It IS Personal

I long avoided writing anything personal here, the thought being that this was going to offer the facts, and other places could offer feelings.

The problem is, it doesn't work like that. At the end of the day ADHD is a whole lot more than some misfiring synapses in the brain and questions about which medicines work and how.

It is almost entirely about how it effects ones life; if it had no effect, if it were only about the synapses, than it wouldn't matter at all if anyone had ADD. It would be a quirk like red hair or left-handedness.

But it's not. I recently read an interesting kids' book The Lightning Thief. Broadly, it and the other books in the series answer the question "what if there were children of the Greek gods among us mere mortals today." The answer, in it's unfairly abbreviated form, is those children would all be dyslexic (hard wired to read Greek not English) and have ADHD (hard wired for battle not modern-attention spans).

The thing I liked about it, is it didn't glorify ADHD. When the kids are in the special camp for "half bloods" (half god, half mortal) they are in their element, but they are nowhere close to godliness in the world everyone else exists in. They have real problems in school and in making and keeping friends. They suffer realistically with severe cases of dyslexia and ADHD.

It is a great read for middle school students because it is an intersection between literature and mythology, and--perhaps more importantly-- it creates a platform for thinking about what kids who are different have to offer (that probably takes a teacher's prompting, since kids are generally not threatened by titans in their day to day lives).

But for me, it also gave another message, one that I've been avoiding: this is something I have. It's the way I am. For better or for worse. Period.

So when my mom asked why a three page essay was taking me so long to write, I said "that's the way I'm wired" and moved on to talking about the importance of research and the idea that "the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

But being able to say "that's the way I'm wired" is the result of months and thousands of dollars in therapy. Which is to say that therapy is expensive and, I think for people diagnosed with AD(H)D in their adulthood, often necessary.

I still get massively frustrated with how long it takes me to get things done and the anxiety that the lost time and the frustration produces. But even as I am annoyed at myself, being able to say "that's the way I'm wired" without it feeling like a lame excuse, rather an explanation of how I will inevitably approach the world and the tools I will need to find and develop, is something that is important enough for me to share with others.

Important for me to post on this blog. So maybe others in similar positions will mull it over themselves.