Some Things I’ve Learned

Living with this condition my whole life, I’ve learned some ways to get by, or to get within eyeshot of getting by. A while back, at one of those meetings I go to once a month, somebody brought up “crutches”. Crutches are ways we learn to hobble along in spite of whatever weaknesses or failings (physical or mental or otherwise) that we might have.

I’d never thought about it, but I began to that evening. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t learned a few things to help me hobble a little faster or more easily through life. So I thought about it, and, as it happens, there are some things I’ve done to make life easier. I can’t speak for anybody else, so I won’t; these are only how I have gotten by, and there are three crutches I’ve leaned on. There might be others I use without knowing it, but these are the three I’ve picked up on.

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The first one is Never Being In Control. I don’t like running things. Whenever I can, I’ll let somebody else take charge, and if there’s any planning or organizing to be done, I’ll make damned sure that somebody else does that. This only makes sense. I can’t plan anything. My brain just freezes up and I sit there, doing nothing. It sounds nuts, I guess, to somebody who doesn’t deal with ADD, but that’s what happens.

My first week at the school where I worked in Honduras, the headmaster gave me the keys to my room, told me to begin getting ready for the students to come the next week, and sent me on up. I went up there not really knowing what to do. I went in, and there were some books on a shelf under the windows, and a desk, and that was about it. That was it. A room with some desks and books. I didn’t know what to do, so I went down and asked what I should be doing to get ready. he told me, “We know you’ll do a great job this year, and you’ll figure it out. Everything you need is up there. Good luck.”

So I went back up. And I sat there. I sat there for hours, while all the other teachers were doing their teacher things. And while they were doing their teacher things, I sat there and my brain just kind of shut down. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but sit. So I sat. I sat there in that room every day, all day, for a week.

The Sunday night before the first day of school, I was panicking, because we had to turn in our weekly lesson plans the next morning, and I didn’t have any lesson plans. So, well, I dragged out the four books we were going to use that year for English grammar, science, math and something else I’d be teaching the fourth grade, but which I’ve forgotten, I wrote down some page numbers on a sheet of paper, and wrote out a lot of horseshit, and went in the next morning with my “lesson plans”.

And nobody ever said anything about them to me. Nobody asked me for them, or even asked whether I had any. So, naturally, I said to myself, “Pffft! The hell with this shit,” and I never wrote any lesson plans after that. Mostly I just followed the books. Sometimes, I’d walk in and pull something out of my ass and go with it. Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t, but either way, walking in cold and going with whatever came into my head was what I felt best with. I was kind of in control, since I was the teacher, but I mostly just reacted to whatever whim came into my head, or to the class, and I felt a hell of a lot better doing that than agonizing over some crap lesson plan that I knew I couldn’t follow anyway.

And that’s how I get by. I only take the lead when things are up in the air, and we have to do things on the fly. And even then, I’m not really leading; I’m only reacting to whatever comes at us. And since I’m better at it than most people, it works out all right. But most of the time, and always if there’s foresight needed or planning to be done, I give the reins to somebody, anybody, else.

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The next crutch I’ve learned to lean on is being nice. This wasn’t much of a stretch. I’ve always been fairly easygoing, and I have a knack for zeroing in on people’s good sides, and bringing them out. And I guess it’s plain to see why I’d have used this to my advantage. Bullies are marginally less likely to screw with nice kids, I guess, and people are more likely to give nice people a little slack when they screw up, which, as I have said before, I have a habit of doing.

Being has other advantages than making it easier to get by when you have ADD. People like nice people, and most of us want friends. And it makes life better. We all have good sides and bad sides. And life is much more fun if you see the good in people. Who wants to go around always being pissed off at everybody? Who wants to go around holding grudges?

And being nice has served me well. I don’t deny that it likely saved me from getting chewed out many times; it most likely kept me at jobs I might have otherwise lost if everybody else hadn’t liked me. So I took something that was kind of inborn, and I cultivated it, and turned it to my advantage.

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And the last crutch is playing the clown. Again, people are less likely to yell at you, or fire you if they see you as the lovable goofball. So I made myself the lovable goofball. If something was going to go wrong, I’d most likely have something to do with it anyway, so if I could at least be the self-effacing, amiable clown, I could take some mistake and make it seem less like a harmful screwup, and more like a typically wacky misadventure.

The only risk I ran going down this road was that I’d come to see myself as the wacky, lovable goofball, the clown, the butt of jokes, the comic relief. And that indeed did happen. I do see myself that way. It’s hard, as I have said before, to unlearn a life’s worth of habits.

And this crutch, also has the disadvantage of being kind of a natural thing for me. I am silly. I am whimsical. I do like making people laugh, and I’m not bad at it. And this side of myself has been so much a defining feature of how people see me that I see myself that way, too. The problem arises when I find myself doing something where I need people to respect me, to take me seriously. It feels unnatural that anybody should respect me. Who the hell do I think I am, after all, to be putting on airs, to make myself out as anything other than a punchline?

This wasn’t a big problem at my first long term job, working at a law library. I began shelving books, but by the time I left, I was a kind of all-purpose guy who would do anything somebody needed. Need copying? I’ll do it. Need something taken to some other office, or picked up and brought back here? I’ll do it? Need lunch? I’ll go get it. maybe the best kind of person for such a jerry-rigged, slapdash kind of job is an amiable bonehead.

It wasn’t helpful when I was teaching, though, because I could never get the students to respect me. And if they don’t respect you, they won’t take you seriously when you ask them to do something. And, damn, if that isn’t just what happened. I stuck with it, and I got through two years, but, Lord, it was hard.

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So that’s it for crutches. That’s how I’ve made it this far, or at least these are some of the ways I’ve found to keep my head above water. Maybe this might help others who deal with children who might have ADD. Maybe if they see them showing signs of behaving this way, they can keep these children from coming to define themselves by what they do to squeak by through life. After all, being nice isn’t a bad thing. We should foster that in children. But if children learn to be such people pleasers that they can’t stand up for themselves, as sometimes I find it hard to do, then that’s something to help them change.