(Graphic: No and yes. Credit: Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind.)

In February, as major economic changes were beginning in my life, I blogged about what nationally noted ADHD blogger Jeff Siegel calls ADHD paralysis. It’s a powerful sense of overwhelm ADHDers feel when too much life comes at us too fast for us to parse it in the non-linear manner that our brains like to go about things. Since we find it particularly difficult to estimate time, usually we see our lives in terms of Now and Not Now. Whatever is happening now is real. Whatever will happen later exists in some forgotten nether zone–unless we were wise enough to write it down on our Google Calendar and set an auto alarm (as drives very much of my life.)

A related concept–one I think about frequently–is that of the ADHD “back burner.” Sometimes when we’re not completely overwhelmed,  ADHDers can still find it hard to get things done, even important things. It’s almost a game our minds play–as long as we think of something we have to do, it’s almost as good as doing it. Except it isn’t–unless we can manage to get the whole world to agree with our persistently pesky prefontal cortexes. No matter how time-sensitive the task, there’s always this background sense that as long as we haven’t forgotten about it–which for us ADHDers is a great sucess in itself–it will somehow magically get done on time without us having to do anything else.

Our inaction is not a (non-)act of laziness, we really mean to get done everything we have percolating on our mental back burners. But often it’s hard to sit down and choose just one of those pending items, and sometimes when you’re not looking (and sometimes even though you are), you turn around and a critical task has gone incomplete for months. If we’ve done the work to come to terms with our ADHD and manage it with meds and/or behavioral strategies, we know the real explanation for what has happened and let go of the urge to blame ourselves for the occasional messes created by our chronic condition.

However, it doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for completing time-sensitive tasks that we have promised others–and ourselves–that we would deliver. That doesn’t make us ADHDers sound reliable, yet when we’re firing on all thrusters, the cruft of inaction becomes less like tar balls floating on top of an oil-ravaged sea and more like a localized thin sheen of algae that arises only so often and in the right light can be kind of pretty to look at.

Fellow ADHDer Handyman Nick said to me recently, “I think you ought to stop writing about ADHD. It’s not doing you any good–who’s going to hire you if they know about it, man? I’m just sayin’.” He also complains to me about the near six-figure design jobs he frequently turns down–or gets turned down for–because “it always turns out to be something different than what they say they want me to do when we first talk.”

I haven’t yet plinked him in the nose for thinking that repeatedly looking highly remunerative gift horses in the mouth and then complaining about all that self-spurned good fortune to a member of great unwashed unemployed America would be a good tactic. Then again, I smell ADHD all over those “turns out to be something different” moments. I know from personal experience how often ADHDers can get the wrong end of the communication stick and blame others for our own misunderstandings.

Point being, you can’t hide what you are. I guess I prefer to let people know what they’re getting with me. Recently, I let a potential blogging partnership with Jeff Siegel languish on my ADHD backburner. The partnership eventually fell through, and don’t I know why. I wish Siegel all the best on the new project with a spectacular new partner–and it’s probably just as well. I don’t think our ADHD’s matched. Like Nick, Siegel’s ADHD is the hyperactive kind that makes introspective ADHD daydreamers like me feel overwhelmed. Then we just turn on our backburners, turn up our headphones and…

What was I talking about, again?

Yesterday I began exploring ADHD “paralysis”, a sense of overwhelm unique to people with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that freezes us in place and robs us of economic productivity by causing us to hyperfocus on fear of failure. As promised for Valentine’s Day, today I want to talk about how that fear of failure, never far from the surface for ADHDers on the best of days, works to sabotage our love relationships, too.

Of course, we ADHDers like everyone else do our best to present ourselves as well-adjusted, minimally baggaged individuals. After all, who in their right mind wants to share with employers, colleagues, friends, and lovers that deep down, you really feel they’re wrongly involved with a perennial screw-up? ADHDers can spend their whole lives fighting this single inner demon and still never fully feel they’ve gotten ahead of it.

When applied to the dating arena, it’s almost as if ADHDers set an inner egg timer the moment they step out their front doors on a first date. Before you know you have ADHD, you blame your dating partners who never seem to want to stick around in usually tumultuous relationships with you for very long. Post-diagnosis and armed–or so you think–with meds and coping strategies, often ADHDers continue to wonder why their love relationships continue to end.

Of course, years of barely self-aware, distractable behavior don’t end overnight. We ADHDers know that. But it’s a lot easier for our brains to hyperfocus on the consistent message the world keeps sending us through our interpersonal relationships: go away, buster. It’s not me, it really is you.

ADHD message boards are full of stories from men and women who mourn how hard the disorder can make it to find your way finally into a committed relationship (for examples, see here and here.) It’s not that we’re inherently un-datable. (At least not post-diagnosis, anyway.) It’s that ADHDers rarely offer themselves the same generosity, kindness, and understanding regarding their symptoms that they expect from the other people in their lives.

If we’re really doing our best to manage our symptoms, who’s to say who’s at fault when a relationship ends? Sometimes it really is us. Sometimes it’s them. Sometimes it’s circumstance.

When we don’t remind ourselves on a daily basis that success in love–and in life in general–really is possible for ADHDers to achieve, we have a tendency to act as if it’s not. Post-diagnosis, those times when we truly do have a hand in helping cut short a love relationship, the failure probably has more to do with an inner decision to surrender to that damnable expectation of failure than from our actual symptoms, as annoying as others may find them.

I speak from experience. Every relationship I’ve ever been in since I started dating at the age of 16 was ended by my partners, not by me. Before I knew I had ADHD, I blamed them for the tumult and drama of my short-lived relationships…and wondered what was wrong with me for attracting such unavailable men. That explains a good deal of the drama surrounding my breakup with now-NYC-based photoblogger (and friend), Devyn.

After learning about my ADHD, the tumult and drama in my love relationships continued, sometimes with unabated ferocity, sometimes with a good measure of newly found self-awareness. But so far, with the same unenduring nature as before. I know it’s not just me anymore. But like any good ADHDer, I still find it hard to shut down the persistent inner voice telling me I’m a total hot mess. What on earth would I do without it’s familiar refrain?

Dating Pastry Chef Chris, that inner voice was more of a whisper, though I still wondered when I was going to make the relationship self-destruct. Dating Doctor Dementia, who by all objective measures was a total screw-up himself, I wondered even more strongly what I was going to do to ruin the relationship.

When Overly Frank dumped me last month in an IHOP in Boystown at 1:30 in the morning (pathetic on the face of it, I know), I could barely hear his words over the veritable and never-ending scream of my inner failure-voice. The next day, I sat with him on my couch and told him about that voice. Until then, I’d never really shared my hidden monologue of low expectations with anyone.

The talk was enlightening. Our breakup wasn’t just my fault, of course. Frank and I are simply a better match as friends. But talking to him helped me see how much I’d given into to my classically low expectations, and how that added unnecessary, ADHD-infused friction into our relationship.

The moral of this story is we ADHDers need to allow ourselves–force ourselves, if necessary–to treat ourselves with kindness and a big, fat open heart when it comes to our normal, human foibles, of which ADHD symptoms are certainly a part. Staying as aware and in the moment as possible and reminding ourselves that happiness in love–and every other domain of life–is inherently possible is of critical importance to avoid giving into our deeply seated low expectations about the future.

After all, if my ADHD life is going to be played out as a foregone conclusion, I’d rather that conclusion be a happy one. Wouldn’t you? Or as I put it to Frank last night over dinner, “So it wasn’t my ADHD…Hey! I forgot my pickle!”

Since opening up about my adult ADHD diagnosis almost two years ago, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to have been welcomed into the close community of ADHD bloggers. My recent re-theming of Chicago Carless was inspired by “Jeff” of the popular blog, Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind, and recently I was asked by the national ADDitude Magazine to consider contributing to their website. I’m beyond grateful that my personal experiences with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder have meaning for other sufferers. (Note that ADD and ADHD are synonymous terms for the same disorder.)

This Valentine’s Day weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about the pernicious way that ADHD can make you let go of the reins of your present life by assuming that your current activities will always come to an unhappy conclusion. Today I want to talk about how that happens in an ADHDer’s general, day-to-day life. Tomorrow (Valentine’s Day), I’ll explore how that negatively affects the love lives of ADHDers.

Jeff has a legacy post about what he calls “ADD paralysis,” or as leading ADHD coach Jennifer Koretsky calls it, “complete inaction.” It’s when an ADHDer takes a look at all their simultaneous responsibilities, half-finished tasks, pending to-do items, and other sources of immediate life stress and simply freezes in place like a deer fixed in oncoming headlights.

This happens because the way an ADHDer’s brain is neurologically wired makes it difficult to discern or establish priority, rank items by order of importance, or manage tasks sequentially over time without strong coping strategies and, in most cases, appropriate prescription meds. (Or at least over-the-counter supplements.) Even with meds, the stress caused by competing claims on an ADHDer’s time can sometimes be overwhelming.

Sure, we could step back, take a breath, and try to Mulligan our to-do list from scratch. But when you have ADHD, that means you’ve spent your whole life wondering why you never get much accomplished (pre-diagnosis), wondering why even with meds your symptoms sometimes still reappear to flatten your best laid plans (post-diagnosis), and hearing ill-informed friends and colleagues wonder why don’t choose to magically overcome your brain’s physiology by just “trying a little harder.”

The result of all that is a veritable headspace of remembered failure that ADHDers carry around with them no matter how highly functioning they may outwardly appear to be. The Ritalin or Adderall may be working perfectly, but you still remember the feeling of being labeled a screw-up–and among some who know you, the label stays unfairly stuck, too.

When life stress comes up against those memories, it’s easy for an ADHDer to feel swamped. It’s as if you just can’t figure out which way to turn or what to do next, for fear that whatever you do–no matter how important it is that you do it–will just turn out badly.

In the worst case scenario, an ADHDer’s superhuman power of hyperfocus kicks in. Once that happens, no one could pay you to stop fixating on the potential for further disaster. You continue on the downward psychological spiral and your life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure that can last days, weeks, and even months, triggering depression and even further anxiety about the future.

During much of the latter half of 2009, this was my experience as I watched the tattered economy sink my communications freelancing career. The economy wasn’t my fault. But try telling that to my ADHD brain. Or to friends, colleagues, and clients who wondered why for a time I fell squarely off the face of the earth, even though good sense should have dictated that I at least try to hold on to the edge of terra firma by my fingertips.

I’d love to tell you how I pulled out of it. I think it was by the shock of former boyfriend (now friend) Overly Frank dumping me mid-freeze (more on that in tomorrow’s post), not to mention returning to a life dictated by making lists, writing everything down, and a healthy daily dose of St. Johns Wort. Forcing myself to heavily prioritize and automate my ongoing job search helped a great deal, as well.

That jibes with Koretsky’s suggestion that to unstick the personal pause button, the best idea is for an ADHDer to concentrate on the present moment. After all, you can only do one thing at a time, no matter how many other things are piling up. And as any believer in the power of kaizen will tell you, a little step taken every day can go a long way.

Though personally, I’d settle for time-release Adderall.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

Today, I walked out of Community Media Workshop’s Communicamp open conference. It wasn’t for lack of wanting to stay in my seat and spend the day with the cognescenti of the Windy City’s media and blogging worlds. But how do you remain at an event where the rules of the road seem almost aimed at making someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder–like me–feel as out of place as possible? Here’s why open conference don’t work for ADHDers…and how to change that.

The daylong Communicamp, still going on as a I write this, was billed as an “unconference” or open conference. Instead of discussing top-down topics in fusty meeting rooms, today’s event grouped people in a circle to propose and defend discussion topics, schedule breakout sessions, choose the length of each session, and keep each session on time. In other words, Communicamp participants were expected to plan and manage the day’s conference extemporaneously, making instantaneous decisions about programming, priority, and time management.

Less than 15 minutes into the opening presentation by conference manager Jean Russell, one increasingly painful question kept broadcasting itself through my mind: Has anyone who organized this conference ever met someone with ADHD?

As I wrote recently on my personal blog, Chicago Carless, the things Communicamp expected of its participants are exactly the things people with ADHD find hardest to accomplish without outside help. The brains of people with ADHD are neurologically hardwired to begin to shut down when so-called executive thought functions are required of us. These functions include common tasks non-ADHDers find simple and easy like identifying priorities, assessing relative importance, and most especially estimating and managing time.

Suffering through someone else’s slow, plodding pace is no picnic, either, when the Ferrari brain of ADHD kicks in and readies you to race ahead to the punchline of any presentation. As Russell spent the hour from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. methodically introducing the concepts of the open conference step by step by step, it was all the ADHDer in me could do to not dissolve into a puddle of flop sweat.

I have no doubt most others in the room had no quarrel with Russell’s frequent admonitions to “take responsibility for your conference experience,” “choose the length of your own group discussions,” and “keep track of time on your own.” Yet I also have no doubt I wasn’t the only person in the room feeling left out by the day’s DIY logistical parameters.

As 10:00 a.m. and the start of the day’s first breakout sessions drew nearer, I leaned to the person sitting to my right and said, “Maybe what we really need is a breakout session on advance planning.” To my surprise, she and her neighbor laughed and agreed with me. A participant sitting within earshot to my left chimed in next, mocking Russell with a sotto voce, “I guess ‘everything will just happen as it is supposed to happen,’” which generated additional chuckles from her side of the circle.

It’s never a good thing when you begin to lose your audience so early into an event like this, and I know Russell (who is both an accomplished coach and good at what she does) and everyone at CMW meant well with today’s conference. I am in fact very grateful to Workshop vice-president Gordon Mayer for facilitating my attendance at today’s event. And I know that great discussions are taking place at Communicamp at this very moment that I look forward to learning about. I wish I could have stuck around.

However, and it’s a big however, today’s conference was no place for an unprepared ADHDer. As I wrote on Carless about the plight of us ADHDers:

“Often we hear from colleagues, friends, and family that we should “try harder” to focus on the task at hand–after all, they tell us, when we really put our mind to our work, we zero in like a laser. There’s usually little headway to be made in explaining that no amount of trying harder can overcome a prefontal cortex wired to shut down the moment a task requiring executive thought functions occurs. Or that our occasional ability to hyperfocus on work is actually a symptom of ADD–the same symptom that more frequently leads us to watch Netflix, listen to iTunes, or play Xbox for eight-hour stints without coming up for air…

Those of you reading this with normal brains have absolutely no idea how to identify with the last [paragraph] I’ve written. Right now, you’re scratching your heads and wondering if I’m kidding. Meanwhile, those of you with ADD/ADHD are nodding in agreement. It’s a gap in understanding that often leaves ADDers feeling like we’re living in a separate world, without the vocabulary to adequately explain to outsiders the all-encompassing nature and pernicious tenacity of the disorder we fight on a minute-by-minute basis.”

It’s the same feeling I got when Russell told me point blank that neither she nor any other of the conference organizers would be helping participants keep track of time throughout the day. That comment, in answer to my question about how those present were supposed to keep simultaneous ad hoc breakout sessions on track, was akin to telling someone with ADHD to “try harder.”

By the end of the opening presentation, I felt totally demoralized and, frankly, fearful of my ability as someone with ADHD to make it through the next seven hours of the free-form, personally time-managed “unconference” without any aid whatsoever from the facilitator. That’s not to say open conferences are by definition dangerous places for ADHDers. But there’s a level of logistical support that must be present to ensure that people with ADHD don’t feel excluded, as I felt this morning.

The fact is, it’s the responsibility of an event facilitator to facilitate–to make sure the event is designed and run so that all participants have the ability to take part. ADHDers need structure to get through events like these, and it’s an absolute necessity that better time- and priority-management cues–or at least clues–be provided the next time someone holds an open conference in Chicago, to make sure everyone can feel comfortable joining the conversation.

Calling out timepoints at a daylong event would do nothing to take away from the central, crowd-sourced nature of an open conference like Communicamp. Neither would using email or web tools in advance to manage the process of seeking, combining, prioritizing, and scheduling the day’s topics.

The latter suggestion, in particular, would have eliminated a great deal of confusion and stress that was widely apparently in the room this morning as I experienced the process unfold, via paper and marker, in real time. It would also have saved a lot of time and reduced the ADHDer sweaty-palms quotient.

In the meanwhile, I heartily suggest anyone planning a future open conference inform themselves about ADHD and the challenges that many people in their audience will face simply by sitting down in the room. Here are some great places to start:

• ADDitude Magazine
• Tara McGillicuddy’s My ADD / ADHD Blog
• Edward Hallowell and Melissa Orlov’s ADHD & Marriage and Hallowell’s own ADHD resources
• Jennifer Koretsky’s The ADD Business Owner
• Erin Moore’s So I Married an ADDer (Koretsky’s life partner)
• The thought-provoking personal journey of Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind
• The ADD public forums ADHD Message Boards and ADD Forums; and
• The membership organization, Children & Adults with ADD (CHADD).

Who knows, a little-self assessment may be in order, too. You can check your own suspected ADHD symptoms with these web-based self-tests:

• The World Health Organization ADHD symptom checklist (a highly accurate predictor of ADHD)
• The Dr. Daniel Amen self test
• The Jasper/Goldberg ADD screening;
• and The ADDittude Magazine self test.

And if you do decide to hold an open conference, best of luck. Be prepared. And remember, ADHDers in the room will thank you to not look at them like they’re crazy…for simply asking the time.

(Photo: “I’m tellin’ ya’, dude, there’s still time for her to call.”)

“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before and they almost always call,” said Nick, announcing his decision to leave his number for our waitress. Overly Frank and I were less than eager to witness the passive-aggressive, likely-to-go-down-in-flames example of heterosexual courtship. We were more immediately curious as to why we were staring into yet another complimentary cookie sundae that had just been plopped on our table.

The same thing happened the last time Frank and I ate at R.J. Grunt’s, the mother restaurant of Chicago themed-eatery juggernaut Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a week before. We assumed the previous free dessert was the work of the waiter who came up to us to say hi after recognizing us both from Bear411. This time, the host answered out quizzical gazes. “We bring cookie sundaes for every person who eats here for the first time,” he told us. “That’s why we ask if you’ve been here before when we seat you.”

That made sense. I’ve loved Grunt’s burgers and malts for years, but on our prior visit I remembered Frank telling the waitress it was his first time. This time, it was Nick’s turn to be a newbie.

“I knew you’d come in handy,” I told him.

“People say that to me all the time,” Nick replied.

I met the 25-year-old Cincinnati expat on the ‘L’ one evening in late June. He noticed I was using a 3G iPhone and came over to show me his 3GS. From zero to 60 words per minute in no time flat, he launched into an instant conversation about tech specs, how much he’d liked his first two months in the Windy City, and whether the Taste of Chicago was still open that day. I did my best to ignore his lack of a left hand while I tried to figure out whether he was coming on to me. Given his rapid-fire choice of subject matter, I had a feeling he was a fellow ADDer.

The quarter hour Nick spent trying to decide between two hamburgers at Grunt’s left little room for ADD doubt. “If you don’t make up your mind soon,” I growled at the 15-minute mark, “you’re gonna lose your other hand.”

“How did you lose the first one?” Frank asked.

“Bar fight,” Nick lied.

“Birth defect,” I said as I closed Nick’s menu. “But Nick likes to make up alternative stories to see what he can get people to believe. He had Chris thinking he lost his hand in a sword fight.”

“Sorry, guys,” Nick apologized. “I’m not usually so indecisive.” I’d eaten with Nick in restaurants before. How he managed to get that sentence out with a straight face I’ll never know. “It’s just that our waitress is so hot. Did you see her?”

The new boyfriend and I just stared at the Cincinnatian without saying a word.

“Oh, right,” Nick finally clued in. “Well trust me, she’s pretty.”

She was. Pretty busy. Pretty older. And if I bet money on these sort of things, pretty much out of Nick’s league.

Nick went on. “I’m gonna leave her my number.” You have to love the persistence of single straight guys.

“I thought you hated women,” I asked.

“Not all women,” Nick replied. “Just the ones who’ve burned me in the past and the ones who never call me back and the ones who lie to me. Like a lot of the women in Lincoln Park.” Nick hasn’t been a Chicagoan long enough to know the word, Trixies. “You know, social climbers. Back stabbers.” He went in for the kill. “Bitches.”

Frank opened his mouth as if to start speaking then closed it just as quickly. Like a carp coming to the surface to gasp for air, I’ve come to know it as Frank’s trademark expression for signifying speechlessness.

Nick went on. “Now our waitress, she’s not like that. I’m sure of it. So I’m gonna leave her my number. Not directly, since she’s busy here at work. But I’ll write it on my check when we leave.”

Uh-huh. Nick’s edgy, lovelorn diatribe seemed the verbal version of a crooked wig, so Frank and I just left it alone and continued with our dinner. I had a feeling Frank was hoping Nick’s ADD would kick in and he’d forget to pass his love note. I, on the other hand, sharpened my inner pencil and leaned in a little closer to Nick to make sure I took accurate notes.

When the unexpected dessert came, Nick didn’t let me down. He looked right at the target of his affections and asked, “Honey, can we have separate checks?”

“It’s not that I want a girlfriend,” Nick told us as he wrote down his name and number. “I really just want a relationship for the evening. It’s easier that way.”

“Do you think that’s all she’s going to want, too?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” Nick replied. “Fingers crossed.”

Frank and I wished him luck. “Now,” I said, “let’s get the hell out of here before she reads that thing.”

As the three of us headed up Clark Street back to Frank’s house, I had to ask. “So Nick,” I said, “what makes you so sure she’s going to call? You know, for my blog audience?”

“Hey, it’s almost always worked before,” Nick replied as if he were stating the obvious. “Sexy babes like that always want a piece of the good stuff.”

I didn’t have to turn my gaze in his direction to know that Frank was rolling his eyes. I continued to press. “But are you sure you’ve covered all the bases?” I had a reason for asking. I knew there was one small thing Nick was overlooking.

“Yes, all the bases, man,” he replied in the coolest tones he could muster. “All the bases.”

If it hadn’t been for Nick’s ongoing air of douchebaggery glee, I would have taken far less pleasure in my following words.

“OK,” I said. “But since the waitress didn’t actually see you write your number down…” I paused to watch Frank’s eyes light up. Nick still couldn’t see where I was headed. “…out of the three of us,” I continued, “how will she know you’re the one who left it?”

Nick’s face made an almost audible thud as it hit the pavement. “Well, um, wait a second…,” he stammered, before quickly realizing there was only one possible course for his reaction to take. “Oh…dammit!” he yelled into the Lincoln Park evening. “Dammit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“What are you gonna do?” I said to Nick. My question was meant as consolation, but he took me at my word.

“Well, do I think I should go back there and tell her it was me?” he asked. “I think I should go back. You think? Yeah, I think I should go back.”

“Don’t you dare,” Frank warned as Nick started to turn around. “Michael and I have to eat there, you know. Don’t embarrass us any further than absolutely necessary.”

“I guess all I need to do is come with a title for my blog post now,” I said while Nick smirked in my general direction.

“Give it some time,” Frank suggested. “I mean, I know you have your punch line now, but judging by the baseline of his actions thus far, aren’t you just a little curious to see what else Nick might be capable of before the evening’s over?”

“Well,” I said to them both. “If nothing else, I probably should hold off on the blog post until we see whether the waitress calls or not. It’s only fair to give Nick the benefit of the doubt.”

“No, man,” Nick moaned. “I totally screwed this up. She’s not gonna call. She’s just not. Fuck.”

“Now you don’t know that,” said Frank. “Actually, she might call. Didn’t your check have the free sundae on it? If the waitress remembers you were the new guy tonight, then when she sees the sundae comped on your check-”

Nick didn’t wait for Frank to finish. “Yes. Yes! It was on my check!” Nick exclaimed. “The sundae was on my check! Oh, thank God. That’s how she’ll know it’s my number on there. That’s how she’ll know it’s me! Hurray! See, man, all the bases! I knew it! I’m in!”

Nick hurried on ahead while Frank and I slowed down to shake our heads. And then the cherry hit the top of the sundae. “Oh my God, Frank,” I exclaimed. “He’s skipping.”

Frank and I let Nick have his moment. As time eventually did tell, we knew the waitress wouldn’t call, but no matter. We were too engrossed in the manic display unfolding before our eyes. As Nick continued to happily hoot and holler over an event that any rational person would never expect to come to pass, Frank and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe. After all, we knew we were listening to something never before heard by human ears.

The sound of one hand clapping.

(Photo: Punxsutawney Phil’s life has nothing on the daily grind of the average ADDer. Credit: Business Pundit.)

Take my ADD, please. When my ADD sits around the house, it really sits around the house. I just flew in from Los Angeles, and boy is my ADD tired. Knock knock. Who’s there? ADD. ADD, who? ADD to you, too, buddy.

Life with Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD) can frequently be its own punch line. A lifelong neurological condition often badly misinterpreted as a mere childhood behavioral issue, it’s not so much paying attention that’s the problem for us ADDers. The real impossible dream tends to be stopping ourselves form paying attention to less important tasks so we can focus on issues of immediate importance.

Often we hear from colleagues, friends, and family that we should “try harder” to focus on the task at hand–after all, they tell us, when we really put our mind to our work, we zero in like a laser. There’s usually little headway to be made in explaining that no amount of trying harder can overcome a prefontal cortex wired to shut down the moment a task requiring executive thought functions occurs. Or that our occasional ability to hyperfocus on work is actually a symptom of ADD–the same symptom that more frequently leads us to watch Netflix, listen to iTunes, or play Xbox for eight-hour stints without coming up for air.

If there’s an immediate payoff in sight, we’re there. When faced with a boring task requiring us to order our thoughts or prioritize our work by time or importance, however…what did you say? I can’t hear you. Too busy watching my Blu-ray of The Devil Wears Prada over here, for the third time in a row. Too engaged in doing so to stop and change gears. No matter how critical the task I should be doing, much less how large the eventual consequences may be. After all, an ADD/ADHD-wired brain only understands time in terms of now or never. So unless those pesky consequences are going to happen in the next few minutes, my brain just won’t interpret them as mattering at all. Ever.

Those of you reading this with normal brains have absolutely no idea how to identify with the last two paragraphs I’ve written. Right now, you’re scratching your heads and wondering if I’m kidding. Meanwhile, those of you with ADD/ADHD are nodding in agreement. It’s a gap in understanding that often leaves ADDers feeling like we’re living in a separate world, without the vocabulary to adequately explain to outsiders the all-encompassing nature and pernicious tenacity of the disorder we fight on a minute-by-minute basis.

Recently, the popular ADD/ADHD memoir blog, Jeff’s ADD Mind, underscored this feeling of separateness known well by ADDers. A staunch opponent of the growing idea that ADD/ADHD is somehow a “gift”, in a post entitled, Adult ADD as a Form of Madness, blogger Jeff describes the way an ADDer can seem to live the same, unproductive day over and over:

“I’m beginning to see ADD as a mild form of madness: a sort of insanity that never lets up…Its ‘victims’ lead a maddening, Sisyphean life as they relive the same day again and again as if they were performing their personalized version of (the movie) Ground Hog Day…ADD assures that its victim’s life will ALWAYS be a series of do-overs, a series of attempts to ‘get it right,’ to try to ‘do the right thing.’”

Jeff notes that for every one battle ADDers manages to win against their symptoms, there are likely 10 other battles with less victorious outcomes. I agree. While I wouldn’t consider myself “mad” by dint of having ADD, there’s definitely a feeling of hopelessness that arises at the end of an hour, or day, or week when you realize you haven’t performed your most critical activities or fulfilled your most important responsibilities–even though you’ve spent every spare ounce of your energy and second of your time trying to trick, cajole, force, and otherwise do an end run around your brain to make yourself start and follow-through on them all, all the while reminding yourself of the consequences of failure at every turn.

The urge to blame oneself is great in such circumstances. The truth, however, is that ADDers are slaves to outside aids. If it weren’t for smart phones, electronic calendars, and email reminders, Ritalin and Adderall, or for the chronically uninsured–like me–fish oil, B supplements, and L tyrosine, we might never get anything done. As Jeff points out, even for all that technological and medicinal assistance, sometimes we don’t get anything done, anyway:

“It seems all one can do is accommodate oneself to this madness, acknowledge that there will be good days (even good weeks!) and bad days (and even bad weeks!)…It is tiring to have to always fight to put it back in its cage again and again so that one could lead a ‘normal’ life.”

Not all ADDers are built the same, of course. Although as sure as like attracts like, we do seem to gravitate towards each other. Without knowing it, regular readers of this blog are already acquainted with a few of the other ADDers in my life. Pastry Chef Chris. Sole Man Donn. Bartolobampo. My Cincinnati-expat friend, Handyman Nick. All of us experience the unproductive temporary madness of ADD in our own ways.

I tend to get wrapped up in distractions that last for days, even weeks at a time. Others in our group have a distractibility cycle measured in hours. Minutes even. Most of us have the ability to laugh about our symptoms. Some of us take meds. One of us doesn’t but really, really needs to. Another one of us pretends he manages his symptoms perfectly, while knowing perfectly well that he doesn’t.

And all of us would be at different, more advanced places in our personal and professional lives if we didn’t have ADD at all. Jeff bluntly covered that topic earlier this year in a blog past called, You Have ADD/ADHD and You Will Not Be Rich and Famous. Maybe not. But the occasional ability to meet a client deadline the first time I put it on my calendar instead of the fifth would sure have me feeling like a million bucks. Imagine that–an ADDer being able to successfully manage his time.

It’s madness, I tell you.

(Photo: “This better not be going on your blog.”)

When Overly Frank adopted olderly Ryza from PAWS Chicago earlier this month, the cuddly interaction between Oklahoma expat and 11-year-old feline made me realize how much I’d been taking my own lifelong companion for granted. His life, that is.

Camões never saw the now-ongoing love-fest coming. For nine years, my Portuguese-monickered danger cat and I have been through a lot together. So many apartments. So many times around the futon chasing a ball of string. So many broken Christmas tree ornaments.

Our relationship is like my ADD attention span, the times I really focus on him come and go like the weather. He deserves more. I do too. Trouble is, my family history doesn’t have a lot to teach about long-term relationships.

It’s no surprise I recently shared with friends the realization that I have no idea how to enter and sustain adult relationships. I call it “The Lonely,” the place I end up inside myself when I’m trumped by my ADD and my codependence. I sit there waiting for my Higher Power to lead me to more stable ground and remind me that the true definition of love is not something I learned in childhood.

Growing up in New York, I never knew my father–either one of them. Not the Irishman with my last name in the black-and-white portrait who allegedly died six months before I was born. Sure as hell not the Puerto Rican border hidden away in the family album with Brillo hair and crooked fingers not at all unlike my own.

A native Manhattanite, my Spanish mom married the Irishman and moved to Queens to get out of her own family’s house and find independence. That’s probably why she raised her kids white-bread American, never teaching us the language of her birth. Imagine her surprise when the Irishman dropped dead of alcoholism in 1964 and a short while later her mother came to retire in the attic apartment.

You’d think she’d have already learned to roll with the punches when she went to the doctor suspecting cancer in 1969 and learned of her unexpected pregnancy. She’d later tell me she cried knowing that it wasn’t a terminal illness responsible for her bodily changes.

By the time I was born–six years after the Irishman died–my brother and sister, both a generation older, were already in the advanced stages of drug abuse and alcoholism. My mother should have known better than to entrust them with the secret of my origins, but given the Irishman’s own addiction, she already had a long head start on codependence, herself.

But my Spanish mother was Catholic enough to feel ashamed at having a child out of wedlock, so a family and a neighborhood were sworn to silence. She sent the upstairs border with whom she had shared what would turn out to be the last sexual experience of her life away and put a dead man’s name on my birth certificate.

I wouldn’t learn the familiar man in the family album was my real father until the age of 24. When the truth finally came out, my mother told me she never loved my father and, after all, my brother and sister weren’t ready for a new one, anyway. She also told me they’d been blackmailing her with the knowledge of my origins for my entire life, seeking money, approval of their eventually uninterrupted drunkenness, and silence for illegal actions. (I remain to this day the only person I know who can claim to have played as a pre-teen on bales of pot hidden in the family house by my sister’s drug-dealer boyfriend.)

When my mother died in 1996, shortly after I fled the family household for the sober urbanity of Brownstone Brooklyn, I thought that was that. Before the funeral, out of resentment at how they had manipulated our mother, I hadn’t had a discussion with my siblings in years. And even then, the closest my sister got to talking to me was the heckling she did from the first pew while I was delivering my mother’s eulogy.

Still, in my mother’s death, I thought I had finally escaped the clutches of my emotionally devastating family environment. As regular readers of this blog know, however, it would take many years of soul-searching, a move across country, and a lifetime of failed relationships for me to realize how damaging my upbringing had actually been.

Damaging enough to keep me from looking for my real father until my thirtieth birthday. Social Security death records told me I’d started my search eleven months too late. Digging through my mother’s effects shortly after, I came across private notes he sent to the woman who didn’t love him. I don’t remember how long I sat there reading and re-reading them.

In my father’s handwriting, they all made one thing clear: he loved her. But he was shut out. He eventually moved to Orange County, California, where he died in Santa Ana on September 29th, 1999. His name was Angelo Oropesa.

Before she died, my mother told me every time she looked at me, her breath was taken away by how much I resembled him. The few photos I have of Oropesa show him with children–my unknown half-brothers. From time to time, I poke around the Internet, seeking them. I probably always will. I doubt I’ll ever find them.

Last week, I went looking again. That search proved surprisingly fruitful, if in an unexpected manner. I ran my own siblings’ names through the Social Security death index.

I learned my sister has been dead for three years.

I doubt she ever let herself be happy. I doubt up until the end at the age of 56 she was ever sober for long. And I doubt my brother was sober enough to try and find me to let me know. I’ve spent many years building an information isolation from the two of them to protect me from their madness. Still, I’m eminently Google-able.

What really strikes me about my sister’s death, though, isn’t the late notice, but the lack of emotional impact the news has had on me. I feel sad that I don’t feel sad at her passing. The most I’ve been able to muster is a sense of sorry when I picture how she must have lived the rest of her life. At one time, I loved her dearly. But I made peace with the destruction my family inflicted on itself a long time ago. And I let go of them a long time ago.

Eventually, no doubt, I’ll find my brother in those death records. In the passing of my family members, what’s truly remarkable is how resilient their ghosts have been. I wish I had the same ability to let them go, too.

Much as I wonder how well “Michael Oropesa” would have fit the face at the top of this blog.