Treating ADHD Blog

Archives: August 2008

The ADHD Motto

If at first you don't succeed . . . try something else that's more in line with your abilities and interests and is less costly and easier to get to.

You know my motto, the lodestone by which I steer, the proceleusmatic words that keep me moving forward through this life of hardship and sorrow, my very own nil desperandum. Don't you? Didn't you get the memo?

OK, you slackers, here it is: "If at first you don't succeed . . . try something else that's more in line with your abilities and interests and is less costly and easier to get to."

Early on, I was eulogizing Eternal Spring, a variation of nei kung developed for "mature" beginners in the field of tai chi. I still believe in it. I know it works. However, I can't seem to make myself do it for more than a couple of weeks at a time. The classes aren't exactly cheap (which is not to say that they're in any way exorbitant, please understand) and the location and hours don't fit particularly well with my schedule. And as much as I'd love to think of myself as an autodidact, I'm not.

So, I was goofing around, doing important stuff like organizing the hundreds of bookmarks ("favorites" to you poor, benighted IE users; when are you going to start using a good browser?) when I happened upon a link to the International Taoist Tai Chi Society. This non-profit, international organization teaches, among other things, a variant form of tai chi, developed by Master Moy Lin-shin.

Taoist tai chi—as opposed, I guess, to High Episcopal, or Hasidic, or Pentecostal tai chi—downplays, almost eliminates, the martial impulse in the art. Its focus is entirely upon improving physical health and spiritual well-being, although they do teach a sword and saber form(?). I went to one of their classes years ago, but I was more attracted to the Yang style as taught by Master Chu.

Anyway, I clicked over to the ITTCS website, and realized that the New York location is on the route I take home from work, and the rate for UNLIMITED monthly classes for seniors is only thirty bucks. And one more thing. I figured out, whiz kid that I am, that If I'm a Senior, I Probably shouldn't worry too much about learning enough Tai Chi to be a Lethal Freakin' Weapon. Let's face it: ten years from now, I want to defend myself against some mook, I should raise my ebony-headed walking stick, the bottom of which I'd drilled out and filled with two ounces of lead, and crack his dome.

Classes start right after Labor Day. I'll be reporting on my progress.

PS: Those of you awaiting similar progress reports on my reading of Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot--You three guys just hang in there. Soon. Honest.

ADHD Prioritizing Gone Haywire

I decided to follow my own advice and treat my own ADHD with a little creativity.

One day, during a lull at work the phrase, "Bespoke vituperation" pops into my mind. I'd been thinking about doing a frivolous business card for myself, as opposed to one that I'd give to a prospective client, and that phrase looked like it would fit in admirably.

I've had occasion to make up several business cards for my various failed businesses, and have the procedure down pretty well. This time I decided to avoid some of the traps that amateurs in typography and design (I'm not excluding myself from this group) step into. No fancy stuff, no watermarks, no borders, only two colors, for starters.

This was . . . about six months ago. I can't imagine how many times I picked the project up. Probably every time I had something else to do that I wanted to avoid.

So here you go, after a few dozen wasted hours, another example of prioritizing gone haywire:

The Eye of the Beholder

I bring you another source for treating ADHD-induced depression with beauty.

Hard on the heels of Stair Porn, I bring you another source for reassurance that beautiful doesn't have to be artsy. Eye of the beholder, m'boy, eye of the beholder.

I've came across these pictures by Branislav Kropilak for years. Naturally, I can't recall where I first saw them, but I urge you to take a look. He works in a medium known as a "Giclee print on aluminium" which means nothing to me, but which seems to provide a hard-edged, glowing result. I find the pics of parking garages especially attractive, and used one as my desktop photo for a year. The point is that you don't need to be Ansel Adams out shooting Yellowstone, or Atget memorializing the exotic gardens of France. It's the process that counts. You can take beautiful—that's actually a lousy word, one that puts up more obstacles—let's say you can put up visually stimulating photos of anything. The physical realities exist, apart from you. The value of the photographs is in your investigation/analysis/presentation of the subject.

Leave the bee-yoo-tee-full stuff to your Uncle Mike, who loves to shoot sunsets and hydrangeas and little puppies. Find something to look at, and think about it. Never mind anything else. Just think about it and shoot it. The subject doesn't need to be "aesthetic" or "photogenic." It just needs to be considered, carefully and honestly, and photographed, as well as you can. And it doesn't have to be a "Giclee print." Just a JPEG--one that you can look at a year from now and regain the state of mind you had when you shot it.

One more obstacle to progress savagely eradicated.

Battling ADHD With Creativity

One way to deal with ADHD and depression is to surround yourself with creativity.

Among the many nasty aspects of having ADHD—I mean, a specific aspect, not just the fact that it sucks—is that The Deficit provides an entry point for depression (so-named after the famously unsuccessful French general, Jacques de Pression, whose inability to win even the smallest battle made everyone in France so sad) and depression loves to put its dirty hobnailed boot on the neck of creativity.

One way to deal with this is to surround oneself with visual reminders that creativity can survive, given half a chance. There's a nifty blog called Stair Porn that features photos of …yes! you guessed it! Stairs.

Now, stairs might not seem very sexy to you. But head over there and look at the pretty photos. And take heart: you can do this, or something like it. Design your own stairs. Or start your own blog.

But do something, for Pete's sake.

Goal Setting for ADHD Adults

The first challenge of reaching a goal is learning to set realistic objectives.

Finding that someone has written just what you've been trying to write, only much better, can be aggravating. Nonetheless, good guy that I am, I will refer you to a posting by "Dustin" on the Writer's Technology Companion. Dustin has written a perceptive piece about setting goals. The short story is that he believes in setting goals that are relevant, achievable and concrete.

I've posted about this several times in different guises, only not so specifically. This is about writing, but there's no reason it couldn't be adapted to one's efforts at learning Sanskrit, or Ruby on Rails or how to get out of a greenside bunker. Set goals that you can achieve, that mean something to you, and that you can quantify. Not "Learn more Sanskrit today." And for heaven's sake not "Learn 500 new Sanskrit verbs and their conjugations today before lunch." Maybe "Review the Second Conjugation in Sanskrit today."

Look over your "Notes to Self" and stickies and calendars and to-do lists. If you find anything saying "Learn to sail a 45' ketch this weekend," smack yourself. Take a good course in coastal navigation first. (It's fun, and will trump almost anyone else line of baloney at a cocktail party, since it's full of words that we've all heard and can't define.)

ADHD Reading Tips

Skimming ain't reading. Let me repeat that: skimming ain't reading.

Skimming ain't reading. Let me repeat that: skimming ain't reading.

I read for a living. Proofreading and copyediting bring home the bacon. OK, I don't eat much bacon any more, if only to avoid having to shell out for the Lipitor, but you get the idea. Everything I do should be perfect, but there's some stuff that's more critical than other stuff. If I miss a comma in a novel, it's not great, but the world will keep on spinning (remind me to see if there's a connection between the moon's phases and my use of threadbare metaphors). When I'm reading legal or financial documents, a missing period can be a disaster. So I've taught myself to read carefully, word by word, character by character if necessary. There's a difference between reading for comprehension and reading for typos. It's just hard to turn the different modes on and off.

This doesn't apply when I'm not getting paid for reading. Twice already today, I've allowed my eyes to wander over a page, only to realize that I had almost no idea what I'd read. The first document was from my health insurance company, so I had an excuse; even after I'd read it carefully, underlining as I went, I was lost. Am I being overly cynical, or is it intentional? You know how card sharks and magicians "force" a card on you, getting you to pick the card they want you to pick out of the deck? I wouldn't be surprised to find that some arm-gartered, eye-shaded parasite at a long-defunct insurance company figured out that if he made the text unreadable, you'd sign your name on the first available dotted line, just so you could stop reading.

The second item, however, was an interesting article about how to sell on eBay. After two pages, I realized that what my brain had snagged from these pages consisted of the words "eBay," "profits," "shipping," "Sevres" and "garage sale." The connections among these terms were nil. I went back and re-read the piece, carefully, and found out exactly what I wanted to learn.

Check yourself when you're reading. Do a little self-testing. If you can't tell yourself, in one simple sentence, what the author wished to convey on that page, you ain't reading. You're skimming.

Knock it off.

The Fate of ADHD Projects

We ADD adults love projects because they're big, they make us feel like we're establishing a real beachhead in the war against confusion; but then everything goes off the rails.

If there's one thing we of the Deficit (ADD) love, it's projects.

(So ask, already, would you?)

Glad you asked. We love projects because they're big, they make us feel like we're establishing a real beachhead in the war against confusion, and because starting a New Project doesn't require any actual work. Or thought. And if we're lucky, it will give us a reason, however specious, for buying a new toy.

Just after reaching the point at which we've defined the nature of The New Project is the site where we tend to go off the rails. Turning the project into an actual step forward, creating a useful structure for improving our lives, that's not so much fun. It's work. It requires regular, concentrated effort. It poses the risk of failure. We'll hate the sight of the new notebook, underwater-writing pen, ergonomic paperclips, daylight-spectrum desk lamp or — dare I say it — USB flash drive that we just had to have to make the project work.

You need an overview, to be sure. But let's remember what we talked about last month: base your actions on recognizing, defining, starting and completing small, discrete tasks. At the end of a month, the little tasks, completed, will add up to a lot more than a grandiose Leviathan of a project.

And you won't have to explain to your wife what happened to that lovely desk lamp she bought you last year.

My ADHD Shopping Process

Once again I'm plagued by that old bugaboo, indecision, and his partner in crime, bad time management.

The urge to buy a USB flash drive has been overwhelming. They're just so incredibly cool, and now they're available with 32 gigs of memory. Of course, the entire hard drive of my desktop contains less than a gig of content, so unless I decide I absolutely must carry around the complete audio text of Swann's Way and the collected works of J.S. Bach (they run neck-and-neck in the "Never-Going-to-be-Listened-to, Not even Ten Minutes' Worth" Derby), a one- or two-gig model would suffice.

So what's the problem? For once, it's not even a financial issue; the little gadget I want (in case you're interested, it's the SanDisk 2GB Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive ) only costs about $25.

It's that old bugaboo, indecision. And his partner in crime, bad time management.

A logical approach to making this purchase would involve doing some research on flash drives, learning what, for example, "U3 technology" means and would I ever need it, trying to find objective reviews and gaining some sense of what features—other than the neat-o titanium case, crush-proof up to a ton—and determining the store with the best price.

Once I got past the neat-o, crush-proof case with the laser-etched graphics and the distinctive blue LED, I was dead in the water. Every day for a week I'd look at the websites of the two stores with the best prices. Check out the SanDisk website.

Think about whether I really wanted to add another gizmo to my key chain, which led to a three-day internal dialogue about the advisability of getting one of those carabiners that hooks onto my belt loop, enabling me to carry my keys, my house keys, my cigar cutter, a pocket knife, my lucky ring and a micro-mini-Maglite along with my Cruzer. Decided that it was either too nerdy or too right-wing, either one a deal-breaker.

In the end, I was forced to ask myself the single most-relevant question: what the hell did I need it for? I only use two computers, and I store anything I'm working on up at Google Docs (which I'm much less likely to lose than the little flash drive). So what actually happened was that (a) I didn't define the issue properly in the first place, (b) I didn't do the research that would have enabled me to make an intelligent choice if question "a" showed a need for it and (c) wasted a lot of time instead of doing something useful, like, f'rinstance, writing more of these articles.

Music, Lyrics and ADHD

My ADHD memory prohibits me from remembering song lyrics--if you'd ever heard me "sing" you'd probably be grateful.

Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I was driving home from the beach last night, listening to a radio station that played lots of oldies. It's only fair to say that I've never been any good at linking up musicians and the titles of their works and the works themselves. Stones, Beatles, CCR, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, Who, Zep, Hendrix…I can recognize their music pretty easily, although I probably don't know the titles of the works.

Then there's everyone else. No matter how much I try, I can never distinguish between Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. Stop sneering. I know one has a flautist, but can never remember which one. Maybe because I'm not a fan of either. And there's a flotilla of groups out there in the "Unlabeled" category, outfits like Journey, Boston, Foreigner, Styx and REO Speedwagon. I'm not even considering the metalhead groups, because even if I could distinguish among Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Megadeath, Slayer…why would I want to?

So I was driving home and I heard and recognized this song. No idea of the group or the title. So I "memorized" the chorus, figuring that I could Google it at home. Unfortunately, the next song (which turned out to be by ELO) distracted me, and the one after that muddied the waters (nice music metaphor, no?) beyond redemption.

I'll never learn this stuff. I don't know why my head refuses to cooperate. Looks as though I'll have to keep humming along, since I don't know the lyrics. Or the title. Or the artists.

Then again, if you'd ever heard me "sing" you'd probably be grateful. The humming can be ignored. The squawking is a real tooth-grinder.

This is Mozart's Brain on ADHD

You are what you remember ... where does that leave us ADHDans?

I've been trying for a couple of years to get through Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot, a self-help kind of book by Richard Restak, M.D., that came highly recommended by a brilliant, and intellectually ruthless friend.

This seems like a propitious time for another sortie, so I'm off again, hoping, this time, that posting about my adventures and epiphanies will encourage me to read, and understand, the whole book. (It's pretty small, and has some diagrams.)

My recent bout of misery demonstrated again that, while ADHDans suffer from memory problems, for whatever reason, the synergism with depression can leave you wondering what your own name might be.

Dr. Restak gets right down to the nitty-gritty: "And, basically, you are what you can remember. Your identity depends on on all of the events, people, and things that you can recall."

Sounds right to me, one of those dicta that's so self-evident that it's easy to undervalue. Consider that if you were to wipe your computer's hard drive clean, it would not only be useless, but anonymous. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a profound funk, I actually do feel anonymous: worthless, friendless, lost at sea.

I'll try to keep you posted on my voyage though Mozart's brain.

ADHD Salesmanship

My fractured sense of ADHD self-esteem rules out sales as a career path.

Sales has always been the least appealing aspect of business to me, and, logically, the one at which I'm least skillful. Unenthusiastic salesmen don't do a good job of convincing potential buyers, regardless of the commodity. The best salesmen I've known could, with some training, have been successful selling stocks, real estate, used cars, antiques, pork bellies, software or Girl Scout cookies.

Personally, I would just as soon scrub floors. My fractured sense of self-esteem always sends up little balloons containing messages like, Why would they want to buy this? and, worse, Why would they want to buy this from a jerk like you? Beyond that, my ability to read people lies somewhere south of my ability to read Pliny the Elder — at least the possibility exists that I could learn Latin.

Classic ADHD stuff. You're trying to sell something, only to realize, after a few minutes, that the only person less interested in completing the sale than you is your potential buyer. Selling requires the clear, focused gaze of a raptor and the self-confidence of a high-wire walker. Not all selling is con, but the difference between the mindsets of a salesman and a con man are essentially indistinguishable.

I was brought to think about this the other day by these illuminating quotations come from a lovely mystery novel entitled, The Gwen John Sculpture, one of a series by John Malcolm. The man being described is the head of a French investment bank, or banque d'affaires:

I guessed that he was a fine persuader, using the attraction of his personality with judgment to gain support and having, behind the use of that skill, a quite cold and detached view of the person opposite as his raw material to be influenced. All great persuaders and salesmen are the same.

… would be a man whose mind had clear compartments, concentrations, the ability to isolate one problem from everything else, like all businessmen of his type.
(The emphases are mine.)

One might fairly assume that the gentleman does not suffer from ADHD.

The Great ADHD De-Clutter

This weekend, I'm reclaiming control over my life! Well, over my computer and filing cabinets anyway... assuming it's not nice beach weather.

I'm totally fed up.

There's so much garbage in my computer, on my bulletin board, and on my new clean-erase whiteboard — I'm not even beginning to account for the garbage in my head (see Fresh Kills Landfill for an idea of what that's like) — that I have no choice but to dedicate this weekend (assuming it's not going to be good beach weather, of course) to cleaning up the debris.

This morning I wanted to make note of an address. Good plan, right? Only problem being that I have no idea where to put the damned information. Plaxo? Gmail? Yahoo address book? LinkedIn? Sticky note? Google Docs?

This garbage has got to go. Time to wade in, swinging the machete, and clear the ground.

ONE place for addresses. ONE.

ONE place for my writing (currently strewn about in Google Docs, Google Notebook, Writeboard, Word docs in a byzantine nest of folders, and heaven knows where else). The most likely candidate is Google Docs, because it keeps track of your revisions.

This means that I'll spend a half-hour reading the support info for Docs. Currently, because I'm a total knucklehead, I write in Docs, then export to Notebook in order to keep stuff organized (please stop laughing) by sub-topics, then convert it to Word and download it to My Documents, then move it to another folder, so that I can email it to my Dear Editrix, then re-enter it in a Docs spreadsheet to keep track of it for bookkeeping purposes. I've got stuff in every possible configuration, all over the joint. Sheer madness.

So. This weekend I'm going to start from scratch. Figure out how to do all this sorting and labelling and inserting and exporting in one easy process. If I can't figure out how to do this, I may dig around in the back of the hall closet and see if I can find an old typewriter and clear some space in my old filing cabinet and buy some stamps. Anything's better than the mess I've gotten myself into with these labor-saving devices.

My Third-Grade Math Trauma

How math went from mind-cloggingly easy to totally incomprehensible a few decades back.

When I was in second grade, my mother got terribly tired of hearing me moan about how, in November, I knew that 3 + 5 = 8. I'd heard it a thousand times. It was boring. So, without discussing it with me, she walked over to my school (very Ozzie and Harriet) and talked the principal into putting me in third grade... on the day I was to go back, unsuspecting, after Christmas vacation.

Before I even got my hat — the kind with the earflaps, I'm sure — off, the principal showed up and took me to another classroom. Once the formalities were concluded, and I took note of the way the older, bigger, tougher kids were looking at me ("Fresh meat"), the witch in charge began the day's math lesson.

"Johnny, please recite the six times table."

The only person in the room more clueless than auto-shop-bound Johnny was the stereotypical scrawny little four-eyed terror-filled runt who'd just been "skipped" into third grade. Times tables? A few minutes later, she told me to recite the three times table. She'd have had an equal chance of my reciting the names of the 206 bones in the human skeleton, or the Plantagenet kings. I've often wondered if that was the proximate cause of my brain shutting down when confronted with anything much beyond simple addition.

The peculiar thing is that I can add quickly and accurately, so long as I don't stop to think about it. The moment I slow down, however, I'm lost, and have to take it from the top. The significance of this eludes me, but the phenomenon is undeniable.

The ADHD Notebook - Pen Not Included

Vincent Van Gogh had adult ADD. Vincent Van Gogh used the Moleskine notebook. You'll never guess what I just bought...

Okay, okay.

I'm a label whore. Shoot me.

Yesterday I went out and bought a Moleskine. - the ruled, reporter-style notebook. I figured that having the binding across the top, rather than on the side, makes it less likely to fall apart.

Fits nicely in my back pocket. Has a little fold-out pocket inside the back cover in which you can keep. . . business cards, a blank check, deductible receipts, one of those little subway maps or one of those cards (this is a very Gothamphilic post, folks) that gives you the cross-streets of Manhattan addresses (how do those things work, anyway?).

But mostly, you get the mystique. Van Gogh used them. Hemingway. Picasso. Chatwin. (Chatwin? Pretty august company, Bruce). If these Moleskine people get any more full of themselves, we'll be hearing that Plato never left home without one of them stuck in his toga, and that Leonardo first sketched out The Last Supper with a piece of charcoal in his.

This would be my third purchase. So far, I don't see that they're any better than the nice orange Rhodia I was carrying for almost a year, that cost about a third of what the comparable ür-notebook goes for.

But I was just starting to come out of my recent bout of sadness and immobility, and thought that a little treat might help.

The first three times I went to write something down in my beautiful new Moley, I found that I didn't have a pen. Or a pencil. Or even a piece of charcoal.

Details, details.