I wrote my first post on December 18, 2009, having been diagnosed casually by my psychiatric nurse thirty minutes into my first visit.* I was 49 at the time.
I’m writing this post on January 12, 2011.
It’s amazing — or not amazing at all, knowing me as I do — that I’ve learned so little in those two years.
I wrote about my learning curve in that 2009 post. I think I described it as a bridge that vanished over the horizon. It was hyperbole meant to console me — ADD is a thing of the brain, after all. By definition it should be human-scaled, and amenable to understanding. It was vast in the way that God is vast — really, really big, but still modeled on its creators.
All I had to do was understand myself. Map my mental genome. Produce a clean blueprint. Scale it up a bit and the bridge wouldn’t seem so daunting. Either the bridge would shrink or I would expand. We’d meet in the middle.
Two years later I’ve discovered that the bridge is no smaller. It might even be bigger. The bridge seems uncrossable. And what good is a bridge that can’t be crossed?
I look at the bridge between my understanding and acceptance of ADD, and where I stand now, and I still can’t see the other end.
I can’t believe I built it.
What was I thinking? I needed something like wheelchair access to circumvent the stairs of a non-ADD world. I didn’t need a planet-spanning arch.
Note to self: build smaller. Think Ikea, not Asgard.
*A more official diagnosis wouldn’t arrive until I’d seen my new therapist for a few months. I told him in our first session that I had ADD, or thought I had ADD, and I wanted to focus on ADD, and by the way, do I really have ADD?
