And that was all I needed for me to become lost. First, I reflected on the source of the Hogben book, the excellent Toronto Boys and Girls’ Library. Then my brain yanked me back on track, sort of: Egypt, the role of triangles in the lives of Egyptians, the stark beauty of the desert themes. How did the bleak simplicity of the landscape compare with the even plainer diagram in my black and white  textbook?

The pacing teacher turned into my aisle. Ok, fine. I backtracked again to check back to the explanation of the proposition. But inevitably this led to more sidetracks about potential alternative ways of understanding the properties of triangles. So. I understood that much. But somewhere on the way to the version I was invited to solve that day, my dancing brain leapt sideways and forward. The ruled notebook page with my solution remained blank. Well, you get the picture. Or maybe not. (I rather hope you don’t.)

Forever underachieving, falling behind, and feeling ashamed about it, I grew up trying to fit in, hiding my general incompetence. This meant that I learned work arounds so that nobody noticed my short-comings much. Somehow I slithered through high school and most of university on sheer audacity. Desperately bored in English, and outraged at the awfulness of parsing my beloved Jane Austen line by line, I made up imaginary books for book reviews and read French novels by holding them on my knees under the desk so I could ignore the teacher’s irrelevance. If I simply couldn’t produce a single date for a history test, boy could I blather my way through the essay questions.  I also learned not to plaster my many excellent, if often unwelcome ideas around so freely. 

Unfortunately, I still grew up with reproachful voices, my own, my parents’, my teachers’: “What is wrong with you? You should take pride in your work.” “Why is it that you never remember?” “Couldn’t you try a bit harder?” “If you cared you could do better?” “Why is someone who loves books such a slow reader?” “But what did I just tell you? Peri. Aren’t you listening to me?” The contempt and constant suggestions that my lack of compliance was my fault, or that I was stupid (which I honestly didn’t think I was) hurt terribly. I was deeply ashamed. Honestly, I rarely wanted to be disobedient. I wanted to do well. Clearly I was simply never good enough. Reading Hallowell and Ratey‘s ADHD 2.0, I found research suggesting people with this condition could lose as many as 13 years of an average life. In retrospect I think that may have been true for me.

However, as the authors define it ‘ADHD’ is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages it. Somehow I learned to live well in spite of my challenges. In fact, in the main I love my dancing, imaginative mind, and the gateway into creative thinking which it gives me. All the same, it also is clear that I could be a better version of myself if I could develop Hallowell’s Ferrari brakes, i.e. better control over my overactive mind.

Managing my version of ADHD has taught me patience, and, now, thanks to the new scientific discoveries about it I also am learning strategies which help me cope with my galloping attention.

• Simple awareness of my goals and when the patterns of my thinking go off the rails helps.
• When I need to be single-minded, David Allen’s helpful, best-selling Getting Things Done, the art of stress-free productivity also helps. I use all the tricks–highlighting, post-it notes, a daybook with side-notes, pop-up reminders on my computer.
• Setting smaller, achievable goals is useful.
• Finding my ridiculous mind funny as well as problematic also makes a difference.
• When I get snarled up in excessive dreaming, it’s important to remember to just keep going. (Keeping going could be: walking down the lane to visit my favorite pine, 10 minutes of breathing exercises, walking around the house annoying my cats by singing, tidying papers on my desk (a special treat I save for just these moments), laying out all the ingredients for the muffins I will cook later, so they’ll come together quickly after I’m done work, giving a neighbor a quick call to make sure he’s well
• Conversely, when I stall from overload, as I so often do, I am learning to accept how important it is to allow myself more breathing room.
• Most important of all for me is how freeing it is to lose the lifelong, crippling weight of self-blame.

**Unfortunately, there is no room here to mention more of the exciting new findings about how balance exercises can improve focus; about the confusing ability to occasionally superfocus, and about how “the ADHD mind recoils from boredom, disappearing into a fervent search for stimulation”.