Finding My Voice With ADHD
Like the experience of many others, a late diagnosis of ADHD has me trawling back through memory after memory, now equipped to see things differently. I’m still struck by what I think is an ironic name for a disorder, because I had never felt a deficit in attention; I was laser focused on some things, just not the things that other people had decided needed my attention. Now, I am in the privileged position of having numerous coping mechanisms and I am maintaining the steady course of a medication that works.
One of the things I reflect on now, is how I have communicated most of my life. I have always been attracted to writing, and indeed I now work as a science and medical writer. The practice of sitting alone with my thoughts and determining the best way to express them has always been met with immense satisfaction. I now see my history of writing as part of my ADHD identity and not just because writing helps to focus attention and thoughts.
Once I knew how crucial writing was to me, I changed course at university and went into the liberal arts so I could learn how to write essays and I would have more time to read the kind of books that meant something, equipping me even more for the knowledge and concepts I would need to write successfully. I am now familiar with the written “voice” of a number of writers, and sometimes I like to read anything by them just to glide over their sentences and thoughts, even if I have no idea what they are writing about.
I never realized it until recently, but I have always struggled to speak, consistently. I still struggle with this in my adult and professional life, where I often feel like the part of me that powers my voice has run out of energy. Attempting to join work conversations on those difficult mornings and insert myself into the dialogue has sometimes felt like I’m at the back of an aircraft hangar and I have to fight against a bungee rope all the way to the entrance at the front to join the storm outside. Needless to say, I am always padding out my work calendar around meetings for time to psych up and then retreat into solitude.
I have often written as a substitute for speaking. Passing girls notes in school; feeling the need to share something important with an authority figure and doing it by handing them a page of scrawl; in the days of letter writing, carefully crafting long streams of consciousness to friends or romantic interests; and preferring to text and e-mail. I wonder if this is why some writers can craft an air of mystery, because they never say much (and when they do it’s explosive), and upon reading their material you realize there is a whole universe inside their head. Some of our best authors had ADHD? You bet they did!
And just as writing involves making all kinds of choices, I have always felt that I need to think carefully about what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. I know that at some point my voice will keel over and retreat deep into my brain, and this has left me in the past with people thinking I have nothing left to say – a problem if they are looking for an explanation, reassurance, or an apology. I have noticed that people tend to pay attention when I speak, probably because I am silent more often that not, but also because I carefully crafted my voice and speech patterns into sounding dramatic. This is all because my life is punctuated by those awful moments of paralyzed silence and the irritation it seemed to cause others.
Every once in a while, I take a look at ADHD studies to see what research teams are discovering about people like me. While I am not a fan of terms like deficit, dysfunction, and healthy control population (f*ck you, medical science), I do like to see if some of the things I identify from my life have been discovered in comparative studies. Recently, there was a study that found those with ADHD have unique voice patterns, and has been tentatively linked to executive dysfunction (ahem) that modulates a vastly complex voice system. So, some of us do struggle with our voices and no doubt, through grit and determination, find ways to make it work for us.
Perhaps ironically, the writer in me is excited by those with ADHD having their own unique relationship to their voice. When a person struggles with something about themselves, they are likely to spend a lot of time thinking about it. Here, you have a lot of people thinking about voice, how to communicate, and how to speak. People with ADHD have put a lot of time and thought into self-expression and so are likely to have done something unique with a core part of who they are. Firstly, this makes people with ADHD incredibly sexy, but these unique expressions invariably contribute to culture in novel and exciting ways.
In fact, more and more, I have become frustrated by the idea that those of us heavily documented in the DSM with deficits and disorders contribute richly, indeed disproportionately, to culture, art, and scholarship. What does it say about us as a species that the novel ideas and novel expression that we cherish for intellectual advancement and the nurturing of our souls comes from the broken and the damaged?
If I had the energy, I might say something.