The Face In The Mirror
When you look in the mirror who do you see? Do you see you for who you are or is it still an open question? For most of my life it was an open question.
Sometime ago my wife and I were going through some difficulties and she posed the question, “Are you a good person that makes bad choices or a bad person trying to be good?” When she asked me that question, at the time, I didn’t know it was related to the first question I asked.
Over the last 20 years I have found myself looking in the mirror trying to identify who that person was. I knew that I was in there, and I recognized the face but time and time again I found myself looking in the mirror not sure who was the person that had got me into that position at the time.After I was recently diagnosed with AD/HD and started to do more research into the subject I began to understand that I was that person staring back but that unknowingly I had a part of me that could override my logic, reason, and moral processes. I also realized that while not beyond my control, the impulses that were brilliant and inspiring to others at times were also pushing me to do things I wouldn’t have done if the other processes had control.
For years I had been asking myself the question “Am I crazy?” Another question that I commonly asked was “What am I doing?” I had no answer for that. It has been so frustrating and debilitating to struggle with that. While I’ve been good at what I do by various means of self management I have often asked myself, “What if they find out I have no idea what I’m doing?” This self doubt even made it into my bathroom mirror.
Now that I know who that person is, me, I work to manage my emotions and strange impulses. I am taking notes during the day of things that I do that I shouldn’t have done and trying to identify how I could turn that impulse around. One of the things that I’ve started to do is when an idea pops into my head is record it somehow so that I get it out of my head. Before that impulse to take action kicks in. I don’t do it everytime but I’m still getting used to it.
The more I learn the more I realize that I have to learn. It’s not a simple fix but a constant evaluation and adjustment to harness the bad but release the good of AD/HD so that I see clearly the person looking back in the mirror.
Being Thankful For Having AD/HD
I’m not an expert on time management. I’m not an expert on AD/HD. I’m a normal person like everyone else, except that I have one of the greatest gifts in the world. I have AD/HD. Why is this a great gift? Isn’t this a disorder? Isn’t this a curse that has caused millions of people pain and suffering, myself included? Yes to all of the above. So let me tell you why I think it’s a great gift.
- It helps me to think faster
- I can multi-task better almost anyone
- It helps me to think of new ways to do things
- I can do more because I need less sleep
- Food tastes better
- Touch means more
- Colors and settings are prettier
- Success feels sweeter
- I get to help my children grow up stronger
How do I know these things? I just look around. I look at the way I do things, the way others respond to me, and I look at my successes and failures. Here’s my corresponding list to explain the above.
- I am and always will be the idea man to those around me. Where some people look at the box and see a box I see a stand, a seat, a spaceship, the body of a robot, a container for donations for the drive tomorrow. Is that distractability? Yes. But it’s my brain firing so much faster than others.
- I take on multiple projects when I shouldn’t. It’s the complete lack of impulse control that gets me into this pickle. Is that bad? Not even close. I have a full time job where I manage the hardest projects, many at the same time. I have a side business doing what I love most, cooking. How I do it is with managing the information and the tasks as they come to me. I use lists, project plans, recording devices. I manage my emotions by taking breaks when I need it and find ways to transition.
- In my life I see 10 options for 1 choice. Some people see 1 choice. Maybe the 1 choice is the best choice, but sometimes it’s not and it’s the ability to think outside the box that I value.
- I don’t need a lot of sleep. Is sleeplessness a symptom of AD/HD? Not necessarily but the energy that prevents me from sitting still is the same energy that wakes me up after a 4 to 6 hour sleep each night. So I have so much more time to do what I want.
- The next three are all related. Normal everyday stimulus can be overwhelming to people with AD/HD. Noise, smells, visual, taste, touch. Not everyone, but for some. I am one of those. This sensitivity helps me to enjoy simple experiences. The taste of dark chocolate as it kicks the chemicals off in your brain down through your body just by sitting on your tongue. The simple electricity that is felt in the touch of a hand. The sights of the leaves changing in the fall. When I was younger and learning to speak two different Chinese dialects I couldn’t shut out the conversations so I began to use that and practice my language skills by translating from the side conversations into English. Sometimes from two different conversations in two different languages at the same time. Curse? No way.
- The person with AD/HD yearns for and more importantly needs praise or gratification. It means a lot to the person with AD/HD as praise is responsible for kicking off key chemicals in your brain that help them feel “normal” or right. When praise or that gratification from others comes even in the smallest forms it feels like a warm blanket on a cold night. Similar to that piece of chocolate above.
- Understanding what I have makes me that much better prepared to help my children in the event that they have this too. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start medicating them at the age of 6 or 7. It means I get to educate them and their teachers about their strengths and weaknesses. It means they gets to learn coping methods I had to figure out on my own. They get to see the world in such a great light.
Like I said at the beginning of the article. I’m not an expert. I’m newly diagnosed and like all new things am excited and have a lot of energy. So I spend this energy on reading as much as I can. Articles, forums, book, etc. I see how people portray this mixed bag I have, some positive and some negative.Most important of all this Thanksgiving is that I am grateful for finally understanding why and what I have. My life just got so much better.
Looking Back - Where Do I See It
Since being diagnosed I have started to play back the events in my life to see where the first signs began. In order to put the events in perspective here are the qualities that doctors look for in the individuals life:
- Fidgety energy
- Difficulty remaining in seat
- Easily Distractable
- Difficulty waiting in line
- Blurts out answers to questions before they’ve been completed
- Difficulty following through instructions
- Difficult to sustain attention in tasks or games
- Shifts from incomplete tasks
- Overly talkative - sometimes excessively
- Interupts others
- Fails to listen to people talking to him
- Loses things regularly
- Takes on dangerous activities without thinking through the consequences
Looking at this list I see many of these in my early childhood. When I was in the first grade my teacher was a strict older woman that believed in teaching the way it had been done for the 40 years prior to my joining her class. I found myself sitting in the hall regularly for disrupting her class where we reciting words on the black boards or for not completing my coursework. This is the only teacher I ever had that mocked me for failing to pick something up that was very basic like reading words we’d been practicing for weeks. It was not her mocking that spurred me to learn, but my interest in a comic book at the convenience store at the end of my street. I saw the pictures and the words and I wanted to know what they meant. It took me a week to read through the comic. The next time it took 3 days. Then I could do it in a day.
Following that first comic my reading excelled. I was still in the hall for disruption but not for failure to read. She was still not fond of me or my behavior but it was as I remember a really boring class. By the end of the first grade I was reading my brother’s text books from the third grade. Once I figured out how to do it I realized I could learn quickly and wanted to be better at it than my older brother. The thrill of being a better reader than my brother was exhilerating.
Other events that mark early childhood was my complete disregard for common safety to myself or others. One summer I got ahold of matches from the kitchen and built a fire between our house and our neighbors house. There was only 3 or 4 feet between them but that didn’t bother me. It did bother my mother and our neighbors and I was quickly disciplined when my mother returned from work. My neighborhood friends and I played hard and played fast. I loved to run. It was so exciting to run and race with others.
I was as impatient then as I am today. I remember having to wait for my turn to do something and wanting to jump out my skin. Whether it be playing kickball, getting a drink from the water fountain, or reading out loud in class. My brother always the good boy that did what he was told, I was the one that came home late to dinner because I was in the middle of playing or got pulled away by something laying on the side of the road and immediately found a new object that I saw as a sword or a laser gun. In the process time slipped by and it was past dinner time. There goes my night to watch the Bionic Man because now I was grounded to my room for the night.
When I played baseball growing up I hated it half of the time. The time I was in the outfield. Until someone hit one out and I got the rush of running to the ball to catch it. The other half of the time was at bat or waiting for my turn at bat. That was the only time I cared about. The motion and activity.
As my life continued on more of this type of behavior continued. Some teachers found out that I would work on school work as long as it kept coming. Some found that I could find things quickly and get things done for them faster than the other students. Some utilized these and some didn’t. Those that did kept me going. Those that didn’t I struggled to keep my grades at B’s. C’s were not tolerated in our house.
When I started middle school we moved to Columbus and I attended Columbus public schools. I was fortunate to attend Woodward Park Middle School. The teachers were generally good and helped me to get out some of the potential they saw. When I was in the 7th grade my math teacher made a comment that I have always remembered. “Bobby, you are very smart. You could be an engineer or something like that if you wanted to. You just have to settle down.” Mrs. Leonard was again an old fashion teacher in that she was very strict. But she believed in her students. At least she believed in me, because she recommended me for 8th grade algebra despite my average grades. I took the evaluation test and passed with flying colors. Many of my fellow students that had always received straight A’s were only allowed into pre-algegra. I never did poorly in math again because I knew that I could do it.
My early childhood is filled with good and bad stories like these. I have excluded the one where I almost burned down a corn field. Or the one that got me up a huge tree with no way of getting down. I was fearless in my actions. I knew that I could do things that others could do but I knew that for some reason they came difficultly to me. It was hard to grasp things that took an hour to explain. I often slept through Calculus but still passed with better than average grades.
Somewhere along the line I learned two important things. The first was that if I blend in no one will notice. If you don’t look like you’re up to trouble no one will notice. I did this well. My mother will attest to this. She still hates hearing about the things I got into when I was younger that she didn’t know about. The second and more important was if I had to study and it was boring or overly difficult to grasp, work in 15 minute increments with a 5 minute diversion to give you a break. It has served me to this day.
What I didn’t mention was the teenage drug and alcohol use. It wasn’t an addiction or me rebelling that some people might think. It was boredom. And when it wasn’t boredom only it was to see if I could do them and get away with it in school or at home. There were periods that I was a model citizen but at the onset of boredom I usually found myself in trouble.
From my early experiences and early successes that were helped by those that saw more in me than I knew I had, I knew that I could do anything I wanted to. Regardless of difficulty I could overcome if I persisted. When I graduated from high school I was grateful. Unlike the other students I wasn’t afraid but looked forward to taking on the world. The thrill of the unknown and the prospect of figuring it out on my own was so exciting.
If AD/HD was understood as well then as it is today would I have been diagnosed? Maybe. But even as an adult I still went an additional 19 years before someone pointed it out to me.