Okay, first the name... pronounced "air-uh-bus", has been my pen name, user name and the name of my small art business for over 25 years. In Greek mythology Erebus was a child of Chaos and the brother of Night. A child of Chaos. In the light of what I know today it now seems beyond ironic - I have to assume my subconscious knew what it was doing. I'm just shy of 58 and 16 years into my third crumbling marriage. It feels like ages but it was only a month ago that a psychologist/marriage counselor loaned my wife and I his copy of Lynn Weiss' book "Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults". I tore through it in two days, alternating between "aha moments" and "oh-my-god moments". Walked around in shock for a few days, then made an appointment with a neurologist that my insurance would cover. At our second meeting he suggested I read "Driven to Distraction", so I got a copy from the library. Shock. Relief. Revelation. More shock. And then I read a passage where someone described being a child in the 50's, when the only recognized learning disability was stupidity. It felt like I'd been shot. My first emotional reaction was "Bury it! Don't go there! DON'T GO THERE!" But of course, there is no turning back. I laid the book down and went to sleep. I get to work at 4:30 am the next morning and no one else comes in till 6:30 (they let me choose my own hours). For the first half hour I pretended to work. Something was moving in the back of my mind. What I had read the night before drifted across my awareness and it was as though I heard a key turn in a lock. Grief. Overwhelming suffocating grief. A choking pain in my heart. I sobbed for ten minutes before I was able to shut that door. Even now... the tears are blinding. My hands are shaking. Because I know that door. Everything I've ever stuffed in a lifetime of stuffing is behind that door. The pain. The shame. The guilt. The fear and the criticism and the names and the laughter that cuts and the wounded darkness and everything that followed me in and it still bears the name it had when I was 5... DON'T TELL. I'm terrified of opening that door again but I know I'll have to. It feels like it'll kill me. It feels as though opening that door will trigger a nuclear reaction and I'll just evaporate. But I have to tell. I have to.

I experience the world through a fog of thoughts. When we talk I listen but then I find I'm thinking of something else and anywhere from 2 to 10 seconds have gone by and I haven't heard a word you've said and I have to reconstruct the conversation based on what I remember and pretend I heard it all and I concentrate and listen harder but it happens again and I have to reconstruct the conversation and pretend and listen harder but it happens again and again and again and I pray that you don't stop with a question because then you'll know, you'll know and you'll think I don't care and you'll hate me.

I still can't say it out loud. Not yet. Thanks for listening.

Quote