Congratulations! You have ADD!

My apologies for taking so long to post again. I found that relying on myself to post “about every week” was just not enough structure for me so I have a new system in place. I have asked my best friend Jen to harass/cajole/guilt/and otherwise mother every week to I get my blog together. So, thanks Jen! It has becoming more and more clear lately how important it is for me to have friends who will help me put some structure and routine into my life. It took a while to realize it, or maybe I did realize it but just didn’t want to ask.

I wanted also to thank all of you for reading, commenting on, and sharing the blog. I’ve received a lot of really interesting feedback on it. Some ADD peeps totally recognized themselves it, and, some NON-add people said they can really relate too. I think that's awesome, and, really, everyone has some of the symptoms of ADD some of the time. The ADD'ers have them more frequently and intensely. One thing that has been really interesting is that I have had several people "admit" to me that they too have ADD, and I had no idea! Some of them have been recently diagnosed and some a while back but couldn't really accept the diagnosis. It's kind of wacky how many ADD peeps are living in the (messy, cluttered and disorganized) ADD closet.

With that in mind, I decided it might be a good topic to talk about what it’s like to receive that all-important ADD diagnosis. I got mine a little over a year ago. I’m making it sound like the stork dropped on my doorstep or I found it in a box of Wheaties. What I mean is that that I sought out a Psychiatrist to test me for it because I had been wondering for some time if I might have it. And then SHE gave me the box of Wheaties and the diagnosis was in THAT. Just kidding.

It may seem sort of strange that I didn’t think to ask anyone about this until I was 27. In fact it was really strange for me to learn this at that age. There were some signs back in the day that might have led me to believe I had ADD and there were some signs that conflicted. I’ll get more into that later because I want to focus (yes! I am focusing on something!) on post-diagnosis stuff today.

(Side note, aka “digression”: Yesterday I started writing this blog when I was giving myself a “day off” from Ritalin, and I produced three pages of rambling material that even I was bored with upon reading later. Sometimes I think that not taking my crazy pills will make me more “free thinking” and “creative” but yesterday it was just “spastic” and “Someone you would not want to get stuck sitting next to on a trans-continental flight.”)

Being diagnosed with ADD, especially after walking around this planet for a while thinking you don’t have it, is an interesting and conflicting thing to happen to a person. A chick named Sari Solden has a great book called "Women with Attention Deficit Disorder." She also may or may not like being referred to as a “chick.” (By the way, she has a great website that has a checklist, for males or females, to see if you may have ADD. Here’s the link: http://www.sarisolden.com/html/screen.html. Be warned that you probably will feel like you have ADD after reading this, even if you don’t.)

This chick, Sari, says that a person will go through the stages of grief (denial, bargaining, anger, depression and acceptance) when she is diagnosed. I found this to be partly true, but didn’t feel it encompass the entire scenario. I would like to propose a new list of “Stages of Acceptance” of one’s ADD diagnosis. In this post, I will introduce the five steps, and go into more detail of step one. I will finish steps 2-5 in subsequent posts (assuming I am able to finish what I started).

Step one:
WHAT A RELIEF! THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH!

Step Two:
IT'S NOT MY FAULT - I HAVE SOMETHING CALLED ADD

Step Three:
OH S***; I'M RETARDED!
(Yes I’m a jerk for using this word. Stick with me and I’ll explain why I use it but also know that I will still seem a little jerky.)

Step Four:
ADD IS OBVIOUSLY COMPLETELY MADE UP - JUST ONE OF THE LIES I HAVE BEEN TELLING MYSELF

Step Five:
CAN YOU PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT ADD IS AGAIN? I DON'T THINK I WAS REALLY PAYING ATTENTION THE FIRST TIME...

Let us dissect these steps in more detail. Know that, in your own progression, you may not follow the steps in this exact order, and you may go through one step a number of times before you move past it.

Let us now take a closer look at Step One: What a relief! This explains so much.
As I mentioned earlier, I sought out a doctor to screen me for ADD. The most common way of testing a person for ADD is discussing their personal history, why he or she thinks she may have ADD, and asking a list of comprehensive questions. After answering about fifty questions, my doc added up the total and pronounced “A score that indicates some presence of ADD is a 22. You scored 45. Looks like you have ADD!” Wait – go back – what? I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. I guess something like “It appears you have some tendencies, go read such-and-such book, etc.” Nope. I really had it and it seemed like there wasn’t really a grey area.

In fact, when she was asking me the questions, I actually laughed out loud a few times. Because, you see, I am insane. No, I laughed because I recognized myself SO much in those questions. Do I get excited about a project and then quit once the fun part is finished? Well, yes, but isn’t that just because I’m an evil genius? Do I frequently realize I haven’t been listening to someone even though they are speaking directly to me? Well, yes, but my own thoughts are just so much more interesting than what most people are saying, unless they are on TV, and then it could go either way. And did I often find myself making lots of small mistakes on a project if it was repetitive or tedious? Again, yes, but also again, that’s just because I’m a super-genius just like those Stanford Professors who need their spouses to set out a pair of matching socks for them before they go to work. And yes – I think everyone does these things to some extent. As I mentioned earlier, it’s only ADD if you do these things consistently, perhaps to the point where it is starting to hold you back in life.

That was the first of many moments that I realized that it really HAD been holding me back. I was not worried or scared right away when I heard the diagnosis. I was just relieved. There was a name for what the heck was “wrong” with me. And there were books to read and support groups to go to and conferences to attend – oh, I was having so much fun already!

The first thing I did after leaving my doctor’s office was call my family. “Guess what! It’s not my fault that I’m a total screw up! Yaaaay! I have a disorder. You now have to feel sorry for me, not blame or get angry or frustrated with me.” Oh, life was going to be sweet. But more about renouncing responsibility and embracing personal absolution in step two.

I immediately went to Amazon.com to buy a book to help me come to terms with my new diagnosis. Instead, I bought three. I would get bored with one, pick up another, put that one down, and then go to the third. My friend Josh said “If I were going to write a movie about someone with ADD, that would be the perfect scene.” It did encapsulate the madness both succinctly and cinematically. But I could laugh at that now! And the more I read about in the books, the more other things from my past I could laugh at.

Remember at the end of the movie “The Sixth Sense” when Bruce Willis finds out he’s a ghost and has all these flashbacks? So that’s why my wife was ignoring me. I’m dead! Good, I thought it was just me! I too had a series of forehead-smiting, gee-that-makes-so-much-sense-now flashbacks. I went back to age six: my mom lays my clothes out for me so that I can get ready for church. About 20 minutes later she comes back to discover that I have been staring at my face really close up in the mirror for 20 minutes. I flash forward to age 25, where I am counting money in the till at Ann Taylor where I work as a manager. Every time my co-worker talks to me I have to start over from the beginning. When I ask him to be quiet for a moment, he says “That’s ok, l have trouble with math too.” I learn that people with ADD will seek strange forms of stimulation, including making a situation more dramatic than it needs to be or provoking people for no reason. Suddenly it makes a little more sense that I told Glenna that Meredith said that she was acting like a slut at her 12th birthday party at the Rollerina Skating Party even though she never said that and I didn’t really know what a slut was. Huh, it’s all so clear now.

Join us next week when we discuss steps two and three! In the meantime, you can practice them by not taking responsibility for things that are your responsibility, and taking responsibility for things that aren’t!