The ADD Brain
I swear I'm probably the most selfish human being I know. Just about everyone I know has problems waaaaaay worse than what I have yet all I can do is sit around and feel sorry for myself. I've gotten to the place where I have stopped listening to myself because I am boring. There's a problem though - there's not just one voice that comes from my brain that I am ignoring. I'll put it this way. Get a bowl. Dump in some Rice Crispies and add milk, then stick your ear down close. Hear that? All the snapping, crackling and popping? That's about right.
No? Doesn't make sense? Not surprised. ADD'ers tend to make such far out associations that no one gets them. Let's try a different visual then. If you have cable go to the Bloomberg Channel. It's the one with two tickers running at different speeds with stock quotes at the bottom of the screen. In the top left side it usually has a box with headlines while in the right side there is some talking head expounding on the quotes or the headlines or both. Add a larger headline to the top of the entire screen and that should do it - no, wait. Take your remote and do a picture-in-screen of another channel that's showing Spongebob. Turn the volume to max. That's ADD. Scary part is even with all that going on at one time - as I sit with my Rice Crsipies and Bloomberg TV - on a good day it can all make sense. However, on a bad one you can't even finish snap, crackle... ooooooh, who lives in a pineapple under the sea.... and in other news! It's likly that you can never complete a freakin thought to save your life.
Not only that, you can never finish a project. Paintings and writing projects that captivated me days before sit incomplete for weeks, months and years. I have so many incomplete paintings I now make sure I do the "eyes" last so they literally don't sit there looking back at me wondering when I will give them life. I would have made one really poor mad scientist. I'd have a basement of half finished Frankensteins laying around on tables, beds, draped with sheets, shoved under beds in the guest rooms, deep freezer, tool shed, dog house, disguised as lawn ornaments.... see, it's more fun to come up with places to stash the "bodies" then it is to get that goofball Igor to get one fresh brain to bring si I could at least bring one of them to life in order to train to clean my toilets.
Understand that there are basically three types of ADD. One, of course is the hyper version. My best friend Mark has this and for as hyper as he is he self-medicates himself with - you will never guess this - with caffeine! He lives on Starbucks to the point they have named a drink after him call the "Black Mark" (get it), which essentially is a Venti Espresso with a shot of coffee. Then there is the second type which oddly is an over-focus caused when the chemicals that should flow between the connections in the brain (I know the technical jargon, I just can't spell it) move too slowly. When you have this version you literally can count the movement of mosquito wings and then ponder its impact on the air quality index in China. In other words you are so keyed into the fine minutia of a subject that the subject itself become irrelevant. And finally, there is the third version which is a combination of the first two. Experts consider this version to be the worst, because it's hard to treat given that one minute you can be in hyper mode which warrants a treatment that includes drugs to slow your brain down and then in an instant you are boring holes into concrete, in which case you would be given an amphetamine to stimulate those chemicals. Guess which one I have? Bingo! Ya, it can really suck.
Supposedly ADDers are supposed to be brilliant. It's true they are provided they can get what's in their head out there to do something with it. I've tried screwdrivers, oil filter wrenches and that nifty can opener that opens cans without the jagged edges. Other than pulling out chunks of hair I haven't been too successful. Without the ability to extract them they just sit there - well, not so much sit there as they do swim around rapidly while giving you the middle finger on every lap. Eventually you'd think they'd quiet down, but no it can go on for hours. Add stress, emotional duress, loneliness, depression, or fill in the blank with any other negative emotion and you just have created the incredible hulk. "MMMM, Hulk Mad!" End result - insomnia. You try to start counting sheep, but then the Hulk gets bored and starts punching sheep, then he's knitting wool sweaters, and finally he's wearing a sheep's head as a hat while driving a rented convertible Ford Mustang (with a black stripe) through 7 states... but still no sleep. That is where I am. It's been over 4 weeks and I'm averaging roughly 2 and a half to 3 hours of sleep a night and I think I am about at the end of my rope. I've tried over the counter sleep aids and after exceeding the recommending daily dosage I only get a headache. I actually don't want to go to the drug option - I have enough already (three is enough thank you) and I don't like turning to pills as an option.
You'd think with all this extra time not sleeping I would get more done right? Nope - I now have an average of 6 more hours a day to procrastinate. If I could get rich by procrastinating then I would be able to pay Bill Gates to clean my toilets on a regular basis. So there. I'm a whiny little "brat" (brat is my new term that someone called me recently). I have friends with major issues going on in their life like marriage problems, one was in a wreck while almost having their other car repossessed, one's dad is dying, and another thought her mom was having a mini-stroke, and yet another friend is in Iraq dodging bullets... and here I sit unable to sleep. I don't like me very much right now, but I do have the time to say a prayer for all my friends and family. If you can, say a little prayer for them too. Meanwhile I'm going to go stab my brain with a Q-tip.
