Friday, February 11, 2011

What ADHD really feels like

There are a lot of people who think ADHD is made up. Some of us personally know better. Tommy Babcock is someone who has it and he describes what it feels like to him: 
All the new information I’d taken in since I arrived left me nervous about navigating the rocks and shoals of Ginny’s marriage and dealing with Jimmy’s plans. The train and the ship left me with a need to move about, so the next day I jumped into Ginny’s MG and drove to Ambleside.  This area of Cumberland was cold and bleak in the winter, but Lake Windermere had an attraction in any season. As I drove roads leading towards the coast, I thought about dinner last night and tried to clear my head of the Port, while absorbing Jimmy’s offer. It was an offer that hit me like bathtub gin in a Chicago speakeasy.  I knew it might be the right thing to do. It also might, for a while, turn off that ceaseless inner motor. There often was a runaway railroad train inside that threatened to tear me apart if I couldn’t keep moving. Sometimes all the pushups or miles I’d run couldn’t stop it and I wouldn’t know what to do next. Explorers are oftentimes described as heroes, but I believed men went in search of new lands because they couldn’t handle staying where they were. The men who remained in St. Louis were probably more comfortable in their own skins than Lewis, Clark, and the others who’d followed the Missouri to its source or crossed the Sierras in November. Meriwether Lewis was so haunted by those demons he stabbed himself to death. 

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