Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: The hottest thing to get your kids diagnosed with in the eighties. My mom was always a trend follower who (even to this day) stays read up on the paper and keeps her homepage set to “Yahoo! News”, no matter how radical or fearmongering the headlines might be. “How else would one stay informed?” she’d say.
As goes the famous quote:
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
This is true 99.9% of the time. But could it be that, in my case, the news media was right? (Insert broken clock cliche here.) It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my novel. Could ADHD be the culprit?
Well, I’m not hyperactive, for one. I’m fairly calm, cool, rational, and collected compared to most people. But it turns out one can have ADHD and not be hyperactive at all.
And I certainly don’t have an attention deficit. After all, I sometimes find myself giving attention to a single thing for hours on end. I have attention in spades. But again, this isn’t required for ADHD, which tells me ADHD was named poorly.
It turns out there’s three different “types” of ADHD. They are called “presentations”.
Presentation 1: Inattentive
People used to call this one “ADD”, which just happens to be exactly what I was diagnosed with as a child. I took Ritalin from first to fifth grade.
Was I inattentive? Not really. I paid close attention to my teachers, got straight As, and was even in a “gifted” program. But my teachers in second through fourth grade were particularly great. They were fun, engaging, and cared about the children on an individual level.
My first and fifth grade teachers, on the other hand, were not very good. They bored me and regularly singled me out in front of the class in negative ways. As a result, I found myself drawing, or letting my mind wander sometimes instead of paying attention in class. Guilty as charged.
Presentation 2: Hyperactivity
My guess would be this was for those kids who just couldn’t sit still. I was never one of those. But then again, put anyone in a desk in front of a boring teacher under the steady hum of florescent lights and chances are, they won’t be able to sit still for long. I don’t blame them one bit. I also don’t blame ADHD.
Presentation 3: Combined (Inattentive+Hyperactivity)
This is the most common ADHD diagnosis, probably because everyone can be at least a little inattentive sometimes, and everyone’s a little hyperactive sometimes, too. It sounds too “one-size-fits-all” for my tastes. There’s room for everyone on a spectrum, which means more money for Big Pharma.
Whenever I get nervous, I bite my nails. Turns out, that’s a hallmark sign of ADHD.
Another sign is having trouble with long-term goals (like writing a novel).
Another is having basically two modes: 1. Being completely lazy. 2. Trying to do everything at once.
And another is disorganization. I do (or did) tend to let things go to mess.
In fifth grade, I had the second-messiest desk in my class. It got so bad, I could never find my homework. The teacher made an example out of me by stopping class and forcing me to clean out and organize my desk in front of everyone … more than once. But, on the other hand, I can organize projects and notes so well (such as for a novel or a data analysis project), that it’s almost like a superpower I possess.
But there’s plenty of nail-biters out there who probably don’t have ADHD. Everyone has moments of complete laziness and moments where they feel like they’re doing everything at once. Most everyone is disorganized in at least one aspect of their lives.
It sounds like diagnosing someone with ADHD isn’t hard, almost like how a fortune teller can give a generalized horoscope to someone and make it feel specially crafted just for them.
But that leaves me with my original question: Do I have this condition, or not? And do I really want to blame something outside of my control for failing to do something that should be completely within my control?
Nick Enlowe 