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.
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