My world has been upside down and barely tolerable. These circumstances wreak havoc on a person like me, who suffers terribly with severe AD/HD. I have shut down, I have not been able to muster the stamina I need for the long haul for staying attentive to the world as it spins “out of control” around me. I have not returned phone calls or emails of those I consider dear friends in months, not even a text message to let them know I am okay. I can’t make sense of anything because I am too afraid to try, I am being completely swallowed by the overwhelming energy it takes me just to wake up in the morning and feign a smile only while trying to convince myself that everything will be alright.
I cleverly lie to myself a lot, it is my well designed coping mechanism I use most successfully , and it works well for me but fails when I try to use it on my mother. She knows me better than I know myself.
I have taken myself off the medication my doctor wanted me to take; I took Strattera religiously for three years only to stop cold turkey in May of 09. I am even more ashamed to say I haven’t been to see my doctor in over a year for fear that she will put me on a new medication to help me deal with my “AD/HD”. I was on Strattera at a very high dose and while it did help me greatly I hated having to be on it. I hated the feeling of not being “all there”, like I was in a distant tunnel deep within myself looking out of unfamiliar eyes and disconnected at my emotional core with the world that surrounded me.
This feeling caused me to relate to my students I work with on a new level. As an art teacher I find the most success with my students who are ADD or AD/HD, ask the music teacher and he will tell you the same thing. There is something about music and art that allows these children to engage with their inner core. This connection is intriguing to me and has become an area I read about extensively because of the interest I have in Art Therapy and because of my interest in knowing and understanding myself better.
The worse part of my job is seeing my highly artistic/musically inclined student come to art for the first time “doped” up on a new medication. This is often preceded by the classroom teacher informing me that that my art class will be so much better now that the “hellion” is “on medications” and she gleefully reports that her classroom is manageable and she can actually teach without having to deal with his disruptions. Really? Are you serious, because that hellion never posed a problem in art or music? That hellion loved art and music.
Now the child who wears the label of being the “disruptive or inattentive hellion” is sitting at his art table with a glazed over lifeless expression in his eyes. His artwork which he was once connected with on an emotional and highly personal level has become as dull and as lifeless as his expression- he now creates his art in an almost systematic way. The music teacher will usually come to me and say how this child is now singing and fingering his instruments in the same way I describe him to be producing his artwork. A piece of his soul is being heavily masked by the effects of some mind altering drug...and it breaks my heart.
But it shouldn’t be a trouble to me because he is now paying attention in class and receiving passing scores on those infamous and rigorous standardized tests that schools systems and their classroom teachers are held accountable for by the government. Art and music are inconsequential in the grand scheme of the educational system. Just fluff and fun not anything substantial and it is far more important for our school systems to teach to the tests. Didn’t you know this?
I am not only an art educator but a working freelance and fine artist, who produces a totally different body of work when medicated than I do when not medicated. My work is structured and boring, to the point of being tired when I am on my Strattera, and when I am off my medications my art becomes an intrinsic tool for communicating my emotional core…communicating the soul of my being. My art becomes alive with the essence of me.
I have a musician friend who is very much in the same boat as me in terms of his ADD. When he is on his medication his approach to his music is systematic and exact almost to the point of being redundant and monotonous, he barely cracks a smile when he is on the stage performing and can become so entirely serious that it makes his performance seem awkward, but when he is off of his medication he essentially becomes his music and together with his instrument he almost transforms into the music he is playing, he becomes alive and jovial, he becomes his music and his music becomes him.
When I am not on my meds other areas of my life outside of my artistic pursuits fall apart, especially my “significant” relationships. I struggle to find the balance and coherence I need to formulate healthy intimate relationships. I can focus on the things I really love (like my art) but everything else slides way off onto the backburner. Boyfriends I have had usually find themselves there. People loved being my roommate in college and graduate school because they said it “felt like I was never there.” I spent most my time working on my art behind a closed door and I’d forget about everything else…including eating.
This trait of my AD/HD destroyed many of my relationships. Boyfriends would comment always, that they felt like I didn’t care about them or that they felt I favored my art over them (actually there are probably a few in there where I did favor my art over them), but needless to say I have had boyfriends tell me they have never felt so “lonely” in a relationship as they did with me. I am struggling to this day with this aspect of me and still find myself hoping and wishing that I can find someone who can truly and totally understand me and love me for me and not take my actions or lack there-of personally.
It is this trait of AD/HD that makes other see us who suffer from it as being “self-centered”. Really I am not self-centered, it is just that when I am in hyper-focus nothing else is relevant to me, and I mean nothing. The world around me could be completely falling apart and I wouldn’t notice right away. I need time to process it all. I don’t notice my relationships are failing until it is too late. I am at a loss when it comes to seeing outside my focus.
When my mother had been diagnosed with Cancer she had called me at college to tell me. It was easier for me to hang up the phone than it was to deal with that issue in “real-time”. It took me awhile to process the weight of that and when I finally did, I became aware of the fact I had hung up on my mother during a moment where she needed the condolence of her only daughter more than anything in the world. I have never felt more horrible than at that moment when I processed all of that. I fell apart so totally that I have never forgiven myself for what I did to my mother or the horrible things I did to myself to deal with all of my guilt and shame.
Working with children on a daily basis has allowed me to connect with them on their level and I can instantly pick out the children who are “like me”. The old adage that it “takes one to know one” rings loud and clear. My parents chose not to medicate me as a child and instead spent a lot of time working with me and helping me learn coping strategies for “focusing”. I was lucky to have a “stay at home mom” who was a teacher. She spent hours with me after school going over the things I should have been learning about while I was in school. The one-on- one tutoring my mother gave me, helped immensely. She made it fun for me, which helped me focus on what I should be learning and always she managed to connect it back to art or writing, two things I loved very much and could focus on.
My mother used interdisciplinary lessons that utilized art, writing, and music, the very things I loved and could endlessly keep me engaged- often times I would be in the infamous “hyper-focus” mode those of us with ADD or AD/HD are so known for. My mother used my weakness and turned it into a positive strength. I think about this and how wonderful it was and how the modern classroom should employ these techniques but aren’t. I also think how nice it would be if every AD/HD child had a mother like mine. I know teachers, who do try, and I try, but it is exhausting simply because the classroom size in the public education setting is “overloaded”. A child like me is simply just lost in the crowd, in fact in today’s classroom any child is simply “lost”- just another face in the crowd. Class sizes are only going to get larger which has me considering making the switch to private school or just jumping ship now and getting my Doctorate so I can research this topic more.
This also is the time of year that causes me a lot of grief, as the teachers are getting their class lists for next year and when they find out they have a “certain” child known for their inattentiveness or hyper activity they start complaining about how that child is going to make their upcoming school year a “living hell.” Before the principals make the lists final, some teachers even start “bartering” their children with one another. “I’ll take three of yours if you take this one.” Believe me, it happens all the time. Some principals allow it, some do not, but on the whole it happens. Then when the list are made public and the parents find out who is in what class, they start their bribing efforts to get their child or “said” child removed from “that” class. This is the time of year I would not want to be a principal and this is the time of year that has me happy I am no longer the “said labeled child” nobody wants in the classroom.
I was not a badly behaved child, I was actually really shy. I was a tomboy and still am today, boys are far easier to get along with than girls. I had (still do have) the hardest time with eye contact when speaking to people. I remember a softball coach of mine in college got so upset with me always looking down that he grabbed my face and forced me to look at him when he spoke to me. I will never forget that to this day and still think that incident contributed to my preference in emailing and texting people over actually having to speak with them face to face or over the phone. Having to respond to someone in “real” time often makes me feel as though I am drowning in the ocean.
The biggest problem I deal with as an adult is my impatience. It is my impatience that contributes wholly to my impulsive behavior and my blurting. It is the root to all my evil. Really it is. I get easily agitated when I am impatient and I say things I shouldn’t and I know I shouldn’t but they still come out of my mouth anyways. I become highly emotional and in this state I really have no control over any action that happens, try as I might.
Acting on impulse and blurting out are still troublesome. Sometimes things come out of my mouth before I even have had the chance to think about them. This actually wasn’t too much of a problem for me growing up, on the account of my shyness, only now as an adult, where I am forced out my “shy shell” it does become a problem. When I am overwhelmed and feeling like I am drowning in the situations of my life, I sometimes say things I shouldn’t say out loud.
I compensate for this by sending emails because it is easier to do it that way than saying it in “real time” and face to face. When I have something to say to a colleague or my boss, I simply email them, it is safer this way. I really have to force myself to think before I speak when I am dealing with “higher powers” or colleagues I have at work. I am less apt to do so when in the company of friends and “familiars” who have for the most part figured me out and know not to take the things I say personally.
I seem to have gone off on a tangent again so I will conclude this here and now as more often than not I can write without ending! I'm long winded you know, having to make up for all the things I don't say in "real time" ;)
~adios for now
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