“ADHD vs. My Big Trip, Part 4”
In giving in to my frantic ADHD brain overload, I had lost my moorings — lost sight of what made my life mean something…
Okay, I’m at my desk, in my office hyperventilating and staring at our dog, Danny Boy, who’s staring at me with his eyebrow cocked while resting his head on my desk. He lets out a big disappointed sigh. I’ve been running around the house upsetting him and my son with my panicky preparations for leaving on a trip to L.A. to open my show about living with ADHD.
Now my wife, Margaret, and my daughter are back from the store and my banging around and cursing in my office is upsetting them. Danny Boy seems to be a clam, concerned emissary.
Maybe I’m crazier than even the most pessimistic psychiatrists I’ve had think I am. One once warned my wife that, though I seemed to be stable at the time, she should call him immediately if I woke up in the morning and told her I wanted to buy Japan – he said he wasn’t joking.
But I don’t want to buy Japan, though I do like the shoji screens we have in our house, I don’t know what I’d do with a whole country full of them. What I want is to get to L.A. without forgetting something important.
Danny Boy, in our secret cross-species mind-reading communication (I know there’s a specific word for that, but I can’t think of it due to word-retrieval and short term memory problems – which are a real pain in the neck for a writer/performer, let me tell you. And I’m in L.A. writing this at the moment and in a full-tilt panic about THAT. But as Gloria Gaynor says – I will survive.) So – anyway – Danny Boy says, “I’m a dog and I know what’s important. And you are forgetting it, Frank.”
Right then Margaret and my daughter and son come into my office. Margaret has picked up some stuff for my trip at the store, and the kids want to know what they can do to help. I look at them. My family. My best friend/wife, my two funny, shining children and a dog who talks to me with his eyebrows. They are what are important, of course.
These people and this dog and the love we have for each other are the only really important things in my life. And Danny Boy’s right – in giving in to my frantic brain overload, I had lost my moorings to what made my life mean something – to me.
No wonder I was hyperventilating. And no wonder I’m upset. I don’t want to be away from them.
I turn off the computer, they refuse my apologies, so I thank them for being in my life, they say yeah, whatever and we all decide to go to Burger King and blow off anything else.
On the way out the door Margaret gives me a quick kiss and whispers, “We love you, you lunatic.”
Boy, I don’t want to leave home, but I know how lucky I am — look who waits for me when I get back.
