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Jane D. Blog

Emotional Striptease Blog: Tales of Me, Myself and ADD

Archives: September 2007

Fish Out of Water

On Saturdays I go from the clueless business reporter, who thinks that an LBO is a flying object, to swim instructor.

In the swimming pool I command authority amongst these non-swimmers. From the eyes of a swim virgin I am an Olympian, and a swim goddess. This gives me a much-needed self esteem boost that fuels me through the weekend.

It takes courage to take the plunge, take it from Manny, take it from Constantine, take it from Anne. These adults want so badly just to swim a lap, but first they need to put their faces in the water. There are at least nine people in this class, all of them came from different backgrounds, and the vast range of ability and experience was as I told the swim supervisor a "rainbow."

She laughed when I said that, another colorful add throwaway line from the ADD me. Imagine my shock when on the first day of class I discovered that a class meant for people who could swam a lap in the water had people who had never put their faces in a pool before. I should have known when Anne looked at me as if I were an alien when I clapped my hands and said, "Ok, let's all take the plunge now." She looked like she was frozen to the deck.

How do you get someone who has never done something before to do it? To me the water is second nature, I jump in, I swim, it's simple, I was three when I learned to swim, but to these swimming virgins the pool looks scary, everything is new. "How deep is the pool?" Constantine asked, he asks. "Is the floor the same depth all around?" someone else asked. If they are to learn to swim they need to accept that some people just take to the water as if they are fish, and others are late bloomers whose greatest accomplishment will be perhaps to make it to the other end. It's just the way it is. Part of life is accepting that there are some things that other people simply have a knack for.

What the swim virgins don't know is that outside of the water I share my fears with them. Organization, listening, lingering, maintaining relationships, multitasking are challenges for me. I struggle with these in the same way they struggle just to blow bubbles in the water.

I coax the swim virgins in the pool, splash each other, get them to do a conga line and pull the water. I line them up against the pool gutter as if they were little kids, told them to look down at the stupid non existent fish and then blow big bubbles as if they were blowing out birthday candles. What else are you going to tell them?

Anne looks at me and says, "I don't know what to do I just sink." How do you just tell someone, look at me, just let go of the wall and do it. All I could say was look down and blow bubbles, but there must be another way to get them to float. Constantine was the typical man, reacting like Manny did, every time I came by trying to help him (and he obviously couldn't float), he said okay, okay, I'm fine he repeated as if he were I parrot, I get it as he coughed up the parts of the pool he had swallowed. How do you explain to someone that this is what they do, when it's second nature to you. Somewhere in the middle of the class I told the students to just relax and have fun, because they looked like they were going to have nervous breakdowns. Calm down, calm down and everything will be just fine, but it was as if I were talking to myself.

Living on the Rhythm of an Oven Timer

The thought of forking over $400 a month to have a coach tell me to live my life on the rhythms of an oven timer is too much to bear.

The personal coach lady emailed me over all of these things like an intentions journal, a time log, but there's already enough paper, I don't need more of it. So I leave a message to tell her I want to call off the appointment, and put it off until the new year.

On the other hand I wish I were rich and famous and could afford to wholly experiment with all of the remedies out there, because I live life as if I'm an Octopus on roller skates. I'm here, there and everywhere. I wing things. I wing work, wing the way I write, I wing the grocery shopping, the ingredients in a recipe (thus the half-baked pies, and the time I mixed up collard greens for romaine lettuce). Sometimes winging it works, but much of the time it backfires and makes me look like a spacey valley girl. Case in point was going out and buying my very first set of real bed sheets.

I figured that my bed was a twin bed simply because there are two pieces that match together and then bought new sheets for a twin bed, turns out the sheet with the elastic corners don't even stretch to the other end of the bed.

I end up hauling the linens to Jane's husband's memorial service today, with my funeral mates wondering what is going on. Why is this woman carrying a big bag of linens to a Jewish wake? I didn't care what they thought, by the time I arrived at the funeral parlor on the upper west side I was exhausted. I had trekked across Central Park my palms throbbing and my feet throbbing. When I'm in a sunny mood I joke that I'm a bag lady, but I wish I lived a simpler and more stress-free life.

I went back to the linen store and told them that the sheets didn't fit the bed, and that there' were spots on the sheets, making myself feel less guilty of being clueless. The store woman pointed me to a tall cute black kid who asks me okay what kind of size bed do you have? I don't know I say. Twin, full, queen, king? What's 'full' I ask, what's `queen' I ask? Since he can't explain the measurements, and nor can I, I point to a bed on display. It's like that I say only a little smaller. So it's a queen, he says? I guess I say. Do you know how many thread counts you want? He asks. Thread what? I ask, what is that?

The kid looks a little amused but that's one of the perks of ADD, people think I am joking half the time when it fact I truly am clueless. They think I am being silly when I say I don't know how big the bed is. Well you should have a good idea since we're not doing a return again, the kid said. The botched bed linens, the way I take care of Marilyn the Betta fish, are all signs of winging it.

Four days ago the damn fish started to show signs of fin rot, with the Petco sales kid tsk tsking me and saying the disease is a sign of "poor hygiene, poor water quality." Good thing there's no animal control for Betta fish. So I bought new gravel, fish meds, premium food, with the hopes that Marilyn survives. He seems kind of hearty since he likes to snap at me and jump like a rabid dog whenever I stick my fingers near the bowl.

I just don't understand why my plants and fish don't thrive, inevitably there's something wrong with them. The sister says I should be nice to myself, if the Betta dies don't be so hard on myself, fish don't live very long anyway. However, I jokingly tell a friend who has a new baby that I'm not sure how well I'd do with a baby since I can't even handle a fish. ADD is such a vicious cycle.

Outside the shoe-box sized room I'm sub-renting, it is all gray sky and cool air, and pharmacies filled with Halloween trinkets. I walked through Central Park today though observing young couples, supermodel-like couples, dowdy moms, Jewish moms, older couples, and wondered how did they meet, how did they hook up? I envy the newly married cousins, I envy Jane, she and Herb were true soul mates even though he's gone now. I've never met a couple so meant for each other and they make each other laugh all of the time. I would give anything for that. I would give anything to find someone I loved and admired and vice versa and I just haven't found that yet. Is it possible for someone with ADD to find love? There lies the million dollar question. Given that I have a hard time keeping track of conversations and the bad habit of winging things, will I ever walk down any aisle other than a supermarket aisle?

Wanting It All

Decided to give the meds a rest today, I deserve it and I can save $3 that way.

I've calculated that's the cost of an Adderall pill and a touch of Lexapro per day, as expensive as a Starbucks coffee. I always feel a little funny now when I consciously decide I'm not going to take the meds. I didn't feel any different, in fact I felt a little sunnier than I usually do, I grinned and giggled after the third swim class. The first two were a wreck, nine students, three or have a fear of water, three who can dog paddle, and three who can swim. How does one person juggle three classes in one?

Lucky me that the swim school is nice enough to give me a co-instructor, a young Russian man who is as cool as a cucumber. There is success now in working with a co-instructor, I can actually handle the class, I trust the Russian guy too although he has an evil twinkle in his eye. In MK Flynn fashion I told him okay buster, we're splitting up the class and you're going to teach the two beginners. He was like sure whatever, I'm flexible, I go with the flow.

Afterwards took a quick swim with Richard the perverted 50-plus-year-old who clearly likes me, but he's got a girlfriend, it's sick with these guys, they want it all, a little like me.

Gratitude for the ADD Me....Yeah, Right.

I am grateful for coffee with Karla (boy I really need to kick the caffeine)...

• ... and looking forward to joining Ladies who Launch (I dream of a life of autonomy where I can be my own boss)

• Grateful for Monday night meals of M&M's and grapes (pity my future children who will succumb to my offbeat meals)

• Grateful that I have a place to live until December

• I am grateful for the ability to race down the swimming pool in less than a minute

• Grateful for thoughts that extend into unknown galaxies

• I am grateful for the ADD me.

Yeah, right.

Can I Afford ADD?

ADD is costing me a fortune. Will any of this work?

This morning, I felt dead at work, my spirit flat, my soul restless. I can find no joy in calling up bankers and asking them the details of the deals, they make a ton of money but so what? They all sound like they are constipated.

I juggle incoming emails, I answer phones, I feel chained to my seat, but this morning I had the luck of meeting with Karla from Columbia. We were never friends but somehow I feel connected to her. She and I had a lot in common, creativity, we seek autonomy, we are strong women. I met her inside one of my favorite hangouts sitting by the window staring at the sidewalk passerby. I told her about my fears of going it alone, Jane what is preventing you from doing that? Who would pay for my healthcare and shrink and the growing amount of meds I'm taking? Would I be disciplined enough to work, and who would handle the accounting and technology? I'm a numbers phone and technophobe, how would it all work?

Karla said that she heard things from me that weren't healthy, I kept comparing myself to "other people." What do "other people" have to do with me? She asked and then she heard fear, fear of failure, fear of not making it, if I was constantly tied down with these fears I'd have no place to go but fail. I came away from that coffee feeling exhausted and yet enlightened.

The one thing that I've noticed about the magic pills lately is that they've made me a bit depressed. Always during the middle of the day I feel blue, a low that is indescribable. I become so locked in work, and the task at hand that I don't move, I fear moving, I am glued to my seat, I don't even pee. I don't talk to anyone, I am locked in my own world. I wonder if my fears are visible, if the uncertainty if obvious, I look over at Mary, cute, adorable, very peppy woman, a guy magnet, lucky her she has it all, the guy, kid, goldfish, cats, the two-bedroom pad in the Upper East Side. What more could a girl want? There I go again looking into the other lane, it's so easy to lose focus. The one thing that I believe in are angels, like the Michael Landon on that old 80s show "Highway to Heaven."

Yesterday I interviewed this Indian guru who basically helps wall streeters de-stress. After a crackly connection on the phone I ask him what he teaches the wall streeters and high fliers who pay him big bucks to give them life tips. "get smart, get intelligent, think about the present rather than the past and the future, people spend so much time regretting the past and fretting about the future that they neglect the present, it's about discipline and focus."

But let's get real. In a big city like New York it's also about money. ADD is costing me a fortune and I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to afford it all, there's the time doctor who I'm going to work with for a month for a whopping $150 an hour, after working with her maybe I can be a coach myself and charge something equally as ridiculous, there are the notebooks, calendars and all of the gadgets that I buy to make myself believe that I am getting organized, there is the Buddha man who is costing me $25 a session but without the job at the rag I would be forking over $200 for 45 minutes, there are the meds courtesy of Eli Lilly that is $60 a month, but really it's $300 plus a month without healthcare, there is the add support group that is costing me coffee and testing my patience.

Mostly there is the uncertainty of whether any of this will really work?

Inside My Perfect World

I sometimes imagine that I am walking on a thin beam suspended high above the sky, that's what ADD feels like.

One can not cure themselves of ADD, it is chronic but at times humorous. Today, for example, I forgot to take my medication,I say the oddest things also. Tonight the chat with the sister sounded like a skit out of Saturday Night Live. I invited the sister to the next ADD meeting but said it would be really short. Why? Because no one shows up, it's an ADD meeting.

Jane made a funny, she cracked. There are a lot of funnies, I think, they come out of my mind like treasures amongst the many weeds that I also need to live with. On any given day I will go on an adventure in my mind, I think okay maybe I should take piano, or travel to Australian to search for Tasmanian devils, maybe I should take up choral singing or become a Catholic, I wonder if I will ever find my prince charming or the love of my life, I wonder if perhaps I should go out more, maybe I'm too much of homebody. A million thoughts cross my mind and in the end it's a delicious journey.

Reality is paying bills, it is forgetting the online banking password for the umpteenth time, it is speed walking into the humid stinking subways and feeling like a thousand eyes are on me and feeling subconscious about it, it is sitting in the silence of my own world at work and not talking to a soul, it is fearing to walk to the water cooler because I fear people, might they be able to see what is wrong with me?

Without the meds today I crashed, around four this afternoon, I came close to nodding off and falling asleep at my desk. Without the meds I am all over the board, constantly folding and unfolding my legs, buying things that I throw in the boxes under my desk, I am jittery, but with the meds I am sedated but sad.

There is my perfect world. There is a bright light in the darkness or at least I need to remind myself of them, as of late I made peace with mom, she's spacey and selfish but not malicious, made acquaintances with the little half sister, I fought my demons and took a leap into the East River and made it from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had come so close to withdrawing from that race but I didn't.

There are many wonderful things about life even getting gray hairs because it reminds me that I am mortal, but what I starve for most is happiness, and peace, peace of mind, peace with self. I sometimes imagine that I am walking on a thin beam suspended high above the sky, that's what ADD feels like. There are moments when you are confident it's fine and others when you lose focus, and you feel like you are going to fall and die.

To find peace today I forced myself to go to the pool and swim, it felt so good to see Patrick, so nice to see him, so nice to see good old Charles in my lane. I was a little offended he told me to stick in the slow lane, but I think he could tell that I just needed a nice light workout today, I just needed to enjoy the water. I so love it. When I can slip into the coolness and quietness of water I feel at peace with myself.

Hunting and Gathering

In choosing between ADD and being as boring as toast, I often wish I were on the other side of the farm.

This city never sleeps, it is one big colorful explosion of noise and color, of consumerism at its peak. For the ADD me, everything looks like candy, on the way to work, the bookstore I pass every morning, the pet store, the new coffee shop with 100 flavors, the massage boutique, the manicurist, ideas grow like weeds after a rainstorm. I can't stop them. The comedic ADDer calls it pinballing, you could call it creativity, or genius, in reality it's a pain in the ass. In choosing between add and being as boring as toast, I often wish I were on the other side of the farm.

The route to work becomes a row of diversions, on a recent morning I waltzed into the bookstore tempted to buy yet another notebook to organize myself. The closet is already a graveyard of trapper keepers, colanders, rolodexes, filofaxes, monthly, weekly, daily, half day, minute by minute ways to organize, it is the easiest way to drive my add self mad. In desperation there is also the fly lady. After I buy all of Staples I will turn to the Flylady in the same way a Catholic who sins turns to a confessional.

It makes me feel better that I am doing something to organize myself even though it is just a notebook. At home the notebooks pile up like a stack of pancakes, they are hidden in the closet, under the computer, I start one and inevitably forget about it and start another. That is life as the adder, it is a life of beginnings without a middle and end. I walk into the pet store I buy a blueberry colored Betta fish, and then on another day I walked in again tempted to buy another. I believe there's a spirit out there an invisible drill sergeant with a whip stick though that keeps me in check. On the day I almost picked up Betta fish two it turned out the double tank I bought had a crack in it.

I pass the street hawkers, the Africans with flashy belts, cheap purses, faux plastic made in china jewelry and impulsively buy a purse, a wallet, the Christmas gift for next year or maybe even the year after. I am like a hunter, I love gathering. I make excuses and tell myself it's okay because I'm splurging on someone else.

My Piles Make Sense

In order to be an adult, bring home bread and butter, I need to battle my mind everyday,

The room that I am subleasing from the 26 year old grinch of a girl, a fifth floor walkup, has started to resemble the garbage plate cuisine so famous in Rochester, one big fricken mess of artery cloggers.

The walls in the room are bordered by piles of magazines, newspapers, paper, there is the Betta fish pile, the swim pile, the to read pile, to do pile, bills, bank statements, float around like leaves at the peak of autumn, and in the center of it is that feisty cross dressing - Betta fish who I've named Marilyn because its tail is so beautiful it reminded me of Marilyn Monroe.

The roommate has a Mexican cleaning woman who comes twice a month to polish the little apartment. The first few times this happened the piles disappeared, the floor was an empty palette. The roomie looks puzzled when I tell her to order the Mexican woman to put back the piles, to keep the room as it looks. "I just thought you wanted more floor space, don't you feel claustrophobic?" the roomie asks. No not really, I think, to me the piles make sense, it is the way that I think.

The roommate is starting to understand the quirks, the half drunken cans of diet coke, the forgotten candy bar or bag of lettuce that has turned dark brown. Maybe she is a fellow ADDer, after all she's forgotten things like watering her orchid that has gone from leafy green promise to the ugly brown stump, blech. She's forgotten to create the sublease between us, we are both loosey goosey so we fit, I pay her rent once a month and that's it.

Beyond the fifth floor pad and the streets though I live in a straight jacketed non add world. In cubicle land the boss, the colleagues, must think that I am strange, oddly quiet. In the past few months I've rolled in my own misery, I come in and sit there and look absolutely miserable because it's tiring trying to rein in the thousand thoughts, that spring forth like weeds and run like wild mustangs. In order to be an adult, bring home bread and butter, I need to battle my mind everyday, focus, write, organize, multitask, I am thrown into a world of blackberries, instant messaging, text messaging, and it drives me batty, I want to tear out my hair, and in the mess I need to somehow pretend that things are okay, that I can control it, but on the darkest of days I ask who am I kidding.