A few years ago, I was off on some tangent at a party when a man interrupted, looking relieved to have figured me out: “You’re like an information tube, you can’t filter out irrelevant stuff, so you think everything simultaneously”. His remark stung; he wasn’t wrong. Having difficulty prioritising information is part of ADHD which I was diagnosed with aged 15.
Back in 2005, the acronym conjured up the image of a hyperactive boy zooming around before someone force-fed him a Ritalin pill. One teacher referred to it as Attention Seeking Disorder. It has been historically under-diagnosed in women because symptoms tend to manifest as dreaminess, forgetfulness and anxiety, which are less socially disruptive.
But over the last two years, social media has raised awareness and an increasing number of people have been referred to specialists or self-diagnosed. It would be stingy to begrudge others the diagnosis which changed my life, but I wish people understood that it’s just the beginning of learning to manage symptoms. Sometimes, I have a knee-jerk reaction not unlike snarling: When I was your age we had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow!
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. People who have it do not have lower IQs but we do have lower EF. Executive function is what enables you to plan, develop, adapt and generally get shit done. There’s still not much understanding of what it’s like to live with a disorder that warps your concept of time and space. Navigating professional tasks and social engagements is a logistical nightmare. Picking a time and place to meet a friend can take me half a day. In order to function, I write out detailed lists (daily, weekly) with precise, hourly timelines.
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I’ve lost track of how many people have asked to try my medication. How people think about ADHD tends to be coloured by the neurotypical experience of amphetamines in which they’re stimulants, not suppressors. Kerouac wrote On the Road on benzedrine. Didion wrote with Dexedrine and gin. But the amphetamine that brings me up to a normal level of focus will make someone else high. I don’t have a come-down because I don’t go up. Some people describe ADHD as like having hundreds of browser tabs open at once. I still remember the dial-up tone, so let’s say it’s like living in a room with seven radios, five televisions and a boom-box playing, and finding there’s a switch that allows you to hear the words in a song.
Diagnosis is an explanation, but it’s not an excuse. I take medication, but I also have systems. I meal-plan. I put medication in an eggcup the night before. I keep packing lists on my phone and my Google calendar looks like a school timetable. Sleep has always been tricky. My calves hurt constantly because at night I kick my legs like I’m wearing flippers. Off medication, I lose my possessions, become paralysed over small decisions, am pathologically late, restless, overwhelmed and filled with self-loathing. Fifty per cent of adults with ADHD have an anxiety disorder and we’re four times as likely to suffer from depression. Impulsivity isn’t as sexy as it sounds. Mine involves eating and drinking everything, oversharing and turning over enough new leaves to fill a tree. Then cutting down the tree.
Learning to function with ADHD is great training for writing a novel. Wild Pets runs from 2016-2018, is written mostly in the present tense and syncs up with the exact dates of global political events. It follows Iris, a writer in New York, her boyfriend who is touring with his band, and Nance, who is doing a PhD at Oxford. Scheduling calls across time-zones takes serious planning. I had multiple colour-coded spreadsheets: one with columns headed ‘section’, ‘time’, ‘historical event’ ‘weather’, etc. Because I think associatively and struggle to organise my thoughts into a form which other people understand, I steal structures. Wild Pets is organised into four sections, each covering a period of several months. Within these, there are short self-contained chapters, like TV episodes, structured around things like WhatsApp messages, playlists and email exchanges.
Part of ADHD is dopamine inefficiency, which makes one more likely to procrastinate. Dopamine kicks in when you’re about to miss your deadline, so I hotwire my synapses by creating a sense of urgency. Neurotypical people don’t need take medication because dopamine motivates them to act in accordance with what they judge to be important. Writing the novel, I rigged my reward system by dividing my time into mode A (work) and mode B which I had to earn (blowing off steam). I set deadlines and shared them with my bossiest friends. My self-imposed one-year deadline kept me in a glorious state of managed crisis. I had rituals. As I walked home from my office job, thoughts fizzed up and I voice-noted myself. Sharing a house with five people, I’d be interrupted soon after getting back. To stay interested, I made it into a game. The conversations have time-stamps because my characters are in their early twenties and time-stamp literate but also because tinkering kept me engaged.
My mode of attention isn’t broken, but it’s inconsistent. The upside of this is hyperfocus, which can feel like ‘flow’. But where flow is creative and expansive, hyperfocus is more about intensity than quality and makes shifting attention to other tasks uncomfortable. I wrote without lights on except for the glare of my screen. I wore noise-cancelling headphones, listening to the same three-track playlist. Writing gave me permission to go into hyperfocus because I knew, for once, that it was the most important thing in my life.
ADHD isn’t a ‘superpower’ but its symptoms can be converted into energy and well deployed. Take emotional dysregulation, or feeling emotionally ‘flooded’: I’ve always kept journals. Feelings that are agony at the time, later make for powerful prose. No pain is wasted. The attention I pay to conversational rhythm – because I’m trying not to interrupt – helps me write dialogue. Given that information retention is seen as intelligence, having a dreadful memory takes a toll on your confidence. Part of ADHD is ‘rejection sensitive dysphoria’, an overwhelming response to actual or perceived criticism. In life, I’m used to powering through feeling stupid which helps me block out my inner critic while writing.
For a long time, I agonised: What point of view? Which tense? What if the ideas kept multiplying? Scared of creating a mess I couldn’t fix, I tricked myself into writing by leaving my laptop open. I threw a lot of hissy fits, but kept momentum. In the words of Elissa Schappell, my teacher and the first woman I met with ADHD: ‘Throw up and then clean up’. She taught me that it was OK to fling out metaphors and churn up emotional weather, but that without learning to edit myself, mercilessly, my work would never coalesce into a novel. My draft of this piece was 3,000 words.
Wild Pets has just been published in paperback by Faber & Faber
