of [its] self-perception, the honesty, the wit”. I felt so fantastic, that I’ve decided to recorded it in the annals of the internet. It is my hope that anyone who suffers from a mind disorderly as mine and reads it finds a measure of comfort.

The Disorderly Mind

(Note: the first part of the letter has been edited, due to some personal content)

… which leads to Monday and Tuesday being common representatives of my chronic, inner maladies.

Titles and Apprehension

Not long ago, I was introducing myself to a new-met acquaintance at a café, a young man who recognized me from a class we’d taken together. He asked me how I could study in such a loud place full of people. With a little uncertainty, I explained that because of my personal quirks and factors that I unable to comprehend, I somehow find my zen staring at a laptop screen under dim lighting, with techno-arabesque music blaring and a lungful of hookah-smoke. His reply was simple, canned and not uncommon: “Oh, I have ADD too.” I don’t believe I have ever wanted to punch someone in the mouth so badly as I did right then.

It’s a common thing for people to say, popular almost, whether to excuse themselves from some misconduct, personality quirk, or just to differentiate themselves from the masses as much as one would wear a Livestrong bracelet. I had heard it plenty of times before as well, but not felt so infuriated or insulted as I did this night. It might have been because I realized just how lightly the word is tossed about; a person afflicted with Downs-Syndrome with an adequate level of comprehension might be so insulted to hear the word ‘retarded’ tossed about like a beach ball. It felt terrible, realizing that people were so casually labeling themselves with a disorder that has become a crippling shadow over my past and future, when clearly they were people who could function far more near to normality than I could ever hope to.

I had grown up with the word ADD, and never given it any sort of special attention; and as this was my experience, I can only assume this is the same level of familiarity the majority of our world has with the term. I thought it was a minor title given to a child who was particularly hyperactive, and the commercials and pop-cultural representations of the word did nothing to illustrate it as anything else. This fear envelops me. When I tell someone that I have ADD, do

they dismiss it? Do they believe it to be a title, a minor badge of individuality such as excitability, dullness or vanity? When I talk about it with such gravity, do they silently judge me as one who is blowing a small setback out of proportion in order to gain some measure of pity? I have learned to hold my tongue more often than not, but when the occasion gives rise that I must explain myself, such as this occasion where I am committed to explaining myself to you, I grow as impassioned as I can without becoming incoherent, panicky, desperate to implant the reality of my situation lest they misunderstand.

The Fog

I never once suspected I was so fundamentally different, and different is putting it lightly, bordering hyperbole. A little different, maybe. Lazy, irresponsible, unwilling to live up to my own potential; I believed these were true about me as much as everyone else did. The saintly mother of a familiar daughter, not two years ago, was likely my savior, flipping a lever that started the machinations, gyros, pulleys and gears that have been since laboring to turn the massof my life around. I had been having a ‘foggy day’; a blank look on my face, my mind unproductive and scarcely able to react to stimuli, less able to focus than usual. She asked me as we stood in the kitchen, waiting time away, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have ADD?” I scoffed a bit, and answered in the negative.

ADD? Of course not. I’m not one of those kids. I don’t bounce off the walls, there’s not a television in my mind changing channels like the pharmaceutical ads suggested (in reality there was, this was just a poor metaphor that I couldn’t relate to at the time). The thought was seeded, however, and as I am prone to do with curious topics, I Google searched for an afternoon. I read Wikipedia entries, medical definitions, read attestations from those afflicted.

The more I read, the more I searched, the more the terrible realization gained form. A fog is a good metaphor for what my life was like in the 25 years I spent undiagnosed and ignorant, some days foggier than others. The existence of the fog became clearer once I had a referent of clarity later on, but for the most part I was at some level aware of it all my life. I had, however, assumed it part of the normal human experience, that everyone lived their lives and carried on their occupations through this miasma of consciousness. Some days it felt as if I had peanut butter jammed between the gears of my brain, and it labored with great difficulty to describe, model and produce useful thoughts, and the kinks between my brain or my mouth were certainly greater as I had endless difficulties describing the feeling to others.

Like the majority of those who have shared my experience at the uncommon extreme end of the disorder, my life has been colored by myriad failures. I’ve dropped out of college several times. The longest job I’ve ever held didn’t last two years. I’ve concocted grand schemes, good ones too, and couldn’t bring myself to follow through with them. Starting countless hobbies and projects, and never finishing one. As a child I heard nothing but praise for my mind, and in truth I was a pretty smart kid. I read at an advanced level, I could solve algebra in my head. This made it all the worse when as an adolescent I found myself becoming a “C” student, then failing classes utterly. I no longer read, even when I wanted to; I sat and thought about doing my homework instead of actually doing it, staring at a blank wall; the creative things that once filled me with joy I now shunned, much preferring to just sit and stare into space, relieving my mind of the strenuous thinking that had taxed it so much earlier in the day. These, I surmise, were the first waves of the tide that has ever since eroded my mind.

A Cruel Wizard Behind the Curtain

Attention within individuals is best seen as a spectrum; it’s not a matter of either having a disorder or being normal, rather, people fall into a position on the gradient: some have extreme focus, able to direct themselves to fantastic lengths and amazing accomplishments. The majority fall in the middle, and some, such as myself, fall behind. While the primary causes of the disorder are not well understood, it is generally agreed that the symptoms are tied to levels of chemicals in the brain, and the variations in these chemicals between individuals correlate to levels of mental focus and ability. These chemicals, neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, are responsible for much of the higher order brain activities. Dopamine, responsible for the rewarding the brain after completing an action, are at extremely low levels.

When a normal person posts the mail or does laundry, the brain usually congratulates them with a little burst of dopamine even though the task was not very fun. This doesn’t happen in the disorderly mind, and to make matters worse, the little dopamine that is present is reserved to reward immediately gratifying behavior, such as smoking a cigarette, being bombarded with media stimuli, or jerking off. This vast rift in the reward referents leads to an amazing array of behavior problems, as you can imagine. The mind starts to associate actions requiring mental strain or higher-order planning with negative rewards, and constantly screams at you to do something else when attempting to do such things.

The second head of the beast created by these chemical imbalances are flaws in our basic thought patterns, learning and memory. ADD to the mind could be seen as what dyslexia is to words. Sometimes I equate it to having a car with a five-hundred horsepower engine, but no transmission to connect it to the driveshaft, so the engine revs and revs but the vehicle goes nowhere, though this explanation isn’t quite adequate either. The best way I have heard it explained, inphysiological terms, is comparing the brain to a computer. It executes thoughts and commands in much the same way, pulling chunks of data from memory and either using them to perform tasks, or use them syllogistically to form new ideas. Normally, this is a smooth process. In the attention-deficit mind, it’s not; these chunks of information are sometimes dropped. When dropped, the thought process stops in its tracks. Realizing what has happened, it goes back to find that chunk of data it lost, and more often than not, while it is digging around it drops another chunk it was using as well.

The mere process of thinking that most of us take for granted becomes a nightmare. I can often feel these things happening within my own mind, though whether I’m actually observing these things or tricked into perceiving them is up for debate. When this malfunction is applied to everyday tasks, it becomes clear why people with ADD suck at everything. We forget basic necessities required for tasks, such as keys when leaving the house or a tool when fixing a car. We forget to write things down so we don’t forget these things. When a professor asks us to envision a square to understand a larger idea, we forget a side, and by the time we get rid of the triangle in our minds the professor has already covered several other topics. When we read books, we realize we’ve gotten through a sentence and lost half the words, and therefore have no idea what it said. When solving math problems, which used to be so easy for me, I’ll lose one of the numbers. Okay, 128 multiplied by… wait, what was it? 16. So… fuck, what was the first number? Why am I multiplying these things again? When you have to go back and remember that you are calculating the mass of a gas at STP, and must re-envision the entire model of the problem to confirm exactly why you are using these two numbers every so often, you start to hate everything besides sleeping. Dreams become your reprieve, they operate at your own pace, and your subconscious mind demands no more than your conscious one can give.

As if the direct effects of ADD weren’t enough of a setback, they spawn a plethora of secondary disorders, which in turn may even spawn tertiary disorders, especially when left undiagnosed and untreated. Over the twenty-five years I’ve spent unaware of my condition, I’ve developed a number of these comordbid disorders. Repeated experiences of unsuccessful endeavors create an anxiety complex that forbids me to even attempt to accomplish goals. Years of being scolded for being “lazy”, for “not paying attention”, for “being irresponsible”, coupled with the constant realization that I’m just not as good as my peers gives rise to chronic depression and self-reinforcing low self-esteem. The quarter-century spent “not getting things right” became a habit of undisciplined behavior ingrained into everyday life. These things combined with my new-formed conception of myself, all the fears and stress the knowledge of my condition brings, are producing personality disorders which I am aware but completely at the mercy of, and grow worse by the month. If it doesn’t morph into bi-polar personality disorder within the next few years, as it often does, I’ll count myself lucky.

Hope, Temperance, and Tempered Hope

It took me a year since realizing I needed help to actually get it. I didn’t know the first thing about doctors or appointments or health insurance. During this time, I resorted to less than legal means to help myself. I remember it well, that first day I felt normal. I had paid an exorbitant price for a handful of pills that, from my research, promised to help. It was a small and orange in the palm of my hand, the thing that could either confirm or deny my suspicions; I could find no reason to delay.

Within fifteen minutes, I was Elisha, whisked way in a chariot to behold Metatron. I was Paul Atreides, prescient with the spice Melange. For the first time in my life, the fog was gone. I could see the world and not only myself, but the foggy person I was before clearly. My thoughts came fluidly, manipulated with ease, and building with frightening speed. The words rang out in my forethought, “holy shit, I’m a genius.” A barrier that had prevented me from my potentialhad been torn down, and if I wasn’t using the full power of my mind I was using far more than I’d ever imagined possible. As boisterous as that assertion sounds, the thought caused me burst intotears. In class, I was making productive arguments. At home, I was taking care of business. I had a flash of knowledge, a glimpse of a future where success and all the great things previously daydreamt of was within grasp.

The thrill was tempered even then with the grim realization that though I was no longer a hopeless case, I was still a fundamentally flawed being. Without the pill, I was half a man at best, or at worst, an animal. Over a year of regular medication later, the miracle has lost a bit of its luster. I am continually trying to catch up on the years of my life lost to the fog, and all the while, my dormant behavior is still snarling at me from the pit it hides in. I have, at best, an 8- hour window each day to make use of my brain before it turns back into a pumpkin, a bucket of sludge. Often I get home from class and work and am completely unable to do the things I spent the whole day thinking of doing. I often slump on the couch, and can only think about writing, finishing just one story, but my mind refuses to budge. Even as I am writing this, the revolutions of my mind have begun their slowing, and you can probably tell as the style devolves.

Worse still, as with any amphetamine, my body is slowly building a tolerance towards the pill, and I’m constantly experimenting with supplements and practices that will negate it. The snarling old self, the wanton beast, has been venturing out of its pit with increasing boldness, especially since summer began. Common sense tells me to back off, to rest my chemistry for a while, but another, more urgent voice tells me that I don’t have a day to lose. I have to do more, I have to fix myself, my life, and these things demand my mind to be at top form, spurring the overworked horse on when it craves rest. Though it wasn’t apparent early on, the medication is hell on my corpse, and I’m very conscious of the fact that every day I’m sacrificing my body to restore my mind. It’s a terrible thought, but what choice is there? Should it be better to reach a ripe, old age as a shambling zombie, working through my retirement years as a gas station clerk full of regrets? That’s not a choice. Even with this new-found aid, my future seems bleak; I could fall off the wagon at any time, there’s no guarantee of success even with the pill. I must take a small chance over none at all.

We arrive at Monday and Tuesday. The old me came back, resuming the easy course of burying its head in the sand. I know I have to get it under control or else sink, but I have as many ideas on how to accomplish that task as I do cloning dinosaurs. I hate myself. I love myself. I feel as if much of this is incomplete, but I think that’s as good as I’ll get it today. It’s getting late and I’ve gotta save some energy for faire mes devoirs.

Submitted without confidence, but with sincerity,

Tag: self help

Today is the Day