You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Crazy, or Stupid?…What about Selfish?

“I used to think the brain was the most fascinating part of the body. But then I thought, “Well, pfft. Look what’s telling me that.”    – Emo Philips

 It’s a good thing people don’t flat-out accuse me of not paying attention, because the honest response would be, “Oh, I am paying attention; just not to you.” 

I am here today to confess that I am totally, utterly self-absorbed.

One of those self-report scale statements (Sometimes, Often, Rarely, Never) that always used to bother me was “I am easily distracted by outside stimuli.” I would check “Rarely” and then go on to tie myself in knots about how maybe I was wrong thinking I have ADD; I’m not the “Oooh, shiny!” type, I never have been….

What I eventually realized was that I was distracted: it just happened to be by all the stuff going on on the inside. My own thoughts were of far more interest to me than anything out there.

Here’s the way I put it when I was jotting down the notes to bring to my evaluation:

 My inner mind is a major character in my life, and rarely shuts up. I’m constantly aware of my mind reacting….Sometimes the subtext is present enough to seem almost like a narration, although usually that only happens if I’ve been recently reading a good novel.

 ….she typed, trying to recall the feeling precisely as she entered it into her blog….

Wow, that really does sound crazy.

OK, the narrative version of my thoughts doesn’t happen all that often. But the constant awareness I have of myself, this totally conscious reaction to everything, that’s all the time. For a long time I assumed that everyone went around this way. After all, there was that acting class I took in college, where we devoted several sessions to a technique called “subtext.” Subtext is what the character is thinking or feeling beneath the surface, which may or may not match what is being said in the dialogue. “Wow!” I remember thinking, “My whole life is subtext!”

You could choose your character’s subtext, and you were supposed to think it silently throughout your scene. Looking back, the most effective subtexts tended to be fairly simple things; such as “I love you,” or “I want to kill you,” or “I am going to kill you.” The  subtext was a barely-conscious thing, a silent mantra, it was the emotion driving the character’s behavior. All the wordy stuff, that’s what your character says out loud, sometimes in iambic pentameter.

So in actuality my subtexts aren’t anything like the acting class. They are more like the script itself, with the monologue going on entirely within the confines of my head: “Oh, my God! He’s looking right at me! What do I do? I feel completely frozen….Does he know what I am thinking right now?”  It’s almost as if life is the sportscast and I am my own color announcer –

Cue music: “I’m My Own Grandpa”

Yes, there are soundtracks, too; because everything kicks off a song lyric or two.

I suppose you could say that some of this really is sort of like the “Oooh, shiny!” phenomenon, because the things I’m thinking about might happen to be things in my surroundings. There I am, in the pediatrician’s office, and the doctor is giving me instructions for my child’s strep throat treatment, and I’m thinking about how curly the doctor’s hair is, or about the artwork on the exam room walls, or wondering what’s in the file she’s holding. That’s not about me, right? It’s about the hair, or the art, or the file….

But it’s supposed to be about the doctor, the one who is talking. The one who is trying to help us. It’s supposed to be about my sick child, who just wants to go home and feel better. And instead I’m asking the doctor to repeat herself because I’m sitting there amusing myself with my own observations.

Sometimes I am highly aware and observant of the present moment, the current conversation, but usually that’s because I’m trying to get the details right for the blog. Usually I then go on to start silently composing my blog entry right there before the conversation has finished.

And the subject of the blog, of course, is…me….

Now that I’m on meds, this should be better, right? Since starting medication I’ve had a couple of amusing situations where I’ve been sitting listening to somebody talk, and I’ll suddenly realize, “Hey! I’ve been focusing really well! I’ve been paying attention to this entire sermon! This is so great! I never used to be like this before; those meds must be working! Thank God I got that diagnosis and solved the –

Oh, damn, what did she just say?”

No, I’m not quite where I need to be yet.

So you’ve probably figured out that I go to church, and if there’s a mind-wandering minefield anywhere, it’s church (positive-spin version: I am meditating.). I am constantly catching myself Not Paying Attention, and then of course I have to berate myself and promise to do better, which is good for another five minutes of Not Paying Attention, and last week in the middle of this lovely cycle, I became consumed with this idea: I don’t have ADD; no, the reason I am not paying attention because I am self-absorbed; I am SELFISH. I have not loved God with my whole heart because I’m infatuated with my own brain! I have not listened to my neighbor as myself! I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs of the conversation…..

Yes, my faith in my ADD diagnosis was shaken that day. Maybe I really was just this horrible, terrible, selfish person. Attention Defecit indeed. Pfft! Attention Defecit as in, she wants more attention; she’s not getting enough already, the greedy thing! And, look, she’s on drugs, too – she’s on speed! She deserves to be punished…..

And I have been, in a way.

From time to time, I get bouts of what Google tells me is called “Patulous Eustacian Tube.” Which is just a fancy way of saying the tubes in my ears like to stay open, rather than returning to their normal closed state, after popping open during a yawn or a swallow or what have you. Whenever I try to ramp up my fitness routine, it kicks in, usually for about an hour or so at a time, on and off all day long, until my body adjusts to the new activity level after a few weeks.

The main symptom of a patulous Eustacian tube is autophony, which is the sensation that your speaking voice is amplified inside your head. Simply put, when you talk, you hear yourself very loudly. Other voices are either normal or slightly muffled. As you might imagine, it’s hugely annoying to hear yourself amped-up when speaking; it can be almost uncomfortably noisy. At times even breathing and chewing sounds become obnoxiously present.

I can’t stand to hear my voice in my head.

The punishment fits the crime, wouldn’t you say?

Brains vs. Beauty

Now that I’m on medication, I’ve found that my energy paycheck has doubled. Which is great, but as I recall there’s usually an admonition that goes with a windfall:

“Don’t spend it all in one place!”

I think I may be doing precisely that.

Every year when the kids go back to school, they leave me alone for several hours a day in a messy house. And, as in years past, my initial response was to roll up my sleeves and attack it. Since, in years past, I wasn’t on medication, those efforts were usually tripped up by all kinds of side tracks and discouragement.

This year, thanks to “will in a pill,” it’s different, as I’ve reported in prior posts. The cleaning projects are all on track, Week 3 still sees me cleaning sinks and toilet bowls today, Monday, as the calendar I created has decreed.

So my house looks great – at least, compared to what it once was.

But now the signs are creeping in that I don’t quite have this ADD problem licked.

This was to be expected, of course. The pills can’t solve everything. But I was really hoping that, at the very least, that I would be able to tackle at least one or two – to borrow a phrase from one of those questionnaires  – “tasks that require a great deal of thought.”

I might have fooled myself a bit in the beginning, in the sense that I put a great deal of thought into creating a housekeeping calendar for myself. But at the end of the day, it’s still vacuuming, it’s still cleaning toilets. It was the easiest project to jump into precisely because it doesn’t require a great deal of thought. Great thoughts – such as my clever names for each day’s tasks – are entirely optional.

Meanwhile, there are letters not being written, and research and talking points not being put together, music not being rehearsed. Even the papers requiring no more action than listing dates on a calendar are piling up.

Admittedly, the common thread amongst these tasks isn’t just that they require thought, but that they require Thought That Is Not Fun. The letters are condolence letters, the research and talking points for a job I’m nervous about, and I just flat-out hate putting dates on the calendar, because 1) I inevitably put at least one date into the calendar incorrectly; and 2) The dates are usually for Not-Fun things, and 3) There’s guaranteed to be a conflict with something already on the calendar that will need to get worked out. Serious Un-Fun-itude.

And so my house looks really, really great….

My mom used to have a potholder hanging on display in the kitchen that read “For THIS I spent four years in college?!?”

Strangely, I am reminded of my college days – senior year, to be precise – as I fling myself headlong into the laundry. Back then I was in incredible shape, a paragon of fitness. Hard-won fitness, to be sure. I ran something like six miles a day, on a ridiculously hilly road. In the winter I cross-country skied, or swam endless laps in the pool. I look damned fabulous in my graduation photos.

Trouble was, I wasn’t simply running, or swimming. I was running away, swimming in doubt. All that exercise time was to fill up time that I should have spent finding myself a job, or at least figuring out what field I wanted to enter. The very idea filled me with terror; I simply had no clue what I wanted to do. And so I exercised instead. Lucky me, choosing an escape route that actually had some benefits, but I’m pretty sure all those long workouts fit somebody’s definition of perseveration. And, no, I didn’t have any sort of plans made upon graduation, and I would dearly pay for that lack of planning for a long time. In ways I’m still paying for it.

So I’m looking around at my clean house, and I can’t help but wonder: is amped-up housekeeping my new version of the Escape Marathon? Instead of a Pretty Me, it’s a Pretty House, but it looks awfully similar, as I throw myself into something flat-out physical to avoid those pesky, troublesome thinking tasks.

Because, really and truly, I don’t want my tombstone to look like this:

What Am I Supposed to Be Doing?

Recently there was a discussion on the Totally ADD forum about the phenomenon of “hyperfocus” – a total absorption in an activity. For a while the conversation got tangled up in the annoying similarity of two words, “perseverance” and “perseveration.” So I decided to get a dictionary’s differentiation:

Perseverance:   Steady persistence in adhering to a course of action, a belief, or a purpose; steadfastness.

Perseveration:  The tendency to continue or repeat an act or activity after the cessation of the original stimulus.

 

To me, these are not so much opposites as they are the positive-spin and negative-spin versions of the same behavior, and I think that is what stirs a lot of the passionate debates behind the incredibly hot “ADD: gift or curse?” topic. Locking onto something can come in handy, if you happen to lock onto something that serves your goals: “This research topic is fascinating!”  Locking onto watching all the reruns of LOST….well, not so much.

 

Really, the whole thing seems so obvious that I could stop writing about it right now….

 

But the real question is, Should I?

 

For me, right now, this is The Big Struggle. Exactly how should I be spending my time? I had to laugh a bit when I saw Dr. Russell Barkley (In my first draft I wrote “Charles Barkley”) define “perseveration” as “doing something when you should be doing something else.”

 

Really? Isn’t there ALWAYS something else we should be doing? By the time we are old enough to understand the word “NO!”, the expectations begin!

 

Right now, this instant, what should I be doing? There are several rooms in the house that need major organizing. There’s a pile of papers needing action right here at my feet. I should probably be doing some research for my part-time job that starts in about ten days. But I’m blogging.

 

Heck, I can’t even sit down in front of the TV without seeing a pile of books and magazines and thinking I should be reading instead….

It’s all the trickier because I have the luxury of unstructured time. I don’t have a full-time job; I have what I like to call a part-part-time job, as in, not all day, and not every day. Actually, I have two jobs like that, but one is so infrequent that it barely counts as a job…

 

So yeah, you could say I am my own boss. Which makes the whole lack-of-executive-function aspect of ADD a bit of a problem. In fact, for a while I thought that might make a sort of fun slogan for medication: “Be your own boss! Take Ritalin!” I’m actually on Vyvanse, but there is no way to make a good slogan out of that name; I have to stop and think before I can even say “Vyvanse” out loud, because it’s so awkward.

 

Be your own boss. Who really gets to decide what you should be doing, once you reach adulthood?

 

The first decision I made, when I got on meds and the kids went back to school, was to start to bring some order to my life. And the easiest place to do that seemed to be my house, so off I went, making a rotating cleaning schedule, and lists of big-project messes I wanted to tackle, and so on.

 

I also made a new effort to get back on the exercise wagon, since I find if I skip even one day, suddenly I’m skipping nearly all of them. So I needed to exercise every weekday if it was going to stick.

 

So I did those things for a while, every day I was cleaning and working out, and of course it wasn’t long before I was getting really, really tired.

 

That was the obvious problem. But there was another problem: I suddenly had nothing to talk about with my husband. “How was your day?” I mean, what am I going to tell him? “Man, you shoulda seen those toilets!” Of course, there was always the old fallback, the kids. But in truth I was really aching to talk about myself, I actually had lots I wanted to say. It was all about the ADD, of course, the way I was feeling, the things I was noticing about the medication, the way I was going about everything in different ways….but that didn’t seem to hold his interest any more than the toilets.

 

I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to blog.

 

I mentioned in my first post that I have another blog. I started it about five years ago, maybe longer. It started much the way this one did: I was on another forum (devoted to another subject) and found that my posts were getting frequent, and long, and I realized I needed a place to let my musings “go long.” At first the posts were related mostly to the forum subject, but after a while I expanded it out to include any and all thoughts and events I wanted to examine.

 

Damn, but I had fun with that blog for a while.

 

But there was one really big problem with it. The blog tended to eat time in giant, voracious chunks, biting off entire mornings, whole afternoons in one go. It wasn’t so bad when the kids were babies; little was expected of me then, and so when they’d go down for naps I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about spending the entire nap time composing a single entry. After all, if I ran the vacuum they might wake up!

 

Then they got older and started going off to preschool….it got to be more problematic. I had lots more time, but I also had choices. Should I blog, or go grocery shopping? I really ought to do the workout now, before they get home….Still, I persisted, because it just felt so good to write –

 

It felt so good! And I was good at it, too, or at least, I felt like I was good at it. I never had a huge blog audience, but my small loyal following would tell me they liked to read my stuff, and, to be truthful, so did I. I’d compose away, and then sit back and read the results with utter delight. Damn, but I’m funny! I would think. I have a flair! It was so satisfying.

 

It was mesmerizing, too. I had no idea how long I’d spent typing away until I’d look up at the clock: CRAP! And off I’d go on another wild ride to the preschool, hoping my child wouldn’t be the last one standing at the door…..

 

As for that blog, I still have it up, and I still plan to maintain it, but my entries there have become highly sporadic. I think the last thing I put up there was two or three months ago. I’d love to say that in time the crushing guilt caused me to change my ways, but the truth is most of the real reasons are numerous and mundane sorts of things.

 

And, oh yeah, my time was also being spent on a sudden new preoccupation with a condition called Attention Deficit Disorder….

Of all the things I doubted about whether certain aspects of my behavior fit the picture, one thing I never doubted was that my blog-writing was a pretty perfect example of hyperfocus. Indeed, there was no such thing as time when I was dropping my pearls into the post window. I was fully engaged and absorbed.

 

But was this a good thing, or a bad thing?

 

Clearly blogging was causing some problems, the main one my chronic lateness picking up the kids. It also kept me from accomplishing much else, being so much more fun than laundry or errands. My husband clearly wasn’t a fan (not that I ever invited him to read it; the blog was considered my venting place, after all). If I were pouring that much effort into something that made money, that would have been entirely different, but this wasn’t that kind of blog, and never would be.

 

But blogging was also good, in the sense that I now have a chronicle of my life at the time. Writing so frequently honed my writing skills. It kept me sane in that weird disconnected world that raising infants and toddlers can be. And it engaged my brain tremendously.

 

It was a great place to vent!

 

And now here I am, back again, trying to blog about my ADD, all the while wondering if the blog isn’t some disastrous result of the ADD itself, or perhaps benign in and of itself but Not A Good Choice Right Now, as I try to sift through the many things vying for time slots on my agenda, vying for importance, vying for my attention.

 

“Why not just write the blog once a week?” my husband would ask.

 

Oh, if only I could. I tried that with the old blog. It’s like the exercise thing. It has to be more frequent, or it loses its juice. There’s just not enough energy generated in a once-a-week schedule.

 

“Why not set a timer, then? Write for an hour, then stop?”

 

Unfortunately, for me, an hour might as well be a minute. The truth is, for me, writing almost demands hyperfocus; it needs to be a huge, long, uninterrupted stretch, or else the result comes out sounding dull, or overly chipper, like a letter you write to an acquaintance.

 

So I’m experimenting a little, I suppose. I’m trying hard to find a way to do this often enough to make it work for me, while still doing the work everyone else – including myself – thinks I should actually be doing.

A Paradox Beats A Full House

Paradox: one (as a person, situation, or action) having seemingly contradictory qualities or phases

One of the classic paradoxes of ADD is that stimulants often have a calming effect.

This was a problem for me, back in the days when I didn’t know whether I had ADD. I’d read about this calming effect and think, “Good Lord, that’s the LAST thing I need.” Action of any kind from me usually required forest fires blazing somewhere, preferably directly under my behind. I was forever drifting off, falling asleep, oversleeping, and avoiding. Even the sports I chose were strangely unenergetic, in the sense that I always picked the long, slow-burn, uncomplicated exercises like running, lap swimming, cross-country skiing, over other sports that required quick-changing agility or sudden bursts of speed.

I drank coffee, but I couldn’t really say whether it calmed me down or not. I wasn’t drinking it to calm down, of course, but to wake up, and it did wake me up, at least somewhat, but it’s impossible to say if it might have also been calming me down, because I always drank it in front of the computer, a place that generally puts me in a bit of a trance anyway. And if I drank too much coffee, I’d get jittery and cranky – worlds away from calm.

Still, the appeal of going on a stimulant medication was undeniable. It just sounded so much like what I needed; something to rev the brain and the body, get me moving, get my brain out of the fog. Something to wake me up.

So I did wake up, most definitely, after starting the meds. Actually, the first day I felt too revved up at times, but after the first day my heart stopped trying to escape the confines of my chest. Now I just feel….

Well, what, exactly? More alert? Maybe, but not in an obvious way. There’s more an absence of drifting off, rather than a feeling of alertness per se. Although yesterday I had a particularly good day and actually did feel alert, to a point that I went to a tae kwon do class and understood everything on the first go-round, which never happens to me when learning any sort of body movement is involved.

More awake? Sure. I wake up on time and I get up, but it’s not just because I’m too awake to go back to sleep; it’s also because I feel like I have things I need to do, things I want to do. Before, the things I needed to do were just one more reason to stay in bed.

The main benefit seems to be a stick-to-it-ness that I never had before. I call it “Will in a Pill.” Before the medicine, even those tasks I started I’d stop; I’d fold the shirts but leave the socks to sort later. I’d put the papers in piles and leave the piles lying all over the house. I’d sit at the computer meaning to put dates on the calendar and go off on a Google tangent.

Now I just keep going. Strangely, there are definite points when I can feel the old idea of stopping ghosting its way into the process, because after living so many years with the flaw of half-assedness, the behaviors were as much about habit as they were about ADD. But even though those old take-a-break thoughts still drift in, they don’t get acted on. And I don’t really have a conscious process of beating the thoughts down; They appear, but I just keep going and the socks get folded, and they appear again, and I still I keep going, and it all gets put away –

That is, unless something exterior interrupts me. Which it often does, what with those three kids and all. If I get called away, all bets are off. Then I completely forget I was ever upstairs, until it’s time to go to bed and Oh, damn – the laundry! Because there it is, half-folded and all over the bed.

I do have a new strategy for that, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

In the meantime, you’re probably asking Where’s the paradox here (funny, I actually accidentally typed parasox at first – guess my brain was still in the laundry basket)? I’m taking stimulants, and now I’m energetically completing my tasks, right?

Well, in order to find the paradox, we first need to clean my house. What I mean by that is that I need to walk you through a few features of the old style of my housecleaning. You’ve already seen one highlight, the incompleteness. Here’s another: efficiency of motion, to go with my basic inactivity. Some of you might know what I’m talking about: It’s dumping a bunch of stuff on the stair landing, rather than making a “special trip” to walk it up the stairs. (Dump enough stuff on the stairs and you’ll be enjoying another kind of special trip.) It’s throwing things in a box so you can figure out where it goes later. It’s leaving the trash can out by the curb all morning – you’ll pass by it eventually; you can get it then.

All this beautiful efficiency! All this conservation of time and energy!

Except the problem is you can’t conserve what you don’t have. And I had absolutely no energy. Thus the paradox: Turns out I have to spend energy to make energy! It’s really just the other side of the inertia coin: Objects at rest tend to remain at rest; objects in motion tend to have clean houses. When I started making those special trips, I found it was a lot easier to just keep on making them, and what’s more, I didn’t have to sit and stare at whatever mess I was attempting to attack; I was moving in and out of the scene before it had a chance to penetrate, to get me down, to overwhelm me.

So I’ve revamped my cleaning tasks to give them more motion. The old way might have been Clean This Bathroom on one day, Clean That Office on another. (I’m not sure because I so rarely actually cleaned anything.) Now I make grand swooping rounds of the house each day. One day I’m sweeping and vacuuming. I call it “Sweepstakes Day.” Monday is “Bowl Day”; I clean nothing but sink bowls and toilet bowls. (It seemed appropriate for Mondays.) The surfaces I save for a yet another day. Sure, by some definition it’s inefficient. But for me, I actually get much more done, because the extra motion helps me stick with it. And I’m even saving time, because even though I’m moving more, I’m moving faster. So there’s a paradox or two right there.

I was conserving something though: A lot of junk.

That’s a discussion for another day, though, the crossroads of wastefulness and conservation, and where I can comfortably place my house relative to those two roads. For me, this is kind of a big deal, though I’ll admit as a writing topic it probably doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. But it’s at the front of my mind a lot these days, as I adjust my housekeeping methods.

For now I’ll just mention the paradox part of it: Sometimes it’s more wasteful to keep something than to throw it away. As in, you have to store it, maintain it, or at the very least, go around it on your way to something else. Why not just get rid of it?

Because it’s wasteful! my brain would always scream.

But I’m seeing a change here too. It may be that the decision-making process – keep or toss? – is faster, with my new, faster brain. Or it may be that I simply don’t want this stuff in the way any more as I tear around the house on my room-to-room whirlwinds. Or maybe I’m just starting to see how nice a clean house looks, and it motivates me to take the next step to keeping it there.

So what about that calming effect? So far I don’t sound very calm, going up, down, all around the house, armed with vacuums and trash buckets and wipes, running to find a home for a single found pencil or a stray sock.

No, I can’t claim to be calmer, exactly. But I have discovered a deliberateness I didn’t have before.

What’s weird about that is that if you’d asked me six months ago if I was a deliberate sort of person, I would have said I’m the most deliberate person I know. I can ponder for months what kind of shoes to buy. It was ten years from the initial idea before I finally decided to have the stylist cut bangs cut into my hair. I would not take my driving test until I was twenty, even though I’d passed the driver’s ed class at age sixteen, because I just….wasn’t ready. I was the polar opposite of impulsive, I thought everything over and over and over and over. Paradoxically (to stay in the theme), I’ve thought of this tendency as both an asset and my greatest handicap.

How is it possible that I could be any more deliberate than I’ve always, always been?

Well, evidently, there are more stop-and-think moments in a person’s day than I ever realized. And some of those moments can be really, really tiny ones. The most comical example is that I suddenly find myself making U-turns all over the house. I think this is because in the old days, I’d go to a room, forget why I went there, and end up going halfway back to the starting point before I remembered what I’d been after. Now I go to the room, forget why I went there, start to leave, but I leave in a kind of mental slow-motion: I’m giving myself the time, the brain is taking a moment, there’s that teeny tiny deliberation, then BOOK! I wanted that book, U-turn!!!, it’s all one smooth, swift motion back into the room, back to my original purpose.

Or sometimes I’ll just stop, midway to someplace, and just…make a point to remind myself where I’m going, before I even get there.

There’s a certain new deliberateness in the way I move in general. For instance, since I started meds I haven’t had one of those weird moments where I put something down on a counter or a table and fail to completely let go of it, resulting in the object falling to the floor.

On the other hand, so to speak, I’ll make a point of holding on to something from the task I was doing when I’m interrupted or sidetracked, to serve as a reminder of what I was doing before the interruption. For instance, if I have to go upstairs to stop an argument, and I’m filling out a form with a pen, I’ll take the pen with me. I think I’ll have to try this with the laundry as well. I can see it now, answering the doorbell with a pair of boxer briefs in my hand. That will be awesome.

And there’s less dumping stuff all over the house. I put the DVDs back in the box. I toss the socks in the hamper after I take them off. I hang up my purse. The sunglasses still stay on my head, alas, because I can’t see them up there.

So it’s all those tiny moments that have changed, that are now glued together with a little pause, a little more consciousness. A little breath.

My days are busier, but all the moments that comprise them are much, much calmer.

ADD. As any pair o’ docs will tell you, it’s a paradox.

 

Life on the Side Track

One thing I’m still working out with myself is Exactly how bad is my ADD? I suppose, like so many things I ponder, it’s probably not worth pondering at all.  Are you getting better? That’s what matters – focus on that!

But then, If I could focus, I’d be writing a different blog.

So then let’s just talk about Where I fall on the ADD spectrum: I suspect that, on the grand scale, my ADD is not that bad. Heck, let’s not even waste time suspecting: Objectively speaking, it clearly could be worse because I’m diagnosed as “Inattentive Type,” meaning I have issues with concentration and focus, but I don’t have any symptoms of hyperactivity. Half the symptoms has to be better than all the symptoms, right?

Furthermore, I am blessed with some smart-cookie genes, coming as I do from a family of smart cookies. That certainly made the school years a lot less of a nightmare than they could have been, and it probably still comes in handy now and then, even though I’m not involved in a lot of highly brainiac activities at this point in life.

So, great, right? Sure, but in the here and now, it’s been tricky. The main problem was that my lack of obvious struggles with my everyday tasks is a big one reason I took so long to seek a doctor’s opinion. I don’t really have this; it’s not like I ever tried to microwave my wallet!

And my lack of hyperactivity certainly kept the idea out of people’s heads. All my life I’ve been anything but hyperactive; I used to joke that I had a “Type Z” personality. For a long time I had a cartoon on my bulletin board of Garfield the cat lying on his back, with this thought bubble over his head: “If I were any lazier, I’d slip into a coma.”

I don’t even know if those family members who dismissed my fears even know that a person can be ADD without the restless component. Never got that far in the discussion, since I clearly wasn’t talking with a receptive audience.

Now that I have my diagnosis, I’m not sure who I can tell. That’s hard, because I need to talk about this, especially now, while it’s all fairly new and all-consuming. Writing this blog helps, but it takes a long time to compose (More on that in a future post). Going on the ADD forum helps, but I long for something more in-person at times.

The obvious answer would be to check out a support group, but I’m not really wanting to go that route. Again, because I feel like, on the grand scale, I’m not facing the same level of struggle that so many ADDers do. I’m not sure if I could relate, if they could relate to me.

That sounds sort of presumptuous, I suppose. It probably is. Maybe I’m just not ready for a support-group scene. My only experience with any sort of ADD group is the evening I went to the “Now What?” stage show featuring the ADD and Loving It cast when it was here in my area. It was sponsored by the local CHADD chapter and so they had tables set up and so forth.

At the time, I wasn’t diagnosed with ADD, but was instead in the throes of my wondering agony. I didn’t know the answer, and couldn’t let go of the question. I was looking for any and all clues that I could find, subjective, objective, it didn’t matter.

And so when I went to this show – all alone, because it seemed a foolish enough thing to do without dragging my husband into it and throwing babysitting money at it as well – one thing I was very interested in was what the audience would be like. Would I feel like I had found my people at last?

Short answer: no, not really. I’m not the type to strike up conversations with strangers, so it’s not like I really gave anybody a chance, and I was there by myself, so I was already uncomfortable, and it was a show, not a meeting, so the atmosphere was affected by that, but still….I just felt weird there, in a way I can’t really explain. I just didn’t feel at home in the ADD crowd. During the show I found myself laughing at bits in the show that nobody else was laughing at.

In fact, if it weren’t for Rick Green up on stage, I might have left the whole idea alone. But Rick seemed to be the one person in the auditorium I could totally relate to. Maybe because he’s got that whole nerd thing going on. But he was the one who described a personal ADD moment that rang so true that, even though what he was describing was a trivial sort of thing – something about finding a two-dollar chair at a yard sale and buying it, and imagining he’s going to rehabilitate this chair, once he gets around to painting it, and maybe fixing the seat, once he gets around to taking that chair-caning course….

It was totally meant to be funny, and I laughed, and then I promptly I burst into sobs, Oh, My God, that is my LIFE, forever being hung up on these trivial, ridiculous things, investing all my time and effort on things that just don’t matter, unable to prioritize, unable to get rid of anything, overthinking every task until it becomes far too overwhelming to actually accomplish…..

It felt very lonely, sitting there crying over a yard-sale chair story.

My husband ends up being the one I talk with about all my ADD observations. He’s kind of the other side of the coin Rick Green is on. Rick Green is the ADD guy who reminds me of me. My husband is the non-ADD guy who reminds me of Not Me. Watching my husband operate in the world is what convinces me of my inefficiency.

Unfortunately, one of the things he’s quite efficient at is conversation. You can chitchat with the guy, but long-winded pondering is not really his deal. In fact, he can get at the heart of the matter so quickly that the whole long-winded pondering becomes sort of moot. For instance, the other day I was musing out loud yet again about how I’m not like the other ADD fish, that I’m not the “ooo, shiny!” type, the “Squirrel!” type, I’m not one of those easily distracted types –

“No, you don’t get distracted,” he agreed. “You get sidetracked.”

“EXACTLY!” I said. And then I just sort of sat there, sputtering, as all the ten thousand other examples sort of shot away into the air, pbpblllltttt, the balloon suddenly let go. I hate that. He hits the nail on the head, and suddenly nothing more needs to be said. What fun is that?

But it was true. Sidetracked, that’s me. In things as small as going down too many aisles at the grocery store, or going to move the laundry and needing to sweep the laundry-room floor first. In things as large as meaning to start a career, if only there weren’t all these family obligations on the calendar. Sure, it’s a sort of distraction, being sidetracked, but the word suggests something a little slower, a little larger. A little more deliberate. A little less hyperactive.

But no less ADD.

Grocery-Store Head

Here’s a bit of interesting timing: After yesterday’s post, which was all about searching for definitive proof of my having ADD, later that same day I had the epiphany: a perfect example of the changes wrought by awareness and medication was handed to me in a shopping bag.

Because yesterday was the first time I experienced a shopping trip without a single moment of Grocery-Store Head.

That was what I always called it: “Grocery-Store Head”: That feeling of complete fuzziness that would come over me at some point during the shopping process.

Usually it was in the checkout line, fumbling with cart unloading (Do I stand in front of the cart, so I can actually reach all the way in and get out all the stuff, or behind it, so I can push it forward for the bagger to load it up? And of course once you decide, you’re committed, unless you like the graceful look of squeezing past your cart in that tiny space between the conveyor belt and the candy-bar rack!). Then there was locating the store member cards, the credit cards, and coupons –

Ah, coupons. More on that in a moment.

Or maybe the vagueness would drift in during the shopping itself, that meandering tour of each and every aisle, punctuated by frequent checking of the list, because nothing is ever in order on a grocery list – not when the whole family is constantly adding to it. And of course the store layout is never in the order that you use things up. That might come in handy, wouldn’t it? You walk in, BOOM, there’s the milk. Of course the stores would never do that, because they want you to have to roam past the cookies on the way.

Even loading up the car could be troublesome. Let’s start with the fact that I’ve got about six zillion bags of stuff (it was on sale!). Just where did that loaf of bread end up? Well, of course, it’s right here on the top, which is where a good bagger should put it, but of course you now have to somehow reverse the order of the bags as you place them in your car….And then you’re all set to walk your cart back to the dropoff rack and you notice you’ve still got stuff on the bottom shelf….

Grocery-store head. I get it all the time. Before I suspected my brain fog was due to ADD, I suspected some kind of super-early onset Alzheimer’s, because it really and truly made me feel like an old lady, the way I so often stand there befuddled in the checkout line, putting this down, picking that up, putting it down again, trying to find the credit card without losing the wallet in the process. What’s going to happen, I would wonder, when I really am an old lady?

Well, at least I won’t be shopping for three kids by then.

The funny thing was, it was worse before I had kids. I was actually at my shopping worst as a young single woman living in an apartment. That cliche of young urbanites with a fridge containing nothing more than leftover pizza, beer, and maybe a pint of ice cream in the freezer, that wasn’t me. I would cook for myself, which meant I needed some actual groceries in my kitchen.

The crazy thing was, even though the meals were simple –  cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta for dinner – somehow my shopping trips took hours. Yes, hours with an “S.” Mostly because I was obsessed with getting the most bang for my buck. And perhaps also a bit worried about not forgetting anything. I disliked shopping, and so the possibility that I’d have to run back for some forgotten essential was to be avoided at all costs.

So in order to avoid frequent trips, I would go with the idea that I needed to “load up.” And of course if you’re trying to mega-save, loading up becomes even more appealing. If something was on sale, I’d buy eight boxes. And every purchase I contemplated required a check of the coupon sorter, riffle, riffle, riffle. And since I clipped coupons for everything, there were a lot of little papers to sift through. Naturally I’d put off clipping all the coupons until right before I went out for my shopping, so after an hour or so at home with the scissors and the unwieldy filing process ( a bunch of tattered envelopes with handwritten categories like “vegetables” and “paper products” ), I was already starting off in a fog.

And of course, in order to reduce your number of trips, you need to walk the full length of  every single aisle, to make sure there isn’t something you forgot to put on the list….

Things improved when I got married. My husband gradually convinced me that we didn’t need the coupons, that they weren’t worth the time. That helped a lot, although I’d still try to bring along a small handful for things I was pretty sure I’d buy.

When pregnancy and babies entered the picture, my husband took over the shopping entirely for a while, since it was clearly easier for him to buzz over to the store alone than for me to be strapping wiggling infants into car seats and grocery carts.

Now of course the kids are older, and I’m the main grocery shopper once again. And all the old problems returned, even the coupon problem, because even though I gave up clipping them, the store now helpfully prints out a ream of them to hand you along with the twenty-foot receipt. I’d save them in a mound of paper clutter near the shopping list, then nine times out of ten forget to bring them to the store, and on the tenth time I’d attempt to use one only to discover it had expired.

Then I got my diagnosis, and one of the first things I wondered was, “Will the meds help me shop like a normal human being?”

Alas, I had no chance to test out “speed shopping,” because it was summertime, which meant all the shopping trips were with at least some, if not all, of my kids along. And I had no time constraints, so I couldn’t really tell how well I was doing. But my guess is, not so well, because the kids were incredibly crazy-making, grabbing the cart, walking in front of the cart, asking for any and all junk and treat food that they spied, and, occasionally, failing to keep up with the parade: “I think he’s still in the cereal aisle.” Not to mention we had a new grocery store in our neighborhood and I was testing it out. I didn’t know where the hell anything was.

Then came yesterday.

The kids’ first piano-lesson day was yesterday. That’s when I typically shop during the school year. I drop them off, and head to the nearby store. This meant I had a time limit, and I could never, ever manage to stick to it. I’d arrive late to the teacher’s house, three kids waiting for me, coats on. Once the teacher had to call me because she had somewhere she needed to go after the lesson and of course she couldn’t leave her house until I showed up. And yet all the mortification I felt didn’t seem to be enough to prevent me from being late again the following week.

So I’d been dreading it just a bit: What if my first time-limit excursion With Meds, Without Kids turned out to be the same-old same-old? (Hey, I just realized you could abbreviate that as “SO-SO” – How appropriate!)

But I had a few things on my side, starting with an unusually short list. That was pure fate.

But I also had awareness. I had a determination to not let my head get in the way.

It started the moment I walked in the door. Of the old, familiar store, not the new one. The first new thing I did was to put on my iPod and check the time. I figured out what time I needed to head to the checkout line in order to be back at the lesson on time, and I set the timer. With the ear buds in, I knew it would make an audible tone when the time was up, so I didn’t need to keep checking my watch (or my phone, during all those times when I would forget to wear a watch).

The second thing I did was to bypass the produce section entirely. This might not work for some ADDers, as they might never go back, but for me, this was a great strategy. The produce aisle is the most decision-fraught place in the store. Not only do you have to decide what type of things to buy, you’ve got to visually inspect them, sometimes each and every one. I knew that would set the wrong tone, so I went straight back to the milk cooler, the easiest decision of all. No sale-price comparisons, it’s all the same brand, and I always buy the same amount. Into the cart it went, bam, bam, bam, and I was on my way!

The next big change might seem counter-productive to some, but instead of trying to make some kind of logical traveling order out of my list, I simply looked at the first item, “cereal,” went to that aisle, picked out the cereal, and then went on to the next item, “bread,” and went over to the bread aisle, even though it was halfway across the store. I did the whole list that way, zigzagging back and forth, following to a T the completely random order of the list.

This kept me in motion, which helped me focus. Instead of drifting, I was moving with purpose. The faster motion meant less distraction from other items nearby. And it kept my priorities clear – I would have everything on my list before my time ran out.

Which I did, with time to spare. Now I could do a little browsing before the clock ran out. In the process I remembered a couple of things that should have been on the list, but weren’t. But with less time for the off-list items, my cart wasn’t an overloaded nightmare when I was done. Which made the car-packing easier, because there was only one layer of bags in the back, not two, so I didn’t have to figure out how to put something on top of something else without squishing the grapes or the bread.

It was, in short, amazing.

And incredibly enlightening. I knew I was a bad shopper, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until now.

I am one giant step closer to owning my ADD.

Wait; perhaps I have a coupon for it somewhere…..

Diagnosis: ADD

I have another blog, but I’m not telling you where it is.

This blog is my ADD blog. Despite the fact that this blog has ADD, it is actually going to be the more focused of my two blogs. My other blog is all about me and whatever the heck I want to talk about. That blog has no focus whatsoever, unless my navel counts as a focus point. Whereas this one will be about me and whatever the heck I want to talk about, as long as it relates in some way to my ADD.

The trouble is, I’m not sure if the ADD is totally mine.

As in, I still haven’t fully embraced the idea that I actually have ADD. Sure, I took any number of quizzes that suggested I had it, and I read a lot of books that had some very familiar-sounding behaviors in there, and sure, I went to a doctor, and that doctor said, “This sounds very much like ADD,” and I’m on medication now, and since starting that medication I’ve been able to get more done and I feel less spacey….

Despite all that, I can’t quite put my arms around it and say, “Mine. My diagnosis.”

It isn’t even that I don’t want to be ADD. Perversely, I worry that I wanted it too much. Does that make any sense? I mean, here I am, middle-aged and going through all sorts of midlife crisis moments: I should be further along, I should have done more with my life, I have this fabulous education, I have talents, and what have I done with all that? Not nearly enough….Oh, yes, ADD would be a great explanation for all my fizzle-outs, no doubt about it.

And all those bad habits – I could hang those on the ADD peg, too! Messy house? ADD. Putting off unpleasant tasks? ADD. Not paying attention to the conversation? ADD. Late again? ADD. Yes, I really wanted that diagnosis. To me it seemed like a Get Out of Jail Free card for all my screw-ups, a chance to see myself as not spoiled and lazy but heroically challenged! Because I did do the laundry – eventually! I did hand in the term papers – eventually! I was on time – sometimes! I wasn’t lazy; I was amazing! I could see the movie poster now: In the face of insurmountable odds, she got the children to the school bus…

And the idea that there was a pill for all this? Why yes, I was interested in that!

So I’m on that pill. I’ve got my diagnosis. “Go, and sin no more.”

And yet, I’m still waiting to own this. To feel confident in the diagnosis, to feel like I haven’t jumped on some disease-of-the-month bandwagon, to feel like I didn’t somehow just read enough books to un-or-semi-consciously tailor my complaints, thereby making a handy connect-the-dots for my doctor. To feel like this wasn’t just the culminating act of a truly, deeply lazy person: Fix it not with the hard work of soul-searching, but with a pill!

A pill. I toyed briefly with the idea of calling this blog Moms on Speed. Or maybe Mom’s on Speed. I ultimately went a different route with The Brain Fog Blog, but I kind of like the irreverence of “Moms on Speed.” It hints a bit at comments my family has made to me, and in this instance I’m not talking about my husband-and-kids family, but rather my parents-and-siblings family, most of whom scoffed when I floated my early suspicions past them: “You don’t have ADD; you have three kids!” said my mother. “Yeah, I always think I have every disease I read about, too,” said my brother. “It’s different for parents now; everyone has a crazy life,” said my sister-in-law.

Once, even longer ago, another brother said, based on something I said or did that is now long-forgotten, but had to do with some flakeout moment of mine, “You need to be on speed.” I remember holding my breath at that moment: He was a doctor; clearly he was making a joke, but was it a semi-serious joke? Then he added, after a pause, “Actually, everyone would do better on speed,” and that was the end of the topic.

I found that a bit of a letdown, because I realized at that moment that I was really hoping that I might somehow “qualify” for a prescription for the extra energy, concentration and focus I’d been craving all my life, something that the morning coffee only kinda-sorta ever provided.

Mom’s on Speed. I recall an old episode of Desperate Housewives where Lynnette borrows somebody’s Ritalin because she has too many things to do. I don’t recall the ultimate outcome, but I’m sure it was something along the lines of That Was a Bad Idea, I’ll Never Do It Again. The only part I remember clearly was the comical series of snapshots of Lynnette as Supermom, here, there, and everywhere, sewing costumes for the school play, getting it done! Because I had to admit to myself, that seemed pretty cool. Which worried me; was I some sort of drug-seeking Supermom wannabe? Did I just need to lower my standards?

Everyone would do better on speed… “Your brother’s wrong,” my doctor said, when I told her of his comment. “Most non-ADD people do better on stimulants for a few days, but then they stop seeing a benefit.”

So that had me terribly curious, when I started my medication. Would I stop seeing a benefit and thus be somehow found out as some kind of ADD fraud?

Well, if by “benefit,” you mean incredible euphoria, yeah, that stopped after the first day. Boy, was I blissed out, that first day. That was nice, but that’s done. However, it seems pretty clear that I’m still seeing benefits. I can read books better, the house looks better. I can’t tell if I am listening to people better, but I’m not as aware of thinking about other things when I’m in conversations, so I have to guess I’m doing better there as well.

Still, I’m obsessed with finding these clues, these tangible proofs of my doing better. I still have to justify the diagnosis, the prescription, despite a month and a half of doing better.

Why does this matter so much? Why should it? “The medicine is helping you, and that’s what’s important,” says my husband, who doesn’t understand why I waste so much energy on the “Am-I-really?” question. He’s accepted my diagnosis one hundred per cent, and he’s the only non-internet person I’ve been able to talk to in any way about – deep breath – my ADD, because I’m pretty sure no one else would believe me if I told them I had it.

It would help if I believed it myself.

The Brain Fog Blog

If you’re here, you probably know me as Quizzical over at the Totally ADD forum. I would have loved to use that same name over here, but somebody beat me to it, so my nom de plume on this site is Speedmom.

Welcome to my blog!