Brain Matter

As I sat with my former seventh-grade English teacher turned grown-up friend, Kay, at brunch the other day, we bonded over our shared disdain for a man at a table just adjacent to us. He was bald, maybe 50, wearing a navy polo shirt with some embroidery on the chest. We were at Café Brazil, a local coffeehouse chain, and this man had brought to the table with him a venti paper coffee cup from Starbucks.

He was a joined by a pair of younger people, possibly his college-aged children, and casually sipped his coffee while the server came to take their order. Once the food was delivered, we watched as he took his then-empty coffee cup and set it on a perfectly clean table beside him.

“Can you believe him?” Kay asked.

“He should be arrested,” I said.

We seethed together. Then I thought better of it.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge,” I said. “Maybe he has a horrific stomach condition, and he needs special milk – the kind of oat milk that only Starbucks has and that this place doesn’t carry, and so that’s why he brought it in.” She wasn’t convinced, and neither was I.

In truth, the man probably didn’t have any problems with his asshole. He just was one. But the problem I have with my brain is that it moves a thousand miles a minute, so after looking at him once, I’d created a whole backstory for him.

“It must be exhausting to be around me,” I said.

Kay is one of those rare people, just a handful outside of my family, who have known me since I was little. I first took her class in seventh grade, when I was just 12 years old. That first year, she let all of her students choose any work of fiction to read for a book report. It was 2001, and Harry Potter was the new hot thing. Dozens of students brought in crisp new copies of Sorcerer’s Stone for their project.

My mother, instead, took me to downtown Mesquite, a four-block square of ramshackle buildings. Inside the used bookstore, Paperbacks Plus, I chose a novel from the fiction section. The cover pictured a tan man with piercing eyes. The text over the photograph read “American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.”

Later, I asked Kay whether she was worried about me reading that book at that age.

“If your mother approved,” she reasoned, “I wasn’t going to discourage you from reading.” She was right. It was hard enough to get me through one page, much less a whole book.

“Did you think I had ADHD back then?” I asked. She said there were a few students whose behavior she and the counselor had discussed, and I was one of them.

“I never worried about you, though,” she said.

“I learned how to ride the lightning,” I said, and she laughed. (Author note: yes, yes. I understand this phrase also means dying by electric chair. For me, it’s a way to describe how it feels to live with my brain.)

“That’s a good way to put it,” she said. “Not all kids could do that.”

Truth be told, I couldn’t do it either. Not for a real long time. I recently found a manilla envelope with my name on it. Inside, I found six, single-spaced typed pages from 2009. They were my answers to a counselor’s quiz from college when I was finally formally diagnosed with ADHD. I had forgotten a lot of the incidents I included on the form. Some, I still can’t recall. In my answers, I described myself as “bothering” or “annoying” my then-boyfriend several times. Those I do remember.

On the question regarding the inability to cue the monitoring or the passage of time, I wrote:

Without a clock in view, I lose track of time. Fifteen minutes and five hours feel the same to me. Sometimes I’m on the internet, and all of a sudden, it’s dark outside. This causes trouble at work. The end of my shift will creep up, and I am left scrambling, doing stuff in a rush.

Still true! It’s why I keep an analog timer on my desk that marks the passage of time with a highlighted clock-face.

On and on the questions went, and after each one, the counselor had matched answers from my questionnaire with the corresponding symptoms. I was a walking-talking DSM-5 criteria list.

Even so many years later, those symptoms haven’t gone away.

Last week, I lost it after I lost something. I should actually say, after I lost something again. I lose a lot of things – sometimes small things like a scrap of paper with a good idea or a reminder scribbled on it. Other times, I lose big things. Important things. Grown-up things. Like my phone, my glasses, my keys, my passport, my escrow reimbursement check from the title company.

Before ever being diagnosed, I lost and forgot just about every item ever entrusted to me. As a kid, my mom’s constant refrain to me was, “You’d lose your head if it wasn’t hooked on.” This was true. Time and again, my parents would trust me with an important item – my dad’s comb, the family camera, the check to replenish my school lunch account – and each time the item would never make it to its intended destination.

As soon as I would leave the school building and climb into my mother’s Dodge Caravan, school left my mind with the slamming of the van’s door. All my attention shifted to whatever was in front of me at home: a TV show, a game, dinner, a Teen Beat Magazine featuring the Backstreet Boys. School work would not cross my mind again until I was back in my seat in class, blank worksheet in hand, and pit in my stomach.

If I ever managed to do the homework, I may instead leave the results at home, most often on the coffee table in the living room. I soon established an effective pattern for document recovery: fake illness. Pretending I was so sick that I needed medicine meant I got to call my mom. I’d grab my guts, double over, and moan so that I would be sent to the nurse’s office. Once there, I’d writhe until she called my mother.

“The nurse says you have a stomachache,” my mom would say on the other end of the receiver.

“I do,” I would lie. “Can you bring me some medicine?”

“Where is it?” she would ask, exasperated, both of us knowing “medicine” was code for the assignment she needed to smuggle into the building. To her credit, she always bailed me out. And if she was not available, my dad would take her place. He worked nights, leaving him available during the day to carry out my homework heists, creating, like my mother did, covert ways to slide the assignment to me with the finesse of a pickpocket.

My memory didn’t improve much in the intervening years. Then that counselor in college finally gave me a name for what I knew I had for years – ADHD. Each time my then-boyfriend would ask, “What is wrong with you?” as I forgot to fold clothes or lost my transit pass, I had no real answer.

After the diagnosis, at least I had a way to explain it. I could explain why I lost time reading old high school essay assignments I found in a box under my bed and missed the bus which made me late for our date. Or why I zoned out so hard that I actually fell asleep during the math portion of the SATs (I did bubble in my name, which I am convinced netted me the 200 points of legend). It explained why I counted the floors of the Sears Tower out the window of my LSAT testing center rather than answering the logic questions.

I had no solution yet, but there was, at the bare minimum, a why. 

In law school, I learned ways to cope so I could get by. I would keep digital copies of everything and save it all both locally and in the cloud, saving myself from leaving outlines or notebooks on any coffee table. I relied on friends, too, who sometimes bailed me out with case notes when the professor inevitably called on me after I forgot to read a case.

Sometimes I could pull up online notes, simultaneously reading, processing, and speaking with a plausible sense of authority, a skill that I would later learn is not shared by everyone. This worked most of the time. But there was one professor, Bridge, who sat in the back of the room and would peep on students’ laptop screens. His position foiled my Google/read scheme.

One class, I found myself unprepared and called on by Bridge. Without the online case brief staring back at me from my screen, I was hosed. My forgetfulness had me flailing. Exasperated under his hammering, I finally blurted out, “I don’t know, man.” In hindsight, this is quite funny, ridiculous really. At the time, however, my face burned.

I navigated my way through law school and passed the bar with a combination of good ol’ fashioned hyperfocus and over-preparing due to extreme fear of failure and anxiety.

Eventually, I ended up at a big ass law firm, or “big law” it’s called. For many students, big law is the pinnacle. The dream. Six-figure starting salary, five-figure bonus, your name attached to a place so prestigious. For me, it was a nightmare. The extremely high stakes, the lack of sleep, and the boring underlying subject matter swirled together into a perfect storm that sent my ADHD into over-drive.

“Have this prepared for our 9 A.M. meeting,” a partner might tell me about some document or assignment. I would work late, leave after dark, head home, work some more, pass out. Before I knew it, 9 A.M. would roll around, and I would find myself empty handed in a conference room, overhead lights boiling down like an interrogation room, reflecting off the partner’s shiny bald head.

“Where is it?” he would ask. I had to confess I had forgotten. “Are you kidding me?” His question buttressed by an incredulous laugh.

Naw, my dude. I was not kidding.

Another time he thrust a document at me and began barking instructions at me to make some changes. No written corrections on the document for me to enter in to the computer. No emailed instructions. He just stopped me in a hallway and began reciting them out loud like a soliloquy. I asked him a handful of times to slow down so that I could take some notes.

“You can’t just remember what I am saying?” he snapped. I told him I could not and if he wanted my help, I would need to write it all down. He scoffed, grumbled, gave me a dramatic sigh, and yanked the document out of my hand, saying, “Here just let me do it.”

I fell into a stress-fail cycle. This was the name I gave it. It went something like:

Long hours = can’t sleep = no time to work out = eat trash = drink alcohol = brain malfunction = distracted = forget = fail at work = stress out = more work = long hours… rinse, repeat.

I also realized, apart from the pro bono work, I just did not give a shit about what we were doing. The people I worked with were mostly great, but interesting co-workers don’t magically make something so dull suddenly interesting. Imagine you meet a really nice person at a bar, and they take you back to their place. There, they show you an extensive collection of pencil shavings.

“This pile is from a Ticonderoga number 2, manually sharpened!” Snoozeville.

No matter their level of enthusiasm, unless it turns your crank, too, it’s not going to hold your interest. And, in fact, for someone with a brain like mine – boredom makes all of my symptoms worse.

One time I had to read like 300 pages of information about a company that made metal fasteners. I am not making this up. They owned machines that pressed screws and then sold those screws to companies who made like airplanes and cars. There’s not anything more boring on the planet than that. On top of the stress-fail cycle, my symptoms were being actively exacerbated by the subject matter I was supposed to study.

Symptoms all aflare, now imagine you’re in a meeting. Important things are being discussed, maybe even things you remotely care about. You’re trying to listen, but your brain is also singing the theme song to the 1993 situation comedy television show The Nanny, starring Fran Drescher. You wonder if Fran Fine and Mr. Sheffield ever got married. How did that show end? Also, did you know that Fran Drescher has been making weird social media posts recently? Did the Mr. Sheffield actor age well? I haven’t seen him in awhile. I feel like he was in a movie where he played a bad guy, but I can’t remember the name of it. Was he actually British in real life? Y’all remember how Fran Drescher was in that movie Beautician and the Beast, and her mom was feeding chicken meat to chickens? Then Fran goes, “It’s like silence of the chickens!” But that doesn’t really make sense because in Silence of the Lambs, the lambs don’t eat other lambs (at least not that I remember?) It was the humans that were eating each other. Oh shit, I just missed fifteen minutes of this conference call, and I was supposed to be taking notes.

You can see how that would not go well.

My brain is better now. I quit the law firm. I have time to sleep, which helps alleviate my symptoms. I also have time to exercise or go for walks early in the day, which also helps. I now work with a business partner who loves me so much that she researched “ways to support your ADHD spouse” in order to work better with my brain. I get to write about and talk on the microphone about whatever interests me. I can work whatever hours work for me. Professionally, I am now fulfilled and supported. Seemed like I was really riding the lightning, as I told Kay.

Thus brings us to the irony of last Wednesday.

When I realized I had lost a check from my health insurance company and a packet of information on signing up for health coverage, I got stuck in a much worse cycle than the stress-fail cycle. It was the mistake//self-hate spiral. As soon as I realized I had lost the envelopes, the self-berating began.

I am the literal dumbest person on the planet. Adults do not lose important documents or forget things that are so important. I hate myself. I hate my brain.

I was so overwhelmed with the thoughts, I began saying them out loud where my fiancé, Paris, could hear. He also has ADHD, but I treat the symptoms and behaviors of his ADHD – like losing the key to the lockbox that contains all of our important papers, for instance – with love and patience. Somehow, when I am the culprit, I don’t give myself that same grace.

I am lucky because he gives me enough grace for the both of us. Upon hearing my negative self-talk, he politely disagreed then wrapped me in a big hug. This short-circuited the spiral long enough for me to pull out my phone and ask Google what I was wondering silently to myself: “How do I stop hating myself because of my ADHD?”

A number of results came up. They were ok, some blogs and articles, but nothing revolutionary. I put down my phone and picked up the purple leather-bound journal beside my bed. It’s my gratitude journal, and I try to write nightly what I am thankful for. That night, I tried turning the tables on the mistake//self-hate spiral. I wrote down what I was grateful for – Paris, for his patience and understanding. And for my brain – for the good side of it, for all that it can do – forgetting for a moment what it couldn’t.

What it can do is pretty remarkable. It can do two things at once. While writing, it can conjure multiple ideas at once, then place them neatly on a shelf as my hand scrambles to catch up. It lets me tell jokes on the spot and make strangers laugh, not just on stage but even in places like the aisle at the grocery store. It lets me co-host a weekly show where all the jokes are made up and lets me keep up with my quick and witty co-host.

Yes, it also loses things. Even important grown-up things. It forgets to pay bills if they are not on auto-pay. It forgets birthdays and anniversaries and to text people back. It misses appointments without multiple reminders, both physical and digital. It cannot conceptualize a project without seeing a finished product as an example. It freezes when I am faced with multiple tasks all at once or a task with no clear steps. It wanders while reading and does better while listening to music or doing something else at the same time. It is how it is. I cannot change it, so why have I wasted so much time hating it?

The next morning, I turned to my Osho Zen Tarot deck, a deck of tarot cards based on the wisdom of Zen. I did what I usually do – shuffle it three times, cut it three times, then stack them back together. I placed my hands on the deck and silently asked my question: How can I stop hating that part of my brain that fails me sometimes?

As is always the case, the perfect card was waiting on top for me. The Two of Water - Friendliness. The image printed on the card showed two trees, side by side, with separate trunks, but with their branches intertwined. I read the card’s entry in the accompanying book:

“The essence of true friends – mature, easy with each other, natural. There is no urgency about their connection, no neediness, no desire to change the other into something else…A love that is truly unconditional, without expectations or demands.”

Damn. Got me.

The part of my brain that drops the ball sometimes will forever be a part of me. I can help it out – prompt it with calendars, planners, reminder lists on white boards, and apps. I can track the time with my bright blue desktop timer. I can keep my water from being disconnected again due to non-payment by keeping the bill on auto-pay.

But I am learning to accept that the forgetful part is also what affords me the other part – the magical part that can read, process, and talk all at once. The part that lets me write and improvise and be creative.

I can’t get rid of the ball dropping side without shutting off the wildly creative side. They have to co-exist – mature, easy with each other, natural. No desire to change the one side into something else. I am learning to love them both unconditionally, without expectations or demands, but with a stack of planners and ton of Google calendar invites.

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.