[TW: Brief uses of mental health slurs that have since been removed from the social vernacular used to accurately illustrate degradation of the time.]
It used to be a joke. My occasional aloof behavior. My momentary lapses of memory. My undirected focus changes. My hyperfixations. It all just used to be one big laugh. Bobbo is so broke he can’t even afford to pay attention.
All these strange and spontaneous behaviors were all just chalked up to A.D.D … but in a churlish way, like someone who was neat and organized would laugh off their eccentric behavior as O.C.D., or people who are just mildly sad about something would be “soooo depressed”. I didn’t think my behavior truly qualified in such a way that lent itself toward an actual diagnosis, it was all just comedic correlation in my eyes.
Attention Deficit Disorder was still very new when I was growing up. There wasn’t a lot known about it, just the enormous stigma that came with it. Several kids in my grade got a diagnosis and were prescribed Ritalin. And oh, so true to 90s school kid form, they were bullied for it. They’d be called “spaz”, they’d be labeled “retarded”. Kids were cruel back then, though I’m sure things don’t change much. A.D.D. was new, new things were scary, and you handle fear by putting it in its place.
That was one reason I never even considered coming to my parents about my difficulty focusing in school. I didn’t want to be ostracized any more than I already was. I was already razzed daily for my obsession with comic book heroes (long before that was cool), being the shortest kid in class, and the flag football incident (long story). I had enough on my plate without adding “another A.D.D. spaz” to my list of degradations.
But the other reason was I didn’t want to admit I was struggling. Somewhere between the end of elementary school and the beginning of middle school, I felt like I had a harder time paying attention. I was consistently on the honor roll in elementary school, but I barely kept my GPA above a C average in middle school (high school got a little better, but still…). My slip in grades wasn’t because the material eluded me. Far from it, I understood everything we worked on. But it bored me immensely, to the point where my attention would rather drift than focus long enough to do the work and get an A.
I didn’t want to admit that I was struggling, even when the vaguest notion that it could be A.D.D. crossed my mind. But I couldn’t go to my parents, because along with not being convinced I had it to begin with, I just figured they’d tell me to get more sleep, eat a good breakfast, and focus. By the time I was ready to talk to someone about it, I was a junior in high school about to take the SATs. I told my guidance counselor sometimes it’s hard to focus on tests and maybe I have A.D.D. He said… verbatim… “No, that’s just a myth, you just need to buckle down a little bit and you’ll be fine!”
I believed him. That fucker.
Eventually, years later when I was already out of school, my youngest sister got an official diagnosis and was put on medication. That was smart, she showed a lot of signs early on and they got her the help she needed. I still didn’t put two and two together and thought it was an isolated diagnosis. My eccentricities were still only called A.D.D. as a lark.
I lived this way for decades… literally 20 years, the obvious sat in front of my face while I just brushed it off saying “nah, I just suffer from occasional neuroticism”. Then… things just sort of fell into place. New information was being spread, mostly through social media. Now, I had already learned up to this point that you can’t believe everything you hear, and that went double for social media. But independent research showed that what I was hearing was true. The signs of A.D.D. were far more than just “meh, sometimes I can’t pay attention, but what can ya do?” and I exhibited most of them. At that point, it was obvious my joking about it held a lot more truth than I expected. But denial wouldn’t let me do anything about it.
The new excuse was “Well… even if I do have it, it’s too late for me anyway.” I still let the delusions of the past that “meh, so what, that’s not that big of a deal” run rampant, and convinced myself that it was a learning disability. And since I was long removed from a school setting, why bother trying to fix it now?
That was the mindset all the way up to last year, when my son was officially diagnosed with A.D.H.D. He was exhibiting behaviors that looked all to familiar. But we knew much more about it now than we did back then, and the stigma had long since been removed, so he didn’t have to worry about being called one of those hurtful names I heard so many times in school, and more than just because those words have thankfully been rejected by our modern vernacular. He got the help he needed.
And when the doctor said it is hereditary, and it probably came from my side of the family, none of us were surprised… but it still felt like something big.
I clung to “why bother, it’s too late”, but after that wake up call, I began to notice how much A.D.D. still effected my everyday life. My aloof behavior and spontaneous breaks of focus weren’t confined to the classroom, and they were a hindrance I chose to ignore for so long.
It took a year since my son’s diagnosis, but I just got off the phone with my own behavioral specialist. It’s official. I’m diagnosed with attention defecit disorder. No churlish detachment or shirking the signs anymore.
It still feels like this shouldn’t be that big of a deal, that there are people with way worse conditions than me. But that line of thinking has kept me from seeking help for over 20 years. I’m done letting it interfere with being the best parent, husband, and person I can be.
Let the journey to better mental health begin…
A Story About Waffles 