Attention Displacement Disorder

 

Let's call ADD(ADHD) what it really is, attention displacement disorder. I don't have a deficit. I can assure you, I'm paying attention, all the time, to all the things.

Often when I say what? it's just a pause to allow my brain to piece it back together because I was likely off having three other conversations in my head simultaneously, not because I didn't hear you.

That thing I've put off until the day before its due? I assure you I've been thinking about it, "doing it" in my head. It's completed, redrafted, and perfected, I just have to start it. That random fact that holds the key to some other random fact that could be easily ignored and moved past because the rest of the story about TOPIC A really can survive without the name of the exact color of the wall in the corridor I was walking down (chartreuse), but I can't move past it in my head because that's the part that comes next in my sequence. And it will eat me alive until I make that neuron connection.

It's the reason I move after making a place perfect. Or why I start and stop so many quests for knowledge after gleaning the cliff notes version for future (imminent) reference. I want the panoramic view, I want to try it all, I want to feel it all.

So it might also be the thing that allows me to be intimate with strangers with genuine curiosity or to unify divisive parties when its clearly due to miscommunication/misinterpretations. ADD is what allows me to see all points of view in disagreement, but also the reason I blow my rage top if you interrupt me midthought (so that's cool). It's what allows me to manage my workload with relative ease even on the most hectic of days (dopamine rush!!).

It's enabled me to become multifaceted, multidimensional, and a hell of a good time. It can can carry a meeting, land a sales pitch, or save a teacher from the perils of a silent audience, but it also might not say hello to you first, avert eye contact, and be impossibly awkward at least opportune moments.

The version you get depends on how full my masking tank is in that moment...which is why no one ever suspected all of us (women) just now being diagnosed in our mid/late 30s! We always thought it was just the disruptive boy in class who had to be called to the office for his meds. But turns out many of us neurodivergents were struggling in silence for decades and just learned how to hide it to fit in! Turns out there's a spectrum closely aligned with Autism and Dyslexia which sure helps explain a lot else that's been going on in this brain box.