The Old Man and ADHD

I envy those who think linearly. Who can organize their thoughts in mental bullet points and follow them in a conversation like a train follows the railroad track.

I’m not a linear thinker. My thought patterns more closely resemble an actual bullet ricocheting inside a small metal room. Sometimes it makes sense to duck or maybe stop, drop and roll. If I were a train Casey Jones would be my engineer and an ad hoc trip cross country would be just around the next bend.

I am an undiagnosed ADHD because the only letters we had to learn when I was young were our ABCs.

I have a younger relative who was diagnosed as an adult and got medicine to help him focus. There are days I think medicine might be helpful, but I look at all the pills I’m already taking to atone for the sins of the mature male and the work just seems too hard.

My wife can recite examples and will likely use some of them at my celebration of life. For illustration purposes this is what it’s like: I go to make coffee in the morning. I open the coffee station to get the filter. I take the filter to the trash. As I drop in the filter I see the trash is full. I take the trash out to the garage to the big can. Since I’m in the garage, I hit the button and go out to get the paper. I come back in with the paper and as I pass the coffee pot, I hit the button. Fifteen minutes later, I go to get coffee and all I have is hot water. I never got the new coffee and filter in the machine. Since I have hot water, I get a bag out of the cupboard and make tea instead.

To quote the great philosophers, the Rolling Stones: You can’t always get what you want.

It’s all cause and effect, usually random fleeting thoughts that trigger unexpected effects. I’m a rebel with too many causes, each one a delicious on ramp to adventure in the world of sidetrack.

I have come to accept I can’t tell a joke as I get lost between the intro and the punch line because my mind put something together that’s not in the script and takes off. However, I can be improv funny as my mind puts weird combinations together so I can share my caddy-cornered view of the world with an audience that is sometimes receptive. Or not.

I stuttered as a child but didn’t know until I was in my 30s when my mom and sister let the secret slip. My mom related the doctor they consulted said my mind moved too fast for my mouth. They were advised to just pretend nothing was happening and I might grow out of it. I’m sure that was torture and a really loving gesture. I did grow out of it verbally, though sometimes words from what I am thinking pop out that have nothing to do with whatever my mouth is sharing. I’m ambidextrous between word and thought, though sometimes not too coordinated.

One can’t function successfully in the business world going through life like Ricochet Rabbit. I was given the Myers Briggs Type Indicator test in my 30s and it helped explain a lot. I tested then as an ENFP. The strongest portions that addressed my thought patterns was the “N” for Intuition and the “P” for Perceiver. Those scores almost lapped their spectral counterparts, “S” Sensing and “J” judging.

A person with N-P scores like mine is a candidate to be a cadet for the Academy of Space. Hey, everybody likes Star Wars. Right?

Myers-Briggs helped explain the fact I hate structure and rules and have a tendency for my mind to wander at inopportune times because the great beyond is more alluring. I’m a geriatric teenager who is sooo bored by tedium. I also learned if we recognize our tendencies, we can take countermeasures to offset areas of weakness.

So, I learned to make lists. I hated being their slave but discovered my masters could also be my friends. Lists got the constellation of thoughts and tasks out of my head and on paper so I could sleep at night.

I got a professional certification in project management, which basically just says I passed a 400-question timed test on list making. If my wife has chores for me, I tell her they are going on the list. Of course, since we’re married, I don’t divulge the timeline of the tasks or estimation of completion. My goal is always to get them done by the end of some year.

Which brings us to aging and its effect on an undiagnosed NP-ADHD. Lost among the letters of my life are the changes that can’t be solved by a list. Changes that may not be attributed to aging but rather technology.

I know the lists sometime fail me now. I recently subbed for my wife as liturgist at church, something I’ve done competently many times before though not always flawlessly. I had my bulletin all highlighted with the parts I was supposed to perform and placed on the right page of the Bible. The minister had an amendment and the choir director/pianist was ill, so the choir wasn’t singing as highlighted in my bulletin. I got through the invocation prayer all right, but in worrying about the timing of everything that did or didn’t appear on my list, I took a hiatus. I ended up in a conversation with my organist friend, who had been pressed into service because of the pianist’s absence. I never got the congregation called to worship until prompted by the organist. Thankfully, our lady minister didn’t come over and whack me on the back of the head to shake something loose.

In post event examination, I can’t lay the blame on a mercurial mind as much as a shrinkage of attention span. I read this week American’s attention span has decreased by nearly a third in the last 20 years. We now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, though I’m thinking one who has nothing else to do but swim in a finite space all day has the unfair advantage of no internet. An NT-ADHD person didn’t start with a full deck of attention 20 years ago. Maybe I can be forgiven for not getting the worship bell rung.

These days, I read as much as I ever did, though mostly on my phone and not as deep in substance or texture as when I could plow through 600 pages of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” in a 24-hour period. I listen to books on tape, including the Bible, because my eyes and back bother me, probably from too much computer and cell phone.

If I can’t trust lists anymore, maybe I need a different crutch. If shrinking attention span is now piling on my ADHD, how do I offset and combat the slippage?

I hearkened back to Jeff Goldblum in “The Big Chill” for guidance. I’m trying to make myself sit down and read works that can’t be finished while in the john. In true ADHD fashion, I’ve got two physical books underway right now and am halfway through each though always in danger of starting a third before finishing either. Scatter shooting dies hard.

I’ve also picked the guitar back up in the last few months. I’m self-taught, mostly limited and wrong, but I’m making a concerted effort to learn all the basic, fundamental musical stuff I didn’t 40 years ago when I first picked it up. If you hang in, I’ve discovered following those little symbols on the page are an antidote to a short attention span. The internet may be hard on your attention span but offers a wealth of teaching tools and videos that weren’t available when I bought my first guitar.

To distill this whole article down and bring this ADHD exercise to an exit ramp for closure, I guess I’ve come to the opinion that books and music are preferable to a pill. They don’t have to be taken daily to soothe the savage beast of my mind and the side effects are rewarding and don’t have to be recited at fast forward speed.