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Jane D. Blog

Emotional Striptease Blog: Tales of Me, Myself and ADD

Archives: October 2007

My Spooky Halloween

Tonight I was once again a half an hour late to that weekly ADD research session at the hospital.

I'm one of six human guinea pigs (ADD adult participants), there at the beck and call of psychiatrists who want to study adult ADD people and figure out why we are so absent minded and ditzy. I came in and saw candy on the table, ahhh a Halloween treat I thought.

The doctor who runs the research sessions is a funny looking character with his geeky glasses, and egg shaped head. He has a recorder that anchors the table, he checks his watch and scribbles down something when I come in. Yes, I know I'm late I want to say. I decided to be a guinea pig out of some underlying hope that maybe just maybe I can change, be cured, or at least bitch and complain amongst people who are just like me. For the first time in my life I feel very much like I belong, that I am an official member of the ADD frat.

There's a slim black woman around my age with a young son, who says that she's perpetually tardy. She jokes that she has lots of degrees, unfinished degrees in everything from weaving to organic cooking. She talked about being a victim of the Internet, and being sucked in by the temptations of eBay, Amazon and random thoughts like, "gee wouldn't it be great if I took guitar lessons or go to Tahiti."

I can totally relate because the thoughts will hit me like a meteor too, yesterday the sudden idea of getting a Ph.D in sexuality smacked me. The very thought made me laugh, and delight in the very thought of going to cocktail parties and having an awesome throwback line. "Oh what are you a doctor of?" "A doctor of human sexuality."

There's a Hispanic woman in her 50s who must also suffer from some psychotic disorder, she shakes like Jell-O, she's jittery, she seems edgy, she tells me she's been married twice, hospitalized several times. She said she wanted to kill her boyfriend at times, especially when he does a bad job of the laundry. Poor guy.

There's a nice man in his 40s very soft-spoken and somehow sad. He keeps talking about his tossed salad of a resume, how he's the ultimate job hopper, how he loses interest quickly, all of the things he should have done. The blonde woman next to me the nanny said that she finds it hard finishing things. She'll be so hyped up and into the idea and then somehow it fizzles, and it takes someone who will whip her, light the fire under the tail, to force her to finish.

I think of myself as they talk about their stories, and it gets me really sad because our struggles are invisible. I shook my head as I listened to the slim black woman talk about her first day on the job, the disastrous run for the bus, falling down on the street, being late, not having her ATM card work so she could buy the subway card, making a poor impression on her boss, and beating herself all over again. It's me, it's the ADD, I'm stupid, I'm incompetent, I'm going to get fired.

I realized that these are small struggles in the light of AIDS, cancer, plane crashes and yet to the ADD me and my ADD posse these are major hurdles. The day when I arrive at the guinea pig meeting on time will be an achievement, the day when I can complete a project as passionately as when I started will be glory. I know I'm making this sound like a scene from "Chariots of Fire," but there are days when I feel completely smashed and defeated when I've spent hours surfing the web, putzing around, buying up more organizers and alarms with the hope that I will wake up and be on track. The day I can assert myself and tell someone, hey I'm too busy to do that now, will be bliss. I will be free like the pigeons in New York City.

After the guinea pig session I returned to the expensive shoebox of an apartment today, walking past children in costumes, twentysomethings headed to parties, past the many stores and boutiques open late so they can give out candy to trick or treaters. A year ago I was at a Junior League bash in the boonies, where I felt out of place because everyone was engaged or married (well it was upstate after all). A year later I feel no less empty and out of place, only that for an hour and a half amongst the company of people like me, I felt right at home and felt like celebrating.

It's Halloween for Christ's Sake

It was Halloween today, a holiday for people with a social life and families, for dressed-up dogs and babies...

...and here I am sitting in the expensive shoebox sized apartment, $1350 each month, roommate from hell, a TV hog.

I wish I could tell her in a nice civil way, hey can I watch the TV too since I pay $80 a month for cable. I'm tired of being a wallflower, a pushover, is that an ADD trait too?

I spent the entire day slaving away in cubicle hell today, it just gets worse and worse. Without the Indian colleague there's two of us churning out five articles. The colleague does the minimum churning out three articles, why did I have to do five? I don't want to do more than I need to and yet somehow I feel driven to do more, perhaps so I am liked or loved, heavens knows. But today I sat at work and for the first time really didn't want to write, enough is enough I thought, I'm not enjoying this anymore kind of like swimming.

I used to love to go to practice and swim, but lately it's been a mess. I go feeling like I'm going to throw up in the pool. I look angry, I feel angry, and I swim angry and the harder I try the worse it is. The other night the Japanese tri-athlete guy swims in our lane, and he obviously has no idea how to keep track of time because he was supposed to wait five seconds in between and instead he kept swimming the sets in a manic fashion almost mowing us down.

The woman who swims in my lane is a nice woman, fat, plump like a turkey, and has a cheery personality to match it. She was mad at him too but at least she could joke about it. "We should train him," she joked. "All men need to be trained." It was a much more positive way to look at things. I wanted to drag him out of the pool and give him a tongue lashing. Lately these seemingly little things—slow walking people on the sidewalk, crying babies at the airport, being jammed up against the subway car like a sardine, get my blood boiling. The iPod calms me down and serves as my urban pacifier. Steve Jobs rocks.

The city with its rough edges, has been bothering me lately. Everything here feels incredibly loud and impersonal. In the two bedroom, fifth floor walk up, I feel unhappy living with a stranger, space is a premium, everything is a premium, a roll of paper towel costs $2.50 at the 7-Eleven.

What made things worse today was the she-boss she has locked herself in her office, and poked bullet holes in my article with comments like this is a lame lead, can't you be more specific? In the end it shouldn't matter but it does. I take these things personally. I have this imaginary frying pan always smacking me over the head and screaming, what's wrong with you?

Dating Crisis, Man Crisis!

I got to thinking why I don't go after the things I supposedly want. What is stopping me? If I grow bored of potential Prince Charmings that quickly, how am I ever supposed to walk down the aisle? Has ADD also stripped me of lust?

I could blame it on the ADD, only the other night at the guinea pig meeting at the hospital the doctor told us that there are ADD people who are smart and others who aren't, normal people who are smart, and others who aren't, so there's no black and white answer as to what works and what doesn't work. I can't blame the ADD, can't blame the family, can't blame the crazy mother who is a religious zealot. If I don't move forward then it's my fault.

I had a chat with a friend yesterday who seems like she's very happy with her life. She said that she had to train herself to rethink things, and then she finally got what she wanted. It seems like a genuine enough piece of advice. The dad and stepmother are also saying the same thing, rather than going after the flashy, wealthy bastards, who won't treat me very nicely why not the nice person. Dad says, "so long as someone isn't deformed, very few people are that bad looking."

The stepmother says first ask myself what I want and what I am able to deal with, if it's a resounding no then just forget about looking there. I don't have the personality to deal with a bad boy whose going to cheat, just forget about it but if I want some fun, hey nothing wrong with that.

It got me thinking as to why I don't go after the things I supposedly want. What is stopping me? I could blame it on the ADD, only the other night at the guinea pig meeting at the hospital the doctor told us that there are ADD people who are smart and others who aren't, normal people who are smart, and others who aren't, so there's no black and white answer as to what works and what doesn't work. I can't blame the ADD, can't blame the family, can't blame the crazy mother who is a religious zealot. If I don't move forward then it's my fault. When I saw the Nympth at the cocktail yesterday I still felt attracted, but also hurt. What's so good about the woman that he came with? Well she's a superb swimmer and she's skinny and wears nice clothes, but she's in her late 30s and she's not married either so it got me thinking that okay, maybe the jerk and the snobbish super swimmer deserve each other.

There wasn't a hint of remorse in the nympth's eyes either. It's as if he had been trained this way to treat women poorly, but rather than second guess I decided to heck with it, not worth my time. I'm only glad I walked away when I did on that rainy night, and said to him that he was full of bull shit, and left him by calling out "it would be good if you kept your word," knowing very well he wouldn't. Dad says that "casanovas" like that don't really keep their word, they go up and down a list and maybe this time he started with the Ws, and since he didn't see me as girlfriend material he moved on. Besides he was really never interested in me as a person. I was disturbed at how bored I was of him too. After a while he lost his charm, which made me think that somehow ADD had also stripped me of lust. If I grow bored of potential Prince Charmings that quickly, how am I ever supposed to walk down the aisle?

The ADD Meet Up Went Swimmingly Well

Although we're all strangers, it feels really nice to be with people like me where I can do the emotional striptease without feeling dirty.

The ADD meet up meeting went swimmingly well. This time the pow wow was at Gregory's, a long-key Starbucks-look alike near Union Square, rather than Cosi where the music literally drowns out all thoughts. We had two repeats and three new people, including a really strange man who was fixated on the idea that I am a part-time swim instructor.

One of the repeats is Kevin a cute Catholic Irish man who said the best thing about his life in recent years was coming to terms with his ADD and who he is, and being totally unashamed. He takes a Deepak Chopra way of tackling the ADD, and says that life is not bad since he adopted the motto, "Instead of going home to the pub I go home to the tub."

He takes short walks after work and has divided the house into zones, the laundry zone, the cooking zone, the bed zone, the clothes zone. Actually it's a brilliant idea even though his apartment probably looks like Romper Room. Tonight we just tossed ideas, sorrows, challenges, jokes into the middle of the coffee table as if it were a toy box.

Kevin gave us the time challenge of keeping the conversations streamlined, no more lingering conversations and scattered thoughts. I fished out the Speedo watch and we parceled out five minutes for each person. On your mark, get set, go. I kept staring at the watch, staring at the speaker, but sure enough the whole timer thing was working like a charm otherwise it would be the never ending meeting.

Ideas galore tonight, there was this guy Vlad the raw food eater who said he thought that the vending machine cuisine might be contributing to ADD. There was Cullen a shy mousy man who said that he found lists helpful, even though I itched to scream, "it doesn't work!" How many times have I walked into a store to buy another notebook and start making another pointless list.

Quai this cute girl took out a dog-eared mini planner she said that she had every thing in this one notebook, which amazed me given it was the size of a BlackBerry. It had pockets for business cards, coupons, it had an address section, it helped her to see things on a daily basis. I wondered where she'd gotten the calendar from, were there good calendars for ADDers? I wanted one.

This got me to thinking an activity might be creating calendars together. I've learned to kind of be flexible with the meetings given that ADDers tend to forget things, yours truly definitely included. As one of the members swiftly pointed out I put the wrong address down for the coffee shop. They all said they forgot to bring that one thing they didn't want to do that we were going to do together, so we ended up with the round robin.

Gregory's staffers waltzed over and said they were closing down, at 8 p.m. "They certainly keep us on track," someone joked. I threw the mess of papers, half-drunken coke bottle, pens, articles etc. into my three bags, (bag lady I am) and took the emails from the members and said thanks and good night. I walked into the humid night bumping into the usual Friday night crowd. In the blocks between Murray Hill and Chelsea there are young couples everywhere, wearing flashy clothes, stiletto heels, they are off to parties. I felt a little sad that somehow my weekends seem attached to either swimming, ADD, and are devoted to the struggle of just trying to clean things up, and getting ready for the week to come, but everyone is dealt a different set of cards right?

Yeah, I'm In, I'm In.

I feel like a college kid again waving the acceptance letter to her first choice college.

Only in this case I found out that I've made it into the Mt. Sinai free ADD research program, I guess my ADD is that bad. But for the first time I feel like I am getting something free out of having this disorder, and besides we get paid to be guinea pigs right.