The ADD Post
Sep. 28th, 2020 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI have ADD.
I’m making a distinction between “ADD” and “ADHD” because I’m probably one of the most chill and least “hyperactive” people you will ever meet. If you talked to me for the first time, or if you worked with me for years, you would probably never know that there’s anything “wrong” with me. Almost no one does, and honestly, I don’t see this as being in a different category of chronic condition than, say, diabetes. It’s genetic, and I handle it with a combination of medication, behavioral strategies, and social support structures. You know, as one does. It’s not a big deal.
For me, this is very much a “mind over matter” situation. My hope is that, if I’m aware of myself and how I tend to operate, and if I put careful thought into the decisions I make, I won’t experience too much trouble as I move through the world. It actually kind of annoys me when people talk about medical conditions like ADD/ADHD as “my brain did this” or “my brain does that,” as if a person is composed of a pure spirit that exists separately from their body, the circumstances of their life, the society they live in, and their personal decisions. It’s much more holistic than that, and none of us are innocent and helpless victims of our “brains.”
Still, having ADD is shitty. Having dyslexia is shitty. Having executive function disorder is shitty. For the record, having anxiety is shitty too. All of this is shitty to begin with, and it’s made even shittier by the fact that almost everyone born after 1980 – regardless of gender, race, or economic class – has been subject to intense neoliberal pressure to “optimize” their “performance” in order to succeed in absurdly competitive systems that only reward people with an abnormally high degree of preexisting advantages. It’s also shitty that these disorders are both poorly understood and ridiculously stigmatized, and that the American medical healthcare system is inefficient, ineffective, and intensely bigoted, even if you’re a straight white man (but most definitely going downhill from there).
In any case, having Attention Deficit Disorder is precisely that – my ability to concentrate and manage my attention is not neurotypical. I personally wouldn’t call it a “disorder,” necessarily, because it feels very normal to me, and I don’t think it’s actually a “deficit” compared to what other people experience than it is a few steps closer toward the end of a spectrum as opposed to being smack in the middle. Sustaining focus and attention for long intervals with no physical movement or immediate reward is painfully difficult for me, but I am relatively good at lateral thinking, thinking quickly, processing multiple sources of input, and managing multiple tasks simultaneously in a way that many “neurotypical” people seem to find exhausting. To use an academic setting as an example, what this means is that I can finish a test quickly and with a perfect score but can't for the life of me sit still and look at the desk while waiting for everyone else to finish (instead of drawing on the back of the test paper or checking my phone).
In the long term, this doesn’t really affect anything. For example, although I can’t sit down and read one book for an entire hour, I can sit down for an hour and read ten books, and I can do this every day until all the books are read. As a result, I read more books than anyone I know (for real), usually with good retention and recall. A problem only arises if you give me a book and expect me to have read the whole thing by tomorrow – in which case I would say that’s your problem, not mine. In other words, the “problem” is often the arbitrary framework for a task, not my ability to handle it. To be blunt, the way I work only becomes a “disability” if someone deliberately goes out of their way to make it so by refusing to accommodate it.
This becomes tricky, however, when I have to set a task for myself.
Specifically, how the fuck am I supposed to write a novel.
I’m making a distinction between “ADD” and “ADHD” because I’m probably one of the most chill and least “hyperactive” people you will ever meet. If you talked to me for the first time, or if you worked with me for years, you would probably never know that there’s anything “wrong” with me. Almost no one does, and honestly, I don’t see this as being in a different category of chronic condition than, say, diabetes. It’s genetic, and I handle it with a combination of medication, behavioral strategies, and social support structures. You know, as one does. It’s not a big deal.
For me, this is very much a “mind over matter” situation. My hope is that, if I’m aware of myself and how I tend to operate, and if I put careful thought into the decisions I make, I won’t experience too much trouble as I move through the world. It actually kind of annoys me when people talk about medical conditions like ADD/ADHD as “my brain did this” or “my brain does that,” as if a person is composed of a pure spirit that exists separately from their body, the circumstances of their life, the society they live in, and their personal decisions. It’s much more holistic than that, and none of us are innocent and helpless victims of our “brains.”
Still, having ADD is shitty. Having dyslexia is shitty. Having executive function disorder is shitty. For the record, having anxiety is shitty too. All of this is shitty to begin with, and it’s made even shittier by the fact that almost everyone born after 1980 – regardless of gender, race, or economic class – has been subject to intense neoliberal pressure to “optimize” their “performance” in order to succeed in absurdly competitive systems that only reward people with an abnormally high degree of preexisting advantages. It’s also shitty that these disorders are both poorly understood and ridiculously stigmatized, and that the American medical healthcare system is inefficient, ineffective, and intensely bigoted, even if you’re a straight white man (but most definitely going downhill from there).
In any case, having Attention Deficit Disorder is precisely that – my ability to concentrate and manage my attention is not neurotypical. I personally wouldn’t call it a “disorder,” necessarily, because it feels very normal to me, and I don’t think it’s actually a “deficit” compared to what other people experience than it is a few steps closer toward the end of a spectrum as opposed to being smack in the middle. Sustaining focus and attention for long intervals with no physical movement or immediate reward is painfully difficult for me, but I am relatively good at lateral thinking, thinking quickly, processing multiple sources of input, and managing multiple tasks simultaneously in a way that many “neurotypical” people seem to find exhausting. To use an academic setting as an example, what this means is that I can finish a test quickly and with a perfect score but can't for the life of me sit still and look at the desk while waiting for everyone else to finish (instead of drawing on the back of the test paper or checking my phone).
In the long term, this doesn’t really affect anything. For example, although I can’t sit down and read one book for an entire hour, I can sit down for an hour and read ten books, and I can do this every day until all the books are read. As a result, I read more books than anyone I know (for real), usually with good retention and recall. A problem only arises if you give me a book and expect me to have read the whole thing by tomorrow – in which case I would say that’s your problem, not mine. In other words, the “problem” is often the arbitrary framework for a task, not my ability to handle it. To be blunt, the way I work only becomes a “disability” if someone deliberately goes out of their way to make it so by refusing to accommodate it.
This becomes tricky, however, when I have to set a task for myself.
Specifically, how the fuck am I supposed to write a novel.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 09:34 pm (UTC)I've noticed my own writing expands to fill the time available (so if I try to write on a weekend day it will take me all damn day to produce the same amount I could get in my lunch break on a work day), so I try to counteract this by setting timers. Which works for my excitable-squirrel brain, but might not for yours.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 10:01 pm (UTC)Every afternoon, I drive to the neighborhood park and sit in my car to write with no internet reception and nothing to distract me. I put three documents on my desktop and set a timer so that I'll work on them for five minutes each. If I end up getting absorbed in a particular project, so much the better. If I can't concentrate for longer than that, I'll take a walk and go home.
This is a highly inefficient way to work; but, by continuing to do it every day, things eventually get done by sheer virtue of the inexorable march of time.
I'll be honest, people who use strategies like Nanowrimo and wordcount goals are like wizards to me. Writing is magic. Who knows how it works?
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 10:14 pm (UTC)I was really, really glad when