What Reality? The Fantastic World of ADHD

ADHD is a very commonly misunderstood disorder. The average perception is that of a little kid running around like a squirrel on crack – which kids basically do anyway, with or without ADHD, because they’re kids. A diagnosis of ADHD is often frowned upon by the uninformed, even treated as nothing more than an excuse for medicating misbehaving children. As a twenty-year-old with ADHD Inattentive Type, I can say with some authority that it is not. It’s much more serious than that, and in so many ways, much more amazing. I say this as a writer in particular – ADHD is awesome.

I didn’t actually find out I had ADHD until I was eighteen, spending my first year away from home at a little college in the mountains of Colorado. It was called, very subtly, Colorado Mountain College. I signed up for a class called Abnormal Psychology, simply because Abnormal is such an intriguing word. It turned out to be a regular psychology class with more science, which disappointed me terribly. But at the very end of the year, just as the snow was starting to turn into mud, we started studying learning disabilities. When I read the description and symptom list of ADHD, it was like finding a map to my brain. It explained everything.

I’ve always seen the world a little bit differently from most people. I constantly see the big picture, and I can hardly force myself to focus on the details. The view off of my deck includes mountains, a forest, and a sprawling city. I can’t focus on just the tallest mountain, or a certain tree in the forest, or a skyscraper in town. I see it all at once and I can’t separate it out.  That’s because ADHD isn’t really an attention deficiency – it’s attention surplus, with no control. People with ADHD focus on everything, all at once.

Unless they don’t.

This is where it gets confusing for me. There is a symptom involved with the disorder called hyperfocus, which is basically focusing on one thing – say a video game, or a tv show, or a series of books, or surfing the internet, or an idea – to a truly bizarre, obsessive level. It gets to the point where I can hardly think of anything but the subject of my hyperfocus. It can honestly be debilitating. I do it a lot.

It’s those two factors that have made ADHD such a fantastic thing for me. Because I can’t focus on it, the real world bores me. So I think harder. What’s in that forest that I can’t see? Easy – a bear. Only no one notices because he’s green, and he doesn’t make any noise. He’s the rare Silent Emerald Bear. He kills people, but only if they look right at him. Why? Because he only eats eyes, and how would he knew who had them unless he saw them? It’s about there that the hyperfocus kicks in, and suddenly I can do nothing but write about this bear. It’s exhilarating. I move out of the real world into a reality where bears are green and picky. I live there more fully and completely than I do in the real world. And then I move out, and then I’m on to the next one. It might be ghost pediatricians, or geriatric unicorns. And so on. Living inside fantasies is something I’ve done since I was a child, and now as an adult, I get to do it even more. Even better.

So, ADHD is fantastic, and more people should give it a go. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bear to write about…