Educating the public

I have AD/HD. I'm not hyperactive; my subset of the condition is primarily inattentive type. I was diagnosed in 7th grade, and tried a couple different types of medications until finding the one that worked best for my needs. I'm pretty open about this, mostly because while I don't think it "defines" me as a person, it does impact how I live my life.

Recently, I found out I would be without medical insurance coverage for about a month. (I also managed to visit a hospital within hours of not having coverage...because that was a good idea :P More on that later) Because of the short notice, I was unable to get prescription coverage for my AD/HD medication, and will not be able to do so until my new coverage from work kicks into effect in December.

I do pretty well making up for not having the meds. I generally do my best to grab a cup of coffee to help me focus at least a little, and to make up for the higher rate of exhaustion that I end up feeling. I make sure to sleep more, to help my brain recharge. And I make sure I always have post-it notes everywhere at work to take notes when tons of information is getting thrown at me at once.

Today, in the bi-monthly meeting at work, I was working to concentrate, and needed something physical to occupy the distracted portions of my brain. I grabbed a pen and a post-it, and started drawing curly cues. My boss, standing beside me, whispered loudly, "Allison, concentrate on the meeting!"

Now, this puts me in a tough spot. Don't get me wrong, I'll keep my mouth shut about the reason why I was doodling, and not retort that I was paying attention. But there is that overwhelming urge to educate said manager that it actually was more distracting for her to reprimand me and distract me from the conversation in the room than it was for my absent-minded drawing. I don't want to make excuses about how my neural synapses send plenty of messages, but that their arrival at their final destination is as reliable as USPS during a snowstorm. (Nothing against postal workers. I think you guys do great work.) I just got frustrated having someone assume that I was zoning out when I was actually doing what I could to concentrate.

A couple years ago, while in college, I had a professor do something similar. She pulled me aside outside of class one day, and made a remark basically telling me how much she disapproved of the fact that I was knitting in her class during lectures. I took the chance to explain to her that during lectures, I find it really hard to pay attention for any length of time, and taking notes ends up derailing me more than keeping me on track. So, I told her, my coping mechanism was to knit something simple and mindless to help keep the rest of my brain going in the right direction. Coincidentally, the class I was taking was Psychology of Music, so I suppose I would have hoped that a psychology/music professor would be understanding. (She was, post-explanation.)

It bothers me when people say that I definitely couldn't be AD/HD, because I'm not bouncing off the walls. Or when someone tells me that they think that it doesn't really exist because some person in their family told them so. Or that the medication is a stupid idea because some person they know who got diagnosed with it found out they could function better without it than with it. Every person is different. Just because a lot of my friends can drink 3 or 4 alcoholic drinks without getting drunk doesn't mean I can, so why would anyone assume that all people with AD/HD would take the same medications, or function the same way.

The world we live in isn't as compromising to different methods of working than it used to be. Look at our school system: Sit still in a desk for 6+ hours a day, with few breaks (especially in secondary school), and being expected to take notes, understand information, and spew it back onto very structured tests. I thrived when I got to college because I got to set my schedule, and my major was a lot more flexible. Now it's back to that world of sitting still for X-amount of hours a day, processing information and spewing it back into the correct format. It's not hard, but it can be challenging, especially without the help of medication to get those messages from the synapses to the receptors.

The point of all of this? If you don't know about the way someone's brain works, don't assume they're purposely ignoring you because they're doodling on a piece of paper. They might actually be doing exactly what they need to do to pay the best attention to you.