Maybe “In the Beginning” is a little grandiose, but if it’s O.K. for the name of a Moody Blues song, I guess it’ll do for me...
I’m starting this to lay out some of the thoughts I have about my life with attention deficit disorder. It’s been a fun ride, on the whole, though, Lord knows, it’s been hard, too, sometimes.
I am, by the standards of America today, a failure. Let me begin by laying out a few of my credentials. Even though I have a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from George Washington, I’ve never had a job that payed enough that I could support myself. It took me six years to get through college. The two longest jobs I ever held were: 1: Working at the Biddle Law Library, starting my freshman year (take two) at college until two years after I left college, shelving books and doing odd jobs; and, 2: Teaching at a small bilingual school in a small town in Honduras for two years, where I earned $100 a month, and as a teacher, I was barely more competent in the classroom than an empty chair would have been. I could go on, and maybe somewhere along the line, I will. But for now, I guess that should establish me as a reputable slacker.
The thing is, though, that I never wanted to be a slacker, at least, not after 30, anyway. (I guess everybody wants to be a slacker for a while, when all of life is ahead.) I tried--or at least I thought I did. Or, maybe, rather, I thought I thought I did, but sometimes I didn’t know whether I was trying or even whether I thought I was trying, though, as I said, I thought I thought I was. (This might seem a bit hard to follow, or to fathom, I know, but I’ll see if I can bring some sense to it.)
This goes back to when I was a child, struggling in school. I know now that I had ADD (the inattentive, or spacey, kind, not the hyperactive kind), and school was hard. Rather than doing my work, I might be looking out the window, or doodling on my desk or talking to friends. I forgot my homework much of the time, forgot to do it, or did it and left it at home or lost it, or did the wrong homework or did it wrong. I showed up at school without my books, or without anything to write with, and I showed up late much of the time.
As I said, I wasn’t hyperactive, so I wasn’t a problem in class; I just didn’t get my work done. Teachers were always on my back, as were my parents. They were frustrated beyond belief. They knew I could do the work; I was just choosing not to. That’s what they all thought, and, after a while, I thought so, too.
After all, my classmates were getting their work done, and I wasn’t. I could do it, so, that meant I chose not to do it. I was lazy. I didn’t care. This isn’t what my parents, or even the teachers were telling me. It’s what I worked out on my own. And this is where I became confused and frustrated: I thought I was really trying. I thought I was, but the work wasn’t getting done, which meant that I wasn’t trying after all, even though I thought I was. I began to wonder if I did think I was trying, or whether I was only telling myself that to make myself feel better, or to use as an excuse when I screwed up. So I didn’t know if I thought I was trying or not. I thought I thought I was trying, but I wondered if maybe I was only lazy. I began to believe I was.
And thus began my lifelong struggle with what I call Lazy Bum Syndrome, or LBS for short. LBS can be long lasting, and I know of no cure for it yet, though I am working on it. What is, I guess, its worst effect is that it grinds down one’s self confidence. It would be one thing to try my hardest and fail. That’s something I can live with. I guess anybody can. But to know--whether rightly or wrongly--that I failed at something only because I didn’t even try, that I never cared enough to work at it, well, it led me to blame myself. To blame myself for being lazy, for not caring enough about the people who cared about me to make anything of myself, for being a bad person. It led me to hate myself, and this is something I’m still working on overcoming.
I don’t know whether any of this is worth anything to anybody, but I hope it might be. I’m writing it out so that people going through what I went through can get off the ride earlier in life than I did. There’ll be more about this, needless to say. I’ve only just gotten off the mark here. But it’ll do for a first post.
