So, here’s the thing with adult, non-diagnosed, ADHD. In its various iterations – I choose that word advisedly, rather than use an alternative like, stages, or phases, or from time to time – because, for me at least, it’s progressive, it presents as a desire for perfection, sometimes ambition; at others a remarkable ability to concentrate deeply until a subject is cracked, whilst at others, most others, it’s all about an inability to concentrate at all, and flights of fancy. It’s part of the condition to leave a trail of disappointment and underachievement behind you, but I wonder how many of us remember those disappointments and dwell on them?
I’m not entirely sure whether what I experience today is the same as it’s always been; or if the overwhelming sensation of failure that I feel now, is the accumulated accretion of all those disappointments. Or something worse; that the condition feeds itself, and other weaknesses, to build on what it has established until it acquires a dominating relationship with the host body? As I experience it now, I think I prefer this as an explanation – that, foundation islands of underachievement began to be grown-over with a moss of despair, until, eventually each of those isolated islands, are connected in a shroud of depression.
I don’t even know whether ADHD causes depression in and of itself; or whether it is only some of us, that this inability to fulfil our deluded expectations of ourselves, so regularly disappoints. But I think it’s where many of us end up.
For many years, of course, people afflicted as I am, don’t realise that we have ADHD, or a related/independent depression. All we know is that we have spent a lifetime underachieving, never quite living up to the person that we know that we should be; trying too hard, and putting too much effort into that which is worthless; failing to comprehend that which is worth the effort; being overcome by inertia to launch ourselves into that task that we know demands our attention, that would be fulfilling, if only we could; or to start a job which we anticipate with excitement, only to find that the route ahead looks like acres of ploughed fields made impassable by low level trip hazards and barbed wire.
And then, of course, we reprove ourselves for these failures, and it turns into a self-feeding, toxic mess, where cause and effect cannot be untangled; where disbelief in the self, rather than becoming the motivating force to prompt you to harness all your capabilities to do it better next time, becomes the erosive force which slowly destroys your confidence; where replayed failures of yesterday make you less and less inclined to try something new again tomorrow; where a life littered with wrong choices at the wrong time, becomes a self-recriminating Hadron Collider of mental anguish, constantly circulating negative thoughts at neural speed, which bump into each other to create a new history formed of distorted, subjectively interpreted, worst-case-hindsight.
Now, add into this, a father so narcissistic that he died in the earnest conviction, that he’d never lost an argument. Arguments, by the way, that were like convincing a Creationist that there were no dinosaurs on the Ark. A man whose only goal when engaging with his offspring was to defeat them in any exchange; the only nod to their personal growth and development in that treatment, being that they were receiving a schooling in his own personal brand of uncompromising honesty. The honesty that permitted him to talk to teachers, and to your friend’s parents, in terms of the crushing disappointment that you had been to him; the sort of honesty that glorified his contemporaries at school, who had competed in the Olympics, and represented England and Oxford and Cambridge, in various endeavours, but looked upon the same achievements of your contemporaries in terms of ‘Why couldn’t you do it?’; a man who had boundless enthusiasm for criticism, but none for praise; but yet a man who was never sufficiently engaged to see a course of tough love through to the end. A man whose only reaction to serious pursuits, when he wasn’t in the mood, or trivial fun, when his mind was on more serious matters, was to exhale and roll his eyes. A man who could not comprehend that others did not perceive the world exactly as he did. A man whose contribution to the desired sporting excellence of his children was to enrol them in the club, then never donate another penny or minute to the cause, leaving them as teenagers, with no income, to fund their way through it. A man whose constant comparison of you with your contemporaries never took account that they were funded, and you were not. Or should that say, ‘invested-in’? A man, who, if still living, would feel unfairly traduced by these words, unaware that he lived his married life in a private bubble of sneering disapproval of everyone close to him.
I sound as self-pitying as him. I know. No, I really do know. But I’m only being honest daddy. Like the way you taught me.
But with him in the mix, toxic goes nuclear, and it becomes impossible to unravel the competing causes of a life not lived; only that a life has been endured trying to figure out why it has fallen so short of your expectations. Only now, at this too late moment, do I realise that I have good grounds to forgive myself for the things for which I have been most self-reproachful. But it is too late. For even if it is all resolved, shortly, which won’t happen, I am forced to think of those wasted years, that will never be got back. The whole of adulthood.
Or maybe I’m just lazy, and nowhere near as smart as I think I am?
No, the only question that stands to be resolved today, is why didn’t the eighteen-year-old me, kill himself? Think of the pain he’d have saved. Think of the good he’d have done. No, actually, that’s wrong, it’s more than that. The real question to resolve, is why didn’t that waster have the slightest notion that to have killed himself was the only reasonable thing to have done?
My father was right, he really was fucking useless, that boy.
Dickie White's Diary 