Deficit of Attention

If you read the chapter about Happy People, you will understand a little bit about what my life has been like. I have been like that all of my life. Psychologists have told me that this is somewhat a function of my ADD, having a high level of intelligence and being creative. I am always on a natural high, except when I am on a natural low. There is no even setting for me. It’s like living on a roller coaster. It’s fun and exciting, but when everything drops, it really drops.

ADD is just another aspect of my day-to-day issue.

Imagine for a moment a huge traffic jam. In New York. Rush hour. Friday. When the president is in town.

Imagine the Autobahn.

Think of a beehive.

Splice those three images together and you have a basic example of what happens in my brain every day.

It is hard for me to play pool because all of the colors and patterns on the balls distract me. Those pictures that you are supposed to look at for 30 seconds and then you see the image – I have never once seen the image. My mind is too busy being occupied by those thousands of little dots that I can can’t focus back on the real picture.

Information overload is something that happens to people that have ADD or ADHD. All of that mental traffic starts flowing and before you know it, there is a freeway going on in my cerebrum. It’s gets so bad that sometimes I have to sit down. It’s like someone is hanging on my head…not heavily at first, but then it drags you down.

A good way to illustrate what happens with me is this. I was with a friend and she was a rabbit and she directed my attention toward it. My response – “I have to go to the gym”. That was honestly my first response. This is why – Rabbits jump. Jumping made me think of jumping rope. That I had not jumped rope in a long time reminded me that I needed to go to the gym. Therefore, the rabbit made me realize that I should go to the gym.

Imagine living like that everyday.

It’s not a problem – it is a learning and processing difference.

I always had the classic signs, but most of my teachers must have picked up on the fact that I was really bright and that with pushing, I could finish my work. The key here was pushing. If I were assigned 10 questions, I would do 5. I could never complete anything. Cleaning my room was and still is as painful as removing my own intestine with a dull butter knife without anesthesia would be. My wardrobe has a lot of the same color in it, because I get distracted with lots of different patterns. You can’t imagine how happy I was to see the monochrome look become stylish.

I forget my thoughts all the time. I have to take paper everywhere I go like I have amnesia so that I can write down things that I need to know. This is useful, especially when I move from room to room and forget what I am doing in the first place. I have to do the crossword puzzle in class so that the teacher is my distraction and thus I end up paying attention to the teacher.

There are lots of other things that I do to cope with this, and I could probably explain ADD much better right now, but I am distracted by the need to write this chapter.

I tried to write this chapter so many times, but I lost focus.