Did I say next week in the last post? I’m so sorry… I meant next…uh… Winter Olympics… sometimes my MS Word automatically corrects Winter Olympics to say…
Ok, so, it’s been a few weeks. But guess what – IT’S NOT MY FAULT, BECAUSE I HAVE…ADD!!! Just kidding. Thought I don’t have an excuse for not posting because excuses should be saved for really important things like not coming to work when U2 is in town and your friend just spotted Bono at the Hilton. But I do have an “extenuating circumstance.” This extenuating circumstance has been taking up all my lunch breaks and waking me up at 1, 3, 5, or 7 am each day. No, it’s not a baby – I mean, seriously, I would probably just leave that thing on top of my car with my coffee the first time I took it home from the hospital.
No, he is Lando, a rescue dog from a great company called Dogs Without Borders. He was supposed to be a foster dog (my boyfriend Barry called him “Bananas Foster” for a while) but after the first hour he was in our house I secretly decided to keep him and then tricked my boyfriend into wanting to keep him over the next few days. But really, he is – and I’m going to speak in 16 year old girl language here so you may need a translator – he is like soooooo the cutest thing EVER! OMG! He is totally cuter than if there were a Muppet that was like, a llama. Only he were a blind llama from Myanmar and he had just lost his whole family so you’d always be like “Awwwww, poor blind Muppet llama!” Anyway. He’s super great.
Ok, so, it’s been a few weeks. But guess what – IT’S NOT MY FAULT, BECAUSE I HAVE…ADD!!! Just kidding. Thought I don’t have an excuse for not posting because excuses should be saved for really important things like not coming to work when U2 is in town and your friend just spotted Bono at the Hilton. But I do have an “extenuating circumstance.” This extenuating circumstance has been taking up all my lunch breaks and waking me up at 1, 3, 5, or 7 am each day. No, it’s not a baby – I mean, seriously, I would probably just leave that thing on top of my car with my coffee the first time I took it home from the hospital.
No, he is Lando, a rescue dog from a great company called Dogs Without Borders. He was supposed to be a foster dog (my boyfriend Barry called him “Bananas Foster” for a while) but after the first hour he was in our house I secretly decided to keep him and then tricked my boyfriend into wanting to keep him over the next few days. But really, he is – and I’m going to speak in 16 year old girl language here so you may need a translator – he is like soooooo the cutest thing EVER! OMG! He is totally cuter than if there were a Muppet that was like, a llama. Only he were a blind llama from Myanmar and he had just lost his whole family so you’d always be like “Awwwww, poor blind Muppet llama!” Anyway. He’s super great. Ok so anyway, back to talking about not taking responsibility for our own actions. To briefly recap, we were discussing the five steps of processing through one’s ADD diagnosis. Step One was WHAT A RELIEF! THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH! I’m glad I have shared this step with all of you because all of these great stories that came out that you’d be much too embarrassed to share if you couldn’t blame them on ADD. Which brings us (after about six weeks…) to Step Two:
STEP TWO: IT’S NOT MY FAULT, I HAVE ADD
This is the step where you will probably tell way more people than necessary that you have ADD. Like the guy in line behind you at the bank who’s mad because you’re talking on your cell phone and didn’t notice the next teller was open. For 10 minutes. Simply turn to him and say “I have something called ADD.” You may want to say it very slowly in case he has never heard of ADD before. You can then explain to him, and the several people standing in line behind him, that you have a condition that is no way your fault any more than it is his fault that he was born looking like that. Briefly outline the major symptoms of ADD including pros and cons of having it, and be sure to include a list of famous people with the disorder. You may now proceed to the next open teller.
You will notice feeling much lighter, as if you have just been absolved of all of your sins. Be sure to mentally forgive yourself for every time you were late to a meeting, lost your tax information, or forgot your lover’s sobriety birthday. In fact, if you have had several lovers at one time that did not know about one another, that’s not your fault either because you have a proclivity towards exciting new things and besides, if they ever said anything about not dating other people, you probably forgot it and that’s not your fault either.
When you go home and notice that your house is a disaster, don’t fret. How could it possibly be clean? You have ADD. It’s not your fault! Just add that pile of mail to the top of that other pile that is either your compost or your tax information. When your mother comes to visit and faints on top of a pile of bank overdraft fee notices, tell her there’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, when she had that herpes breakout, you didn’t hold her personally responsible for every little blister and bump, did you?
This statement will probably bring you crashing directly into…
STEP THREE: OH S***, I’M RETARDED
Now, we all know that it’s not nice to call someone retarded. But then, it’s much easier to say things to yourself that you wouldn’t say to someone else. And if you say it in your own head, it’s not like someone is going to track you down and say “Hey, you know what? My brother has downs syndrome. You really shouldn’t say that.”
But seriously. In our culture, or, in my culture, I should say, which would be white people born after 1975, if you want to say something is dumber and more ridiculous than anything else you can think of, you call it THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. Oops sorry, that one just kinda slipped away. You call it “retarded.” Or other people call it retarded, if you’re going to pretend that you never say that. And so that’s what I said to myself when I went into Step Three.
Suddenly, now that I knew that I had ADD, I couldn’t go through an hour without noticing things that I was forgetting, messing up, or losing because I had ADD. I did a 180 and stopped feeling like it was a free ticket but more of a great big boulder I had to carry with me everywhere. Or like a dorky cousin that my mom made me take to my friend’s birthday party. Or like that weird red spot on my shoulder that appeared after my 24th birthday and thought would probably disappear but hasn’t yet but I’m too embarrassed to show to a doctor. That’s what having ADD felt like.
(Pause for sympathetic coddling noises.)
I saw ADD in everything I did, even if it were something someone else without ADD would do, something totally reasonable that didn’t even matter anyway. Instead of being easier on myself for little goofs because of my new diagnosis, I tried to eliminate any and all goofs so that no one would notice. Which was stupid because I had just spent the last 3 weeks telling everyone I knew that I had ADD.
I started to notice how often ADD was mentioned negatively in everyday conversation or in pop culture. A cop told another cop on a TV show that it looked like the report he filed had been written by someone who forgot to take his Ritalin. Someone at work would mention a problem client of ours and say “I think there’s something seriously wrong with him, like, maybe he even has ADD or something.”
Oh my god, there is something seriously wrong with me!
The other un-fun (or doubleplusunfun for the Orwell fans) thing about this stage is that the way people around me reacted to me started to make me feel retarded. (I should say “I chose to let them make me feel retarded.”) Since I had told everyone I knew about my diagnosis, you know, to absolve me of all the mistakes I was making, they didn’t know exactly why I had told them and what I expected from them now that they knew. So people began asking if I needed more time, some reminders, a checklist, etc. A lot of the time, these things were actually helpful. But, even though I was just learning that I did best in life when I had some sort of external structure in place, I still wanted to do everything “All by myself.” And I was starting to hate the diagnosis and didn’t want to be reminded of it all the time.
This is probably what led me to…
Tune in next week for steps four and five; the exciting conclusion to Shannon’s journey through her ADD diagnosis!
Non-sequitur of the day: Ok, this is sort of a sequitur, I just didn’t know where else to put it. It’s not my fault, I have…nevermind. Anyway. So I don’t know what stage this was exactly, probably all five, but one of the things that came along with my diagnosis was that I talked about ADD ALL THE TIME. It was like when I was a little kid and I was like “Did you know that Michelangelo is the one who has the nunchucks and he likes pizza the most but really they all like pizza and I think that Michelangelo is the coolest except I also like Donatello because his mask is purple and I wish the Michelangelo’s mask was purple cuz I don’t really like orange.”
Except now it was like “Did you know that people with ADD have a tendency of being more naturally empathetic than other people? I’ll bet that’s why I’m so empathetic… most people don’t even know what the difference between empathetic and sympathetic is… Also people with ADD tend to have more vivid dreams than other people. I’ll be that explains why…” blah blah blah, you get the idea.
So this one morning I was driving my boyfriend into work – my poor boyfriend who bore the brunt of all of the ADD stream-of-consciousness hyper-babble – and I was regaling him with yet another fact that he didn’t care about from one of my many ADD books when I interrupted myself with this: “Oh my god, look at ALL of those bike cops! Why do you think there are so many bike cops in one place? Do you think it’s a training exercise or something? Have you noticed that bike cops usually seem to think they’re such hot s***?” That was when I looked over and noticed my boyfriend laughing so hard it was inaudible, which was why I didn’t notice that he had been laughing since the moment I interrupted myself talking about ADD to have a little ADD moment.
