Volume 2, #10, April 2004

Having Arrived

A personal account by Joanne Ellis

I feel panicky putting this down – I said I'd share about my ADD-ed life, and that my writing style is 'playful.' It’s so much easier to navigate the gulfs of fear or pain by shuffling over little bridges of laughter. That’s what I’d planned to share mostly here, the comic aspects of how we ADD-ed people live.

But at the moment, given the stunning disappointments of the last few weeks, I can’t think of a single thing that’s amusing about being fifty years old with a three-year-old ADD diagnosis. Half or more of my lifetime is gone: the trail behind me is strewn with painful memories of abandoned commitments, professional and personal humiliations that still coax an acid drip of self-distrust over my soul. I’m pondering my semi-developed professional skills that have languished with me as much as, or more than, they've made me money. And there's this ongoing, haunting self-doubt: can I really trust my own instincts, make worthy decisions, commit to them? Can I forgive myself for the inevitable mistakes I'll make, not confuse them for signs that my path is indeed a hopeless sham? Am I still kidding myself, an undercover fraud playing at life?

Sorry about this; it wasn’t my intention to beckon you here. I know you don’t like it, either. If you have a mind like mine you’re already, “Oh God let me out of here,” and backing away from the monitor. This story came due in a season of intense discouragement. Don't misread this; I'm not returning to my old address under the bed; I just can’t pretend. I'm feeling the whole loss, of years that I've lived like a thoroughbred chained in the starting gate, straining to run race after vanished race. The trumpets sound, the crowd roars, the shot is fired, and my peers explode out of the gates time after time in a storm of dust and determination. There I remain, tensed for the next race, rider, gunshot. I have never felt so alone in my life.

My husband and I are running on empty. We’re broke; we live month to month; he works far too hard, far too much, for not enough, and has had many of his own efforts at growth thwarted. He’s watched too many times as I’ve backed off from commitments I’ve made. He’s angry, bitter, and unwilling to believe in me, for the time being anyway. I haven’t helped nearly as much as I could have, if I had long ago developed something I could stay with. It feels like a coin toss on some days, to know which of us, the flake or the overly rigid depressive, is ready to call the attorney to bash out a joint custody agreement. Because our two boys still count on us.

For now, I hone my writing; there are occasional orders in faux stone building or coloring wall or pilaster caps or ornamental urns to match natural stone in landscaping. And I shovel manure on a ranch here in Southern California, weekday mornings as needed, for minimum wage. Our closest friends are silent about my juggled disciplines; they’re all more mystified by the horse poop gig, which by most logic looks like a step further backward. An ex-graphic artist, a sculptor with a Masters degree who has taught studio classes and placed first in juried shows, an ex-direct saleswoman who got an account with Capitol Records, ...what the hell am I thinking? How did I get here?

You may be familiar with the ADD-ian’s exceptional need for stimulation, and how we often get it by putting variety in our lives (changing jobs, careers, addresses, lovers or spouses, etc.). Two things you might not know are the cause, and result, of insufficient stimulation.

It’s often a struggle for me to stay awake, if I’m not doing something I genuinely care about or that gives me some sort of relief from the drowsy state to which I automatically default. Many times my husband comes home in the middle of his demanding day to find me passed out on the couch. Sometimes I’m tired from having worked past our usual bedtimes. But sometimes it’s because hours of sedentary, repetitive, routine paperwork seem to siphon the oxygen out of my head and pull me into sleep like deep water sucking on a lead weight. It's not that I can't do desk-ish work; it’s that it's critical for me to stagger it with physically demanding chores. Workout clubs don't last for me; too boring. I know, I know, poop instead? I'll explain.

My beloved doctor discovered five years ago that I’d been living with a long-term, low-grade depression. Two years later he diagnosed my hereditary ADD. Typically, I was researching ADD to help with our younger son's struggles. I seem to have every characteristic of a second ADD subtype, developed from internal head injuries. It may have compounded the usual focusing and task completion difficulties, and the extra stimulation need. Apparently the ADD brain is usually blood flow-poor, thusly oxygen-poor, so I may have a larger deficit in the cranial oxygen department.

Enter the physical life. Exercise, sports, manual labor, dancing the night away. I grew up on a family ranch of woods and fields, with cattle and horses for meat, recreation and tax advantages. I grew up hauling and stacking wood, piling and burning brush, shoveling, unloading and spreading manure and sawdust, loading and unloading hay and alfalfa bales, raking leaves, etc. It’s a huffity-puffity life, with plenty of aerobic and muscle-toning opportunities. After I'd do my pre-adolescent and adolescent refrain at chore-time (“Awwww, do I have to?”) I would do the work and remain amazingly unimpressed every time, how energized, calm, clear and upbeat I felt after thirty minutes to a few hours. And it was all in the great outdoors, where you find the best air. By my twenties, way before my diagnosis, I was going home from college on weekends, eager to get sweaty, energized, bushed, sore, and – profoundly content.

Okay, I’m back on the poop program, then, so I must be planning on becoming an accomplished equestrian, right? I must be preparing to disavow all my former aspirations and head for twelve-hour days of feeding, training, hauling, shoveling, medicating, massage, dressage, portage, exhaustage. No. Okay, then, a top-notch ranch-hand, or owner. Right? I’m abandoning my family and I’m moving into a wooden bunk where I belong, yes? No. A quick review here: no. The first conventional notion you can file in the nearest color-coordinated wastebasket, concerning the likes of me, is the concept of “One career, 8 or more hours a day, forever, ‘til I die.” Ain’t gonna happen. You can forget it, because I sure as hell finally have.

I should back up here. I got a coach last summer. Actually, she’s more like my Fairy God-Mentor but I don’t want to embarrass her so I’ll just call her a coach like everybody else would.

Nope, I better back up some more. Back at the diagnosis, my heart soared – so, I was not an idiot, a flake or a hopeless loser! I just needed some drugs and then I could live and work in cordial, anesthetized, unrelenting monotony like everybody else seemed to! That was my not-very-inspired hope at first, anyway. I didn’t get it.

Then early last summer, I opened Sari Solden’s book on women with ADD in a Borders bookstore. I had read all sorts of books from various authors on ADD for two and a half years, looking for answers. I was realizing that while the medication and nutritional changes helped immensely, not much was improving. I saw:

" ... the painful reality is that many women with ADD have ... kept a part of themselves locked away from other people ... as if the way they live is in some way shameful ... (they) feel like outsiders ... not living life but instead coping with this silent thief of time and dreams."

At “... silent thief of time and dreams” my knees gave up, and I was choking on grief and tears, in that solitary bookstore aisle. I read the book in a couple or so days. What Sari Solden got through to me, among other uncompromising messages, is that the goal of medication, dietary changes, coaching, whatever, is not to make me like everybody else. In the first place, she states plainly, that isn't going to happen.

I had noticed that. I was still yanking up and down on the same see-saw: do I do what my gut says, or cave in -- again -- to the advice of everybody else who always knew better than me because I'm a flake and they're not, even though following their advice makes me feel trapped, hopeless and miserable? Eureka -- the shocking goal of medication and all the other stuff -- is to help me to capitalize on the way I really am.

Joanne Ellis Joanne Ellis lives in California and is working on a book, from which this article is an excerpt. "A little over half done," she says, her book is called Stalking the Wild Mind: 47 Years of Uncharted A.D.D. Watch for more of Joanne's writing in ADDvance in the coming months; we found this article so meaty, her writing demands to be put on the menu again.

What, capitalize on being a flake; you may think sarcastically, if you’ve endured countless letdowns from your ADD-ed loved one? Sarcasm, now there’s a weapon of enduring damage. There’s the ‘sar-’ part, a Greek prefix meaning ‘cut,’ and '-casm', a contraction of ‘chasm,’ a deep and jagged gorge; so, it means, “slice you into wafer-thin fillets and Frisbee them all into the gorge.” Okay, that’s not really the root breakdown of sarcasm, but it might as well be because that is the brutal purpose of sarcasm. Anyway, the dictionary website, this ain't. Oh, thank you Big Mama, I'm starting to have fun again! I'll get through this, too.

If you have this kind of mind, or a loved one who does, if you haven't hit some sort of wall like the one I'm getting bruised on, you will. Nonetheless, I've made a promise to myself: I will never go back; never trash another three, six, nine or more months I might have used cultivating my own callings, on one more empty band-aid job, only to throw it off angrily, validating once again the judgment of what a flighty unreliable twit I am; never again 'pass for normal', never let anybody tell me that shoveling shit is not a dynamic part of my growth. They have no idea how much I've unloaded already.

I am committed to being a steadily-contributing adult, bound only to my own conviction and integrity, weird and proud of it. For the moment, I am the only one who completely, painfully, believes in me. So be it. Have a shovel.