all the thoughts

July 7, 2023

There are a thousand places I want to go as I transcribe my thoughts, getting into the question of who I am. Vizzini suggests, go back to the beginning. I could instead work backward from today. Or I can make a sandwich.

“A thousand places” sounds like an excellent place to start. How did I get to 52 years old with a squishy sense of self? Squishy? I have had a sense of who I am, but I never felt … confident in that. It felt like wearing a mask. Not everything was a lie, yet I was plagued with such incredible self-doubt that truth and lie were blurry. I’d ask, “Is this thing about myself the ‘real’ me? Or am I faking it well enough that others think it’s true? What’s the difference?” Like that, ad nauseam.

I’ve always been ambitious while never quite feeling like I deserved it. There’s been success that has come from hard work. And while I recognize that, if you asked me how it all worked out the way it did, I’d say, “Luck!” I’d undermine myself constantly. I’d make mountains out of mistakes that were molehills. Only recently, after nearly 18 years of marriage, have I truly believed my wife when she says, “I love you.” I mean, what’s so special about me? I’m a fuck up with stacks and drawers full to overflowing with evidence to prove it. 

Oh, what’s that under the rug? Ignore those—just some dusty accolades and the occasional win that keep getting underfoot.

You see, I’ve been at war with my brain for about four decades. I’ve only recently understood this from an outside perspective. In the midst of it, though, from the inside perspective that’s had its hands on the steering wheel, I didn’t understand anything. Last year, I had a therapist to whom I described life as walking through hip-deep mud. Every step was a struggle. I’ve also described it as standing on shifting sands. You can never quite get your foothold. One moment you feel secure and stable, then the earth collapses beneath you. You find yourself grasping at any handhold, anything to stabilize you and pull you out of the panic. Life is like that sometimes, I know, but I’m not talking about life. This is all going on inside my skull. I’m the sand, the me, the footholds, the mud, the handholds, and the panic. I’m all of it and thus wholly responsible for shifting the sands. Easy enough to understand now, but the best I’ve been able to do for the last four decades is to scream at the sand to stop. 

Yeah, that didn’t work.

Back to “a thousand places.” See, right there. I was supposed to launch into my description of ADHD only to find myself following the squirrel that is “the squishy sense of self.” My brain is like that ad nauseam. And it’s always driven me mad.

Okay, Vizzini, back to the beginning. I got my ADHD diagnosis about 18 months ago. That’s not the beginning but bear with me. For the first time, I could step outside my brain and see it for what it was. It’s like that axiom that fish can’t describe water to you. I thought everyone’s brain worked the same, and thus, I was born with one that didn’t quite work right. My brain would veer off the tracks whenever I started to get momentum. I had access to amazingly complex thoughts but lost simple ones, even when critically important. I thought of myself as stupid.

As I began to see and understand the ADHD brain, the pieces of my history started to fall into place. I can trace the withering self-criticism, sense of doubt, fear of rejection, struggle with managing facts, ease with managing concepts, difficulty communicating, and more, back to my early teens. It must have started earlier, but it was in my early teens that the impact was first felt.

I’m tempted to dig further to understand better exactly what’s at the center of all these onion layers. Patient Zero, if you will, which was infected by my ADHD. I doubt for many reasons that it’s fruitful, plus I don’t believe my journey is archeological in nature. Instead, it carries me forward. That’s why I said I’m walking naked into the desert. It doesn’t matter how the layers of my story were built up (did fear of rejection lead to self-doubt, or was it the other way around?). I need simply set them down. These are not my stories to carry any longer. I want only to move into the future unburdened, rejecting archeological for the architectural. 

What sense of self am I constructing if I start with a blank slate?

One last bit about “a thousand places.” I am not an expert on ADHD. I can only tell you my experience. In broad strokes, I describe it as “I think all the thoughts at once.” There is nothing linear about my brain. I will know something is true without identifying the steps that make it so. I can simultaneously see a thing - an idea, a concept, a solution - from multiple angles. Trying to backtrack to identify the steps or disambiguate the various angles is difficult, at times exhausting, and usually terribly dull. I prefer to think of the world in terms of systems without concerning myself with cause and effect. My thoughts prefer to go to a thousand different places. 

And I’m okay with that now.