Public Service Announcement

This morning I was focusing on my core priorities, which meant catching up on email and deleting spam, when I came across a PSA for a new website, AdultADHDisreal.com. I immediately downloaded the PSAs, visited the website, smoked a cigarette and remembered to take my medication before going onto five other things, playing a little guitar, and eventually coming back to the email clearance project.

As a guy who wasn't diagnosed until 48 despite a rather textbook ADHD life trajectory, I'm a little disappointed they didn't get someone a bit higher profile than Howie Mandel, "host of the show Deal or No Deal," on board for this. Robin Williams would have done nicely. I'm betting that half the comedians on earth share my superpower. I'd also have preferred the PSA focus less on the negatives.

Superpower? Hell yeah. It's only an "affliction" when you don't get it. Once you know the dynamics of flow and hyperfocus, you understand that the world is divided into hunters and gatherers, and we hunters, when we're not bored, live in a heightened state. An ADHD friend calls this way of being "The Passion." I like that.

Boredom, to me, is a sin and an insult to the universe. It's a lapsed-Catholic meets existentialist Buddhist on Adderall kind of thing. You wouldn't understand.

Here's Robin Williams, using his superpower to describe the French.

Life Begins At Seventeen

After the disastrous sophomore year of high school, my life took an unexpected turn for the better. The sessions with a counselor seemed to have had some effect upon my parents. Suddenly, I was allowed to have friends and to come and go like a normal teenager.

I'd quit my job at the Canton Cafe when, after three years, the Wong family still refused to bring my pay up to minimum wage. My small cut of the waitress' tips made this legal. I now worked at the Country Kitchen, a Denny's-like chain. I made new friends. Getting high was part of the job. The lower rungs of food service are like that.

When a popular manager was fired after an ownership change, me and the lead fry cook decided to fuck them. It was a Sunday and crazy busy. I let the dishes back up almost to the door. Mark slowed down on the orders. When the point of maximum chaos met with the height of noon rush, we walked out. A waitress quit along with us.

This was my first overt act of labor rebellion. I don't know that it accomplished anything, but it was glorious. I soon found a similar crap job at a pancake house on Minnesota Avenue.

My junior year proceeded uneventfully. The deal with my parents was that if I went to school, they'd leave me alone. This worked surprisingly well. While I can't say I'd come to like school, I read a lot, and my grades were acceptable. This was a start.

It started to look like I'd finish high school.

Something else happened as well. I grew. The pre-adolescent pudginess went away and I got long and skinny. I had a date or two.

I was actually liking my life. I had friends. I had freedom. While this was the year I discovered the joys of purple haze and microdot, the drug use was still much more moderate. It was more about having fun than shutting down.

But the détente with my parents was about to end. I arrived home from a post-school year party at 1 a.m. and was met by my father at the door. "Even Cinderella was home by midnight," he said. "Whatever," I replied. I was grounded for the rest of the summer.

The next day, they went to work. I packed a box and left.

By the end of the week my stuff was tossed and my bedroom converted to an ironing room. They canceled my life insurance. This was a passive-aggressive insurance agent's way of saying, "You're disowned."

I soon felt as though my previous life had ceased to exist. It was like being hatched anew at seventeen. I felt that way for a very long time. Years later, when I was married, my wife put a photo of her family on our mantle. I placed an egg atop a candle holder.

For the next month or so I revolved between the living room of a girl I barely knew, a couch in apartment of another casual friend, and a sleeping bag on an air mattress in the garage of yet someone else. I didn't want to wear out my welcome anywhere, so I did what I could to tread lightly.

I had a small savings, and quit my pancake house job the day I left home. It was a kid's job and wasn't enough money to really help anyway. I also didn't want to be that easily found.

Hunger was something that, in the coming years, I'd come to understand. I showed up one afternoon at the Canton Cafe and asked the waitresses I'd once worked with for a hamburger and french fries. Barbara bought the meal out of tips and it sat before me on the counter. I was overwhelmed by the moment.

"Hasn't anyone ever given you anything before," she asked?

No. Not like this.

The friend with the garage, a guy named Mike who was a few years older than I and already had a serious drinking problem, planned to move out soon and get a place with me. We found a small two bedroom house to rent. It was cheap. This was, after all, Sioux Falls in 1978.

Returning to school in the fall ceased to be an option. The counselor at Washington High said they just weren't set up to handle emancipated students, and that If I wanted to graduate, I'd have to move back home. I took the GED without studying and passed with flying colors.

Most work required either a driver's liscense or that I be 18, so the job search wasn't going so well. Feeling some desperation, I told someone at the employment center that I needed work soon or I'd be literally on the street. He sent me to a storefront that did CETA job placement. This was a remnant of the War on Poverty. I was soon employed as a maintenance trainee at Augustana College.

The other CETA placement in the Augustana maintenance pool was a stoner named Pat whose parents had died. He had a small house and a social security check. We became good friends.

I did everything from shingling roofs to digging ditches. Most of the time, I followed around a straitlaced coffee-swilling septuagenarian Swede named Buell. After he went home, Pat and I would park the maintenance truck somewhere off campus, have a beer, get high, and then drive back to punch out at five.

I started taking whitecross that summer and loved how speed made me feel. The crash after a three or four day run, however, was brutal. I decided I liked it too much and left it alone. This was one of my better decisions of that period.

Nearly thirty years later, a mid-life ADHD diagnosis got me a prescription to Adderall, a much cleaner version of the same stuff.

Every high school kid who is half-way hip knows of a house where — pretty much any night of the week — odds are a party is going on. I lived in that house. There was a liquor store across the street that didn't seem too concerned about ID. We kept them in business.

I lost my virginity near the end of the summer. A couple of Indian chicks stopped to talk while we were on the front porch drinking beers. The fair was in town. We all went. I came home and went to sleep. Shortly after, my bedroom door opened and there was my new friend. She did all the work. I barely knew where to put the thing. Like most first times, this was not the stuff of fantasy. As she rode up and down, I felt completely outside the moment. It ended and she asked what was wrong.

The next day she brought flowers. Classy. I never saw her again.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Once a Loser: An ADHD Success Story

Those of you who have slogged through my five-part Air Force Years memoir might be wondering, "Who the hell is this guy, and why is he such an irresponsible drug abusing jerk?"

I've often wondered that myself. The answers didn't really fall into place until this past year. That's when I learned, at the ripe age of 46, that I have a "disorder." Last December, after I self-diagnosed about six months earlier, a licensed shrink confirmed that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and gave me drugs to fix it. Sometimes they even work.

One of the downsides of being ADHD is that minor feats of cognition, such as remembering to bring one's lunch to work, go to an appointment, or pay a parking ticket, are inordinately difficult. Successful people with ADHD, and there are many of us, find ways to adapt. Back in 2000, for example, I started using this huge Franklin-Covey planner, which I carry everywhere despite the fact that it weighs about six pounds. It helps, but I need a lot more than the Seven Habits of Success to fix my problem.

Today was classic. I'd written a 1:15 appointment with my shrink, a guy named Marty, down in my July Calendar. Last week, I made a lunch date with another guy, a marketing guy for a local publication who is also named Marty, for 1:00. I put that in my calendar too. So I look at my huge fucking planner, and I have a 1:15 with Marty on the master calendar and a 1:00 on the daily page, and I figure 1:15 being the more precise time, that must be when I'm due at the shrink. So I go, and he signs me up for more Adderall, and I return to a message from Marty wondering where the hell was I?

Two guys named Marty scheduled for around 1:00 today. What are the odds?

The thing about ADHD is that one doesn't suddenly contract this. It's about brain structure. It shows up when you're a little kid. There are problems with focus, hyperactivity, thrill-seeking, and, secondarily, esteem, that start early and don't go away.

In my case, I was the last kid in the 4th grade to memorize the multiplication tables, despite routinely getting the highest scores in my class on the standardized tests. By the second grade, I was labeled as the weird smart kid who doesn't apply himself to anything. In a Catholic grade school populated by sadistic nuns, this is not a good thing.

I was a failure at being a Cub Scout, since follow through on merit badge attainment was pretty much beyond me. By the sixth grade, I was smoking, coming home during school to huff Pam with my friends, and driving around in the family car without a license. By the eighth grade I was a pothead and a chronic truant. In the tenth grade, I got myself kicked out of my Catholic high school and both of the public schools, one right after the other.

As you would imagine, none of this endeared me to my parents. Three phrases are burned into my memory.

"You're too smart for your own damn good."

"If there's a half-assed backwards way to do anything you'll find it won't you?"

"Stop that god damn jiggin' around."

By the time I was seventeen, things at home had deteriorated to the point of no return. I dropped out of high school altogether and left. The period of couch and porch surfing that followed was brief, and turned into a few years of SROs and other cheap housing. I moved seven times in two years and then went into the Air Force.

Through a number of minor miracles, I found ways of being in the world that made an asset of my congenital extremism. The most interesting part of getting a diagnosis was that my life history suddenly made sense. I was "portrait of an ADHD guy."

I'm lucky. My tendencies led me toward work that I love, and because there are people around who compensate for my deficits, I've been able to adapt. The big picture vision, the intuition, the attraction to risk, the tenacity, the comfort with conflict and ambiguity, etcetera. I've learned to see my blind spots and figured out how to make it work.

There are those who dispute that ADHD is even a disorder. They see it rather as an alternate way of being. They talk about how Leonardo da Vinci was ADHD, and how people like me are these Superman characters who, in our visionary rebellious distraction, are the vanguard of humanity's next great evolutionary leap. That strikes me as the smug perspective of the ones who don't know how lucky they are.

Tonight my wife was telling me she had news of an ADD kid she grew up with. He's a bit over forty and, as his family puts it, he "still hasn't found his groove." Their family Christmas letters say something like, "Mark has started graduate school, Amy's theater group performed Doll's House to rave reviews, and Bill has a new mustache."

Lots of people, having been defined as a fuck up, come to own the label.

I'm sure that we have plenty of Real Change vendors that this describes. I sometimes feel much closer to them than I do to many of my middle class allies and colleagues. The outsider perspective is something I get. And, were I less lucky — if I didn't get into college, if I were more predisposed to alcoholism, were I less gifted, if I didn't get a few key breaks, if I weren't a tall, white, male — things could have gone very differently.

A Tribute to Sid Vicious

OK. Sid is our office cat. And this is a video by Dr. Wes Browning. Wes has a lot of time of his hands to play with things like flash animation because his diagnosis gets him a disability check. My diagnosis only gets me a prescription to Adderall. We both wind up being far more productive than we would be otherwise, but in different ways. This is how the universe apparently wants things.

For those of you who don't know Sid, he's lived at Real Change for about 11 years. He hates dogs, and will kill one someday if he ever gets a chance. Sid has a very strong sense of himself, but occasionally goes crazy and becomes a little frightening. He is strikingly beautiful.