Peace and Pekoe
Imagine that you’re short. (Maybe you don’t have to imagine, maybe you’ve always been a bit vertically disadvantaged.) Mostly you get along just fine, but every once in a while you come face to face with the reality that everything around you was designed with someone a bit taller in mind. You crank your driver’s seat forward and (if it will let you) higher, you get really good at hemming pant legs, and when someone asks you to fetch something off the top shelf you roll your eyes and go drag out the step stool you keep for such purposes.
Now imagine that the seats don’t adjust and you have no stepstool, and everyone seems oblivious to the reason why you are driving slowly (because you can’t see well) and why you can’t just reach up and grab that jar off the shelf like everyone else does. Sure, everyone needs a bit of help reaching things when they are little kids, but YOU are too old for that. All of your friends can reach the handstrap on the bus. All of your friends can wash the top pane of the window. And if you just cared enough to try harder, you’re told, you would be able to do it too.
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Or say you are extremely short -sighted, in a world that has not invented eyeglasses. When other people ooh and ah at the sunrise, you just see a blur of misty color. Other people see meaning in marks on paper that look like a grey blur to your eyes. You’re forever missing out on the things that the people around you experience together, and it leaves you slightly out of step with the world. (Besides being physically out of step because you are always tripping over things you can’t see). You can fake some of this – you can laugh when everyone else laughs at something you can’t see, and listen for cues to tell you what is around you. You can almost pass for normal – except that you aren’t. You don’t wave to passing friends because you don’t see them, but you are told that if you really cared you would have waved. It feels like you are always causing some offense and most of the time you don’t know why.
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Now imagine that every time you face a task, even one you’ve done dozens of times, you have to double check every step because it never becomes habitual or second nature. The world seems composed of unspoken rules that you unwittingly break on a daily basis, and even when they are explained to you it seems impossible to keep them all in mind. Other people tell you to ‘just stop and think’ as though there is room in between an idea and an action for something as arduous as thinking through consequences. Even if there were, how would you remember to do it? How do you ‘stop and think’? But you can’t get answers to your questions, just blank stares and admonitions to try harder.
Somewhere along the way you learn to build in external prompts to make up for the internal ones you seem to lack. You write reminders to yourself everywhere, and it isn’t enough because you still have no way of prompting yourself to remember to look at the reminders. But people and circumstances outside of yourself give you some structure, and you use those as the supports for all of your kludged workarounds. Even so, you are easily frustrated and sometimes thrown into a spin when one of your external supports proves unreliable.
Despite your difficulty thinking in a straight line or recalling things on cue, your mind is far from empty – if anything, it feels overfull with unrelated ideas, inspirations that come in disconnected waves and leave bits of insight behind like flotsam and jetsam. Random words or incidents can spark off a chain of loosely connected associations and off you go chasing them down in case there is something important there in that rush of thoughts and recollections….leaving your current task or conversation hanging and unfinished. Your friends think you are a bit scatterbrained and insensitive, and maybe a bit of a bore. People who aren’t your friends…well, you might be told that you are arrogant, spoiled, lazy, selfish, insensitive, and rude. If you had difficulty in school you may also conclude that you are stupid as well. You can see that other people manage to live by that tangle of social and behavioral rules and you come up with self-improvement schemes on a regular basis, but none of them stick. You can’t seem to keep anything up for long. Everything you try helps for a little while, but you just can’t seem to maintain any scheme long enough for it to become routine, and once the novelty wears off your latest self-improvement plan, it sinks into the morass of your mind and is lost.
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When I learned I had ADHD – when I had a diagnoses from a professional – it was like being given permission to use a stepstool. It was affirmation that I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t uncaring, that my shortcomings were not entirely a matter of poor character. It was permission to stop beating myself against a wall trying to do the things I thought I ought to be able to do.
It was relief.
And it was hope. All of these years I had been working on trying harder because I thought that was my problem. Now I had a name, something I could research, something that had treatment plans and therapies and medication protocols. Now I had something that I know how to DO. I can make accommodations – openly working around my areas of greatest weakness. I can give myself breathing space to set goals and work on training one deficit at a time, to teach my brain to make lasting connections. And that is enabled by my medication, which helps me retain the progress I make by augmenting the neurotransmitters that organize and tie together related tasks.
These aren’t easy answers. Even medicated I am still a person with ADHD and I still have all the bad coping mechanisms and quirks that I picked up during my 31 years of trying to pass for ‘tall’. But I’m finally content to know that although I will never be a basketball player, there is no shame in using a stepstool to help me reach the highest shelf.
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