The Fly on the Wall Down the Hall Is Driving Me Crazy

Excerpt Chapter One of David's Book Overload

It was with a tremendous rush of relief and excitement and with a whirl wind of mixed emotions that I finally confronted the mysterious force that had plagued my life. It now had a name: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It explained so much: the childhood problems that had followed me into adulthood, my alcoholism and the difficulty of my recovery, the inability to organize and manage my life.

My life had been a series of beginnings without endings, projects started and never finished. Looking back I realized I had left unfinished many more tasks than I had ever finished. Somewhere out there in the "unfinished task boneyard" lay hundreds of pieces of model airplanes and Erector sets, wood intended for a fort, incomplete assignments, articles half-read, letters half-written, conversations half-listened to, and wonderful book titles and ideas conjured up but never used.

It was fatiguing to think of all the opportunities I had passed up over the years because I could not focus on the steps of learning--thousands of ideas never followed through, wonderful ideas that were never given any dimension because they could not be taken far enough. From singing lessons to violin instruction. From organized sports to new, exciting, and challenging ventures. Oh, don't get me wrong. I got by, but that 's part of the tragedy. I just got by. And in the process, so much energy was spent in coping that could have been used for productive, constructive, joyful living.

There were financial problems and some legal problems because I had not taken care of matters in time. I had let people down because I could not meet their expectations. I had regrets because of impulsive decisions I had made. In many ways my life was a series of disappointments, poor choices, and missed opportunities.

But I was now at the moment where my poison was finally named. After all the years of pinning my problems to myriad other reasons, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) . Even though I had suspected such a diagnostic outcome, anticipating it was quite different from feeling its truth. Finally I had an answer for everyone who had ever asked me to diagnose myself, who had asked why I had done this and why I had said that and why I was like I was. Why didn't I listen? Why didn't I remember? Why couldn't I follow directions? Why did I drink excessively and why couldn't I stop when I started having problems because of it? Why couldn't I follow through on what I said I would do?

To my inquisitors I say, it wasn't me you saw. It was what was covering me up. You saw my defenses and compensations. You saw my reactions to an unknown attacker and the raper of my courage. You did not see the courageous survivor part of me attempting to shine through the fog.

I never had an answer to what was wrong with me because I just did not know. Like everyone else, I had somehow believed that if I just tried harder I could make myself better. But if you are trying to pound in a nail with a marshmallow, it doesn't help to hit harder. Now I felt that perhaps I could apply the energy I had expended in attempting to fix myself to what I could do something about. The defenses I had used to protect myself from the whys now seemed to fall on the floor around me like a discarded skin no longer of use. Years of grief seemed to flow out in that instant like a dam of realization had burst as I relived the years of pain when nothing made sense and I had no answers and no explanations.

In one of my earliest memories I was about three years old, lying on my bed, eyes closed, rocking my head back and forth, groaning "uh, uh, uh, uh" with each movement — a kind of ritual chant to hold at bay the clamor of sounds making it impossible for me to sleep. Ordinary sounds. My twin brother, Dan, breathing in sleep in the bed next to mine. The radio playing in the living room. The dog barking. Everyday sounds unbearably amplified in my mind.

My chant didn't bother my brother. Nothing bothered him. But my mother heard me and came in to ask, as usual, "What's the matter, honey? Why aren't you sleeping?" and I couldn't tell her. I didn't know what the matter was. I just knew that rocking my head back and forth on the pillow and making the groaning noise helped to deaden the other noises that were beating at me, the overwhelming bombardment of sensations that didn't seem to bother other people but were painful to me.

The problem that dominated my life and shaped my personality was the need to avoid the piercing, rasping, blasting, disorganized chaos of incoming stimuli that I could not filter out, could not ignore. This made it hard for me to relate to other people; to think, study, and make it in school; to carry out tasks, plan ahead, remember. It embarrassed me and made me feel ashamed when I was with people; it made me insecure when I was alone.

My ability to shut out unwanted stimuli was challenged monthly by the meeting of my mother's sewing club in our home. I anticipated these gatherings with dread, knowing I would not be able to sleep. Not that they were rowdy or argumentative; the tiniest noise could keep me awake. I swear the buzzing of a fly on the wall down the hall could drive me crazy! So you can imagine what the noise from the overextended vocal cords of fifteen females did to my need for peace and quiet. Never once through what seemed to be a thousand years of sewing club did I fall asleep before it was over.

My sensitivity to all stimuli increased as I grew older. Indoors or out, the space around me seemed flooded with sounds that were too loud, lights and colors that were too bright, odors that were too intense, tastes that were too strong, touches that were too harsh. I could not shut them out. They were piercing and confusing.

Overload!

My brother and I were adopted. We didn't know our biological parents, but our adopted parents were our real parents and they did their best for us. My mother wanted nothing more than to provide as much love as possible for her nonidentical twin boys. She had no insight into my problem, but she was as good to us as she knew how to be. She became a resource that I could depend on. She wanted to be a mother and she was good at it. Dad wanted us, too, and he loved us. But he also wanted his alcohol, the alcohol that periodically turned our house into pandemonium. Today we would probably be termed "dysfunctional," but we were a loving family.

It irritated me that my brother, Dan, wasn't bothered at all by the things that bothered me. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to keep cool when I was bouncing off the wall. Most of the time Dan and I were good buddies; and hiking, fishing, hunting and exploring with him provided the solace and healthy diversion I needed to make sense of my world. Dan was always a reassuring touchstone for me.

The differences between my brother and me were evident in how we dealt with school. He never had any problems; I think he even liked school, which seemed incomprehensible to me. He was so different from me I sometimes suspected that he was not my brother at all, that someone had made a mistake at the hospital. We even differed radically in how we walked. I marched and he just shuffled along. On the way to school I was always half a block ahead, begging him to hurry so we would not be late. (A neighbor witnessing this daily ritual appropriately nicknamed us "Pete and Repete.") I had a great fear of being late and of everyone looking at me as I entered the class. Dan? He couldn't have cared less.

Why was I always in a hurry to get to school? It's hard to understand. Who wants to hurry to a place where there are only bad feelings, where the only good things to look forward to are recess and going home? Thinking back, I know now that hurrying was the only way I could deal with my fragmented perception of time. I thought my reason for hurrying was to give myself plenty of time to prepare for the day's drudgery, even though I knew it wouldn't help. But the real reason was that I simply didn't know how to stay in the present long enough to make friends with it. I had to barrel like a bat out of hell because "fast forward" was the only gear I had.

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