Rant #2 - On living with ADHD
ADHD is a hell of a thing. A physical difference in the human brain that causes 5 specific and relatively small areas of the brain to develop roughly 5 to 8 percent smaller than would be normal. And those 5 areas all just happen to deal with Executive Function! The end result of this is virtually no impulse control, no internal motivation, no capacity to focus on anything that isn't interesting... oh and perhaps the worst one, no ability to be accountable to yourself. This gets particularly tricky when you're an adult with money - rewards systems that may have worked when you're a kid just fail, because you can just give yourself the award! It's a hard thing to live with. I'm not even sure a neurotypical can fully grasp how WEIRD it is to have no internal motivation. The only reason I do ANYTHING is because of outside forces, and I mean ANYTHING. If there is no outside force desiring a thing... that thing just won't happen.
It's exhausting, day after day having to overcome this mental inertia to do absolutely nothing. Like, if it weren't for needing to have a roof over my head, food for myself and my cat and medical care to ensure my physical conditions don't kill me, there is absolutely no way I would ever get to work. The stakes basically have to be life and death for me to be doing anything constructive at all. The effort it takes, by the way, to be able to focus and to be able to engage with work and not give in to these rampant mental impulses results in a level of mental exhaustion that some days... I just get home from work, sit down, and stare at a blank screen for an hour before it registers that I haven't even gotten out of my work clothes.
So why am I writing about it? Because sometimes you just need to get your frustrations off your chest, and you don't want to burden anyone with the weight of it. Living in my brain is just the strangest thing - I am conscious human being, but it feels like I'm renting time in my own skull. I'm not the one in control and that is just... well it's weird, but I don't FEEL weird for the simple reason that I've never lived in a neurotypical brain. I've often thought about how different it must be to think 'I need to do X' and just... doing it? The internal argument, monologue, whatever you want to call it to push through and get something done in my brain is like herding cats. My thought process looks like an 8 way intersection with no traffic controls, oh and a runway and some rail tracks run through it too.
The physiological basis of the disease is the really hard part about it. Knowing that it is effectively a deformity in your brain, knowing that you'll just never be able to function as a normal human being without medical intervention is hard. It's not something that will be cured, it's a physical fact of your brain and unless we figure out how to stimulate growth of those 5 regions, or figure out how to edit it out of the genes so that it can't happen in the first place, it's here to stay.
Don't get me wrong, there are occasional benefits to it, if you can get it well managed the task switching becomes invaluable when you have to juggle a number of things, as long as you can maintain interest in them. The propensity for wandering thought patterns and daydreaming undoubtedly can lead to interesting places - I wouldn't be at all surprised to find ADHD disproportionately represented in Science and Art - hyperfixation combined with those daydreams and thought patterns undoubtedly would lead to some incredible creations and scientific discoveries. But man, that doesn't really cancel out the constant struggle just to exist as a conscious being. I can't tell you how many times I've just... forgotten to eat! Sometimes I wind up so hungry that I feel physically ill to the point that I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to keep the food down!
The real reason I'm writing about it, is that even though it was first described in the 1790's, even though it's been discovered to be a PHYSICAL disability, it's still one of those things that is dismissed as nonsense or laziness and that is the worst thing of all about it. The thought that so many people out there think we've made up this disability because we 'just don't want to try hard' is absurd. It crushes the human spirit within us, humanity in it's very nature is a species that strives for progress - that part is still in me, there are so many things I wish I could push myself to do but... I literally just can't. I lack the actual capacity and to think I'd be that way on purpose is insulting.
I just wish more in the world could come to terms with it, ADHD is a real, debilitating, physical defect that causes a learning disability in people that have it, and it results in an utter lack or severely curtailed executive function. It isn't a choice, it isn't curable, and it isn't going away. But it IS in need of support and accommodation, just like any other disability - the difficult part is figuring out what that support looks like.
That is the real challenge.
Anyhow, this wasn't really a rant I guess, more like a stream of consciousness info dump of a lot of crap that rattles around in my head, and the fact that I wrote all of this and got to this point shows how badly I wanted to vent this. I haven't gone 'Look a Squirrel!' this entire time!
