ADD and Me: a mini-biography (This is long -- you've been warned!) :-)

My name is Angela, and I have ADD.

 Hi, Angela!

Well, that was silly.  Okay, I decided to start off my new group, the A-Team, with a little article about my experience with ADD.  I hope to hear all your stories, too.

As is usually the case, I don't really know where to start, so this is going to be a sort of "stream of conciousness" piece -- which is appropriate, since I'm sort of a "stream of conciousness" person.

I was born in the great state of Washington, in 1958, on Thanksgiving Day.  Please, no more turkey jokes!  My parents had only married in January of that year, but they were already about as miserable as it is possible for two people to manage to be.

Despite the melodrama being acted out in my family, I was a bright child, never-met-a-stranger friendly, couldn't-shut-up-if-my-life-depended-on-it talkative, and curious about everything in the world.  I'm told I taught myself to read at the age of three.  I choose to believe that, because it pleases my enormous ego to think that I am truly that brilliant.  LOL!

So, anyway, there isn't much to tell, ADD-wise, about my childhood.  I was spectacularly successful in school, and had other issues not intruded, I might by now have managed to be someone tremendously "successful" (as it is normally defined in our society) and pompous on a grand scale (which I suspect I do manage to achieve from time to time, though I try to keep those moments brief whenever possible).

Years ago, I counted up all the schools I had been to.  I don't recall the total, but I do remember that I had apparently attended nine different schools while in the fourth grade alone. I don't remember them all now, but I do remember that Mom had to talk me into the fifth grade, because my records just couldn't keep up with me that year.

No, we were not a military family.  We just had... issues.  I'll probably get around to those eventually, but not today.  :-)

Even with all the moving around, I still did very, very well in school.  Teachers were apt to tell my mother such things as, "Angela doesn't really even need a teacher.  She just needs someone to tell her what books to read."  Little did they know how true those words were.  I believe it is the extreme (to me) structure of the public school environment through the sixties and seventies that helped me to be so successful there.

Eventually, of course, I reached adolescence, and while school was still easy for me, other things were not, not so much.  I had all the same personal issues that adolescents everywhere have, but I had this screwed-up family to help me deal with them, so I didn't deal very well. I had parents finally getting the divorce they should have gotten years earlier, and Dad was running from "the Feds."  (That's a whole 'nother story I'll tell you about one of these days.)  I developed a habit of passing out and spent a week in the hospital chatting up various technicians while they poked and prodded and tried to figure out what the heck was wrong with me.  I enjoyed that week immensely!

Unfortunately, I went on a Christmas vacation trip to California with my dad to visit his family in 1974, and on the way back, he picked up a fast-talking 22-year-old hitchhiker and brought him home with him and gave him a job.  I'm pretty sure his intention was not to also give him a daughter, but that's what happens when you're not paying adequate attention. By the next October, I was married to the jerk, my mother not having had the intestinal fortitude to continue to tell me no in the face of my rebellious behavior.

At the time of my marriage, I fully intended to continue to attend school and graduate.  Famous last words, huh?  I did manage to go to school in Toccoa, GA for a couple of weeks at one point, and I got all the way registered at some high school, somewhere in California, but never made it to class.  Mr. Jerky-RottenHusband-CubanGuy was abusive, and I had been (handily) pre-beaten, as it were, so I was pretty easy to push around.

So, school didn't happen, and I spent the next couple of years hitchhiking back and forth with Mr. Man.  Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  It got quite dizzying, actually.  Everywhere from San Francisco (which I loved) to Miami to Dillon, Montana (population...  well, not very many) where we spent a month in a log cabin, cooking on an antiquated wood stove.

Of course, in most of those places, I met wonderful, caring people who tried to help me to understand why staying with a man who tossed me down hills and stairs was not such a good idea, but like many young women, I didn't get it. It seemed to me that the known evil was better than the unknown, that being the terrifying prospect of being "out in the world" on my own, by myself.

Well, in 1977 I gave birth to my oldest daughter, my sweet Stephanie.  Thank heaven for that tiny, dark-eyed beauty. If I had not had her, I don't know what would have happened to me.  But when she was about two months old, she just would not stop crying one day, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong with her. After a couple of hours of this, Mr. Man picked her up by one arm and shook her, screaming at her to "Shut the f--- up!"  I knew then that, even if I did not value myself enough to get away from him, I couldn't stay and allow him to victimize her.

It took me several tries to get our separation to stick.  Eventually, I pretended to be going on a job interview, picked up Stephanie and her diaper bag and my purse and told him I would drop her off at his stepmother's house on my way to the interview, and headed for the nearest interstate highway. I kept hitching until I was a few cities away, then called my Dad, who bailed me out with a bus ticket back "home."

At that point, I did manage to enroll in our tiny, local community college.  Unfortunately (uh!oh! not another "unfortunately!") my high school friends decided they should help me "come out of my shell."  Translation:  teach Angela how to drink and party.  I was still a fast learner.  I learned how to bring a different stranger home with me every Saturday night.  I stayed in practice believing everything any man ever told me. (I was already good at that.  It's like falling off a bicycle.  You never forget some things!) And I learned how to drink until I blacked out -- not passed out, but blacked out. I learned that 151 rum would get you drunk twice as fast as the other stuff for the same amount of money.  I learned that I am a crying drunk and a paranoid pot-smoker. And I learned that "speed" must be the most boring drug on the planet.  (That should have been the first real clue to the ADD, had we but known then what we know now!)

Oh, yeah, and I learned to write checks for which I had no funds.  Brilliant.

The next couple of years are more or less a blur of idiocy, enhanced by loneliness, fear, and self-loathing.  I teetered at the ragged edges of society, feeling as though I was "better than this" but not knowing how to BE better.

While running away from yet another bad situation I had created for myself, I met my current husband. I truly believe it was "love at (literally) first sight." We were living together withhin a month and married a year later to the day. We moved to the small town in Louisiana where he had grown up and commenced to building the huge, Waltonesque family we both had dreamed of having.

It's hard, having six children and having "organizational issues."  We have implemented the most ridiculous strategies at times to try to stay on top of things.  I remember when Stephanie was in junior high, she came home one day and was very upset that the other girls had teased her in gym class.  That was the year that, in desperation, I put everyone's initials on the bottoms of all their socks with a black Marks-a-Lot.  Eventually, we gave up on trying to keep them sorted out altogether and resorted to a "sock basket" where all socks went no matter what size or color.  If you wanted a sock, you knew where to go to look.

And we moved every couple of years, which the kids found very stressful. I didn't realize at the time how hard it was for them.  It seemed so stable to me, relatively speaking, after having traveled so far and so often when I was a child.

The years passed, and we seemed unable to "get it together," either organizationally or financially. And eventually, I became severely depressed.  Well, to be honest, I might have always been depressed. It's a little hard to tell.  Let's say, then, that eventually, we recognized that I was depressed.  The isolation was brutal.  I was a born blue-stater in the area of Louisiana where David Duke, former grand dragon of the KKK, had swept the gubernatorial elections, a Unitarian Universalist type in the midst of Christians so fundamentalist that they shunned the "too-worldy" Pentacostals, and a "Yankee bitch" who had stolen the native son away from his "true love" (they had broken up years before).

Around 1990, we began to suspect that our oldest son, Christopher, had some sort of learning disability.  He had an awful time in school, along with severe dysgraphia.  Every evening, I sat with him while we tried to pull the answers out of him and onto the paper that he needed for his day's homework. We knew Chris was a clever boy, but he seemed completely unable to function in school, and it seemed that no one knew why.

We began to hear a little about Attention Deficit Disorder, and my little brother gave me one of his old computers and we found our way onto the Internet, no mean feat in southeastern Lousiana in 1993!

In researching ADHD online, I found a "listserve" for adults with Attention Deficit Disorder.  I thought it made more sense to learn what it was like to have ADD from people who had it; I had already had enough of parents at C.H.A.D.D. meetings who seemed to just get together monthly for cookies and coffee and whining about "what are we going to do with little Bubba?"  So, I signed up for this listserve and within days I was engulfed in an emotional turmoil that I could not escape. 

Who were these people who were living my life??? I had spent my whole life being "different" from everyone around me, and here were people just like me!  They thought like me.  Nobody thinks like me!  And they screwed up their lives like me and wondered what happened afterwards.  They seemed to have the same issues as me, and they seemed to have them for the same reasons.

Off I traipsed to the local mental health professional, who diagnosed me pretty quickly with ADD-I (that's ADD, primarily Inattentive for anyone who might not know).  Oh, with small motor hyperactivity.  Which is fidgeting and being a motor-mouth. Which is definitely me.  He began my treatment with Ritalin, and the world began to open to me in a wonderful and horrible way.

Being diagnosed with ADD was the beginning of a process that I'm not sure is finished yet.  There are stages, much like the stages of grief.  First, there's denial.  "There's not a damned thing wrong with MY brain!" Then there was ferocious anger and a feeling of being cheated. "Why didn't they know?  It's not fair!  They were my parents, my teachers; it was their job to help me!"

It's been so long now, I can't remember if there was a stage of "bargaining" or if there was, how it played out.  I remember the denial, and I remember the anger.  And then I remember the depression.  "I'm broken, faulty.  Worthless.  Stupid.  BROKEN!"

Then came acceptance, of a sort, and a kind of relief.  If it was really this ADD-thing, then it wasn't me.  It's not all my fault.  Mom was wrong all those years when she said, "I've always known you were going to have a lot of trouble, because highly intelligent people don't have any common sense."

In 1994, a crisis about which I am still really not ready to talk (and which I am forced, grudgingly, to admit was as much my fault as anyone else's) arose, and I blew.  Ever seen the Disney film, Fantasia?  There's this scene where a witch or evil queen or something comes up out of a volcano; she gets bigger and bigger and scarier and scarier as she rises out of the mountaintop.  That was me.  I announced in no uncertain terms that I and my children were going to get "north of the Mason-Dixon line" and Hubby could come if he wanted, or we could walk.  Didn't matter to me.

No one was going to keep me in a little box any longer.  I was getting out, you hear me?  We moved to Columbus, Ohio, where I got a job as a customer service agent for CompuServe and was considering moving over to technical support when AOL bought them and it all went "down the drain." Spent a couple of years working for a large insurance company headquartered in Columbus.  Man, talk about boring!  Don't let anyone tell you there are people who go into insurance on purpose. There aren't.  They just end up there and then don't have the energy or ambition to get out.

After a house fire set by an occupant in the other half of our duplex, which we were on the verge of buying, we ended up moving in with Stephanie for several months.  The depression had gotten so bad at that point I couldn't even make it through a phone interview. I would just tell you how pathetic I was.  It was really sad. My friends on the ADDult listserve still hung in there with me, and several of them continued to coax me out to the west coast, telling me that's where I wanted to be if I wanted to work in high-tech.  One online friend in particular, Keith, just would not let it go. "Come to the Silicon Valley," he coaxed.

So, off we went to San Jose, California.  This was autumn of 1999, by the way.  I got there just in time to see Mindspring merge with someone-or-other (Netcom, maybe?) and move their customer service to Timbuctu or its equivalent.

Here's your unsolicited advice for today:  Always research cost of living for the area you're moving to before you decide to go, much less before you move there!  We spent three months in a shelter for homeless families before we were able to move into a tiny little house for which we paid way too much in monthly rent.

But I got my job at McAfee.com, a spin-off of Network Associates, the parent company that made the disk-based version of VirusScan. In mid-2002, Network Associates bought back the dotcom baby in a widely publicized takeover. Surprisingly, they offered the customer service employees a chance to keep their jobs, keep their California salaries and move, on the company's dime, to the Dallas, TX area.  That took about 5 minutes to reason out.  Hmmm.  Stay here and pay nearly $2000 per month for a 920 square foot house in which the entire plumbing system was an afterthought, in an economic climate where folks with Masters degress were fighting over $12/hr jobs, or take them up on their offer? To Texas we went.

Interesting side note:  the house in San Jose was the first place we ever stayed for three whole years in a row.  Shortly before we moved to TX, I was looking around and wondering, where in the heck did all this stuff come from?  The benefit of moving every couple of years to an ADD-type is the forced de-junking that occurs when you move.

We've been here in Texas since November, 2002, and I spent most of that time investing practically my entire sense of self in my position at McAfee.  But gradually, as time passed and certain issues in the corporate culture there never changed, I began to believe that this was no way to spend a life.  That damned place took up my every waking minute, just about, and it just wasn't satisfying to do it that way any more.  Add in a passive-aggressive evil boss without an iota of ethical sense and her evil minion with even less, and eventually it wasn't even worth it to hang around for another two years to get the payout from about $50K worth of stock the president and one of the VP's had arranged for me to receive.  Another little while and it was no longer worth it to stay for one year to get half of it.  A week after that, it was no longer worth it to try to stay until the end of the quarter just to get one more quarterly bonus.  I gave them three weeks notice and then really only stayed two and a half.

Was that an ADD-thing to do?  Yeah, it was.  Was it the smart thing to do?  Probably not.  Was it absolutely necessary to retain any shred of my mental health?  You bet!

 So.  Here I am.  I'm once again reevaluating who I really am and what I want to achieve in my life.  (Not sure that "achieve" is even the right word, but it will have to do for now because I'm tired of writing this particular piece at this particular moment.)

I'm leaning strongly toward the notion that "ADD" is not really a disorder; it's just the way I am. And if that's true, then the right thing for me to do is something that fits with what I am.  Forget money.  Well, no, don't completely forget money.  There's that living-under-a-bridge thing, which I still don't want to do. But doggoneit, there are more important things in my life than making a pile of money.  If there weren't, I would have done it by now.  Right now, I'd rather just make some jewelry and help hubby with his art and write some stuff and have more chances to talk to my children and my grandchildren and see if I can figure out a way just to make enough money to be unafraid of the living-under-a-bridge thing in my old age.  Assuming I can make it to "old age."

That's me, and that's more or less how I got "here."  How about you?  Tell me your story.