ADHD! Dyslexia! Anorexia, forsooth! I’m a fraud, trying to steal the sympathy and support that belong to others, people who have earned it with far greater sufferings and misfortunes than mine. I am undermining the validity of their experiences by equating it with my own pathetic complaints.

So is it all a nothing?

But, fuck it, why shouldn’t I make these claims? Everyone else’s interior existence is unknowable. If these conditions exist at all, and it would be unfair to all those other sufferers to say they don’t, if I exhibit the characteristics, why should I not have them? At least mildly. Isn’t this the point of the Turing test?[1]

All these experiences share a hint of agitation. I’m just a tiny bit more edgy, more obsessive, than the situation requires. I’m clearly not bi-polar, but woven into the fabric of my consciousness is a sense of urgency and anxiety. It’s not the dominant experience. It simply accompanies all other states of mind, adds a texture, a mild flavour, and is unwarranted.

I’ve always lacked a calm breadth of vision, a sense of the wider landscape and my place in it. I think I’ve said before how it’s all close quarters stuff for me, a confused melee of the immediate. My head feels stuffed with bits and pieces. I always have an inane fragment of a song, or a random phrase, going frantically around and around in my head. A sign of ADHD? Or is it just the caffeine? Or is sensitivity to caffeine a symptom of ADHD? Or is this just how thought works?

Is there a touch of mania in my need to be constantly occupied, in having quite such a fear of being idle? At university, my obsessive love of Lulu pre-occupied every waking moment, filled my life with meaning and purpose[2]. There was no time or room for ennui, the terrible pointlessness of living. It certainly fits Carrie Arnold’s definition of “obsessionality”, “a pattern of thinking, in which someone focuses a lot on a particular subject or detail.”[3] This is also a benefit of being anorexic. When your mind is completely taken up by hunger and food and exercise and getting to the next meal, you are always looking down at the road immediately ahead. You can’t lift your eyes to the vast and pitiless universe. Ms Arnold quotes Steven Tsao: “With Anorexia, this obsessionality could be something they think a lot about, but they don’t actually mind thinking a lot about.” He paraphrases his patients’ comments as “if I don’t spend my day thinking about food, what else do I do with myself?”[4] (First World Problems?)

And it’s true of my desire to write. Ever since I first decided that I was going to be a writer, I’ve had something to aim at, something I should be doing whenever I find myself at a loss: sitting on a beach in Norfolk, while children dig pointless holes; crabbing[5]. The brilliance about the writing obsession is that, as I can never concentrate, as I never get anything finished, I never have to deal with the dreadful anti-climax that (apparently) follows the completion of a project. I always, always, have something I should be getting on with, any time I have an idle moment.

That’s why I don’t like going on holiday or reading books that are simply diverting and enjoyable: this frustrated, unfocussed energy threatens to convert itself into the most poisonous soul-destroying boredom. “What’s the point in this? I need to be doing something useful”, I’m always whining, much to everybody’s annoyance.

But is this something everyone feels? Am I just weaker and less empathetic than they are, indulging my stupid self?

• Footnotes:

[1] Turing’s thought experiment, as I’m sure you know, concluded that once a computer’s responses to the world became indistinguishable to a human’s, we would have to assume they’d achieved sentience.

[2] I say again, Poor Lulu! She showed saintly tolerance. How could I have been so blind to the imposition I was putting her under? Or was it a sort of passive-aggressive revenge?

[3] Carrie Arnold, 2013, Decoding Anorexia, Hove: Routledge, p65

[4] ibid

[5] What on earth is the point of crabbing? Has any human activity been more perfectly designed to foster a sense of despair?

So, what do you think?

The truth of all this is compromised by a very strong Confirmation Bias. I’m cherry-picking the best evidence to support Jamie’s theory that I might have mild ADHD. I guess I want to construct an image of myself as a poor afflicted soul who can’t be blamed for ruining everything or failing to achieve. I’m presenting this stuff to you so you’ll say, “Don’t worry Xan, you really are a gibbering fuckwit” and I’ll say, “oh thank God! For a moment, I thought you were going to tell me I was completely normal and perfectly capable of a happy and fulfilling existence!”[1]

In the process, I’m discarding great volumes of ordinary behaviour. But the difference between a normal, functioning person and a fuck-up is just the frequency with which they have the crazier experiences. Their lives aren’t qualitatively different – everyone has those moments.

Were I to describe the boring experiences that take up most of my time, I’d appear entirely stable and normal[2]. To edit my recollections so I appear to be constantly having hysterics is to create a false version of myself.

Even at your edgiest, it’s difficult to pinpoint when your behaviour, and intensity of experience, reaches an acceptable level of unacceptability, because the degree to which you have these feelings is influenced by all the other factors in your mind – how calm you were going into this situation, what problems and pressures you have in your life at that time; how much sleep you’ve had. And the same goes for the people you’re comparing yourself to. They also approach or retreat from this state of agitation, depending on the underlying pressures in their lives.

At what point can you say you have a diagnosable problem?

• Footnotes:

[1] Because, of course, that would make everything ENTIRELY MY FAULT. I’d messed up my life out of pure, satanic perversity, because I was EVIL and wanted to hurt people.

[2] And you’d be disappointed. Admit it.

At work, impatience is translated into literal clock-watching. I check the time every 10 minutes, willing the period to end. I’m a work-shy little bastard, but I don’t lack commitment, exactly. I’m just appalled by the idea of being stuck in the same activity or place for a whole hour. Even outside work, as I embark on any task, I immediately hanker for it to end. My aim in doing it is to enjoy the relief and release of completing it. Or shelving it for a while. Evenings, when I down tools, are luxurious.

At Ascot house, I sometimes had to prepare my lunch under supervision, just before our music group. I loved music group, but it was exhausting for the anorexic brain. I found I’d deliberately linger in the kitchen, doing other people’s washing up, so that I’d shorten the time I had to be in class.

Yet despite, or possibly because of, this, I am driven by a need to be constantly busy, constantly occupied: writing, or running, or cooking or doing the tedious housework. I’m trying to resist or manage my laziness.

The strange chemistry of these two states means I can’t stick at tasks. I get desperately fidgety. Even when I’m writing, I have to get up and pace around. I’ll write for 10 minutes, then spring up and half empty the dishwasher, then I’ll be driven back to the table because I really must get on, and I’ll look at my computer screen for 10 more minutes, then, thinking “I’m not getting anywhere”, I’ll lurch up and run on the spot for 100 paces…

Even if I can keep myself in my chair, I’ll jump between jobs all the time. I’ll have 3 separate documents open, perhaps my diary, this blog and, say, a poem or a page of ideas, and I’ll skip between one and the next, writing as little as one or two sentences on each, sometimes just reading over what I’ve written, stopping to read a couple of paragraphs of a newspaper article or a book, or try to complete a crossword clue, before returning to my work. No wonder my writing style is so fragmentary!

And it’s not just work. I am simultaneously watching 10 documentaries and three films on Netflix, 4 films on Amazon, and Mrs America and A Suitable Boy on BBC iplayer. Again, I’ll watch a few minutes, then worry it’s not the best use of my time and will jump to something else.

This must be linked to how I interact with other people. I can’t maintain conversations, especially if they are going well. I can’t concentrate on them, or on my interlocutor, for very long, which will understandably offend them, so I always abruptly terminate our talks before they can go wrong and people start to hate me.

I used to be a terrible foot-jiggler, but anorexia scoured that out of me. When I went into Ascot House and they fed me up, I started again. Jo came to see me, distressed by the whole situation and wanting to talk about it. She told me off for jiggling my foot. “It makes it seem like you don’t want to talk to me, like you’re eager to be off”, she said.

I said, “No, no, of course not!” but I was thinking,

“Yes. Yes, it’s true. It’s always been true…”

There are one or two last behaviours that might suggest a slight Attention Deficit cast of mind.

For example, I’m horrifically impatience. I’m ok if I know how long there is to go[1], but I’m driven frantic by delayed trains, doctors’ waiting rooms, speeches, meetings and workshops, or waiting to take children home from clubs or parties.  Then, every moment contains the possibility of an end to the torment but doesn’t, and this state could continue indefinitely. I’m going to have hysterics, I’m overwhelmed by claustrophobia; I’m panting with the horror of it. I’m going to puke. I think I might eat my own head. Once, during an interminable leaving speech, I actually burst into tears.[2]

I always have a book with me. A book is a charm that promises to ward off the storms of angst that gust up through my chest, into my throat, making me unable to breathe. It never works, though, because by then I’m too worked up to concentrate.

I remember, at Ascot House, morning meetings made me climb the walls. They could be done in 5 minutes, but, instead, they wandered on and on, with no guarantee of an ending. There was no need for any of the comments to be made – they were trivial and self-evident, yet I couldn’t leave and go and do something useful until they were finished. It was awful. I wished somebody would just shoot me.

I guess everybody hates waiting, but…

Actually, does everyone? Are we the same? How can I tell?

• footnotes:

[1] Those thin, constantly moving lines at Disneyland are a stroke of genius!

[2] I was very anorexic and needed to get home to eat my snack.

I’m most unhappy if somebody flatly contradicts something I know to be true. Reality quivers at the blow, because, If the fundamental principles of my understanding are false, I’m delusional, and I would not be mad.[1]

It’s commonly a disagreement over remembering events, though not always[2]. I understand that a memory is a thought you are having in the present. It is not a stored item; it is a neural circuit being re-used. And brain circuits don’t fire in isolation. They are part of a whole tangled, interconnected network, a glowing haze of electricity that envelopes your brain, each part feeding off and triggering the others, to create an aggregate identity.

Past events leave their legacy in the brain in patterns of synaptic connections, but memories are recreated every time you access them. And you alter them to make sense in the light of your current understanding: they are strands in that moment’s neural web.

So, perhaps you revise an experience to make it match those of your companions, or rationalise the number of people who were there, or add in something you learned later, or you merge two similar events. Memory is fictional, subjective, unreliable. I know this.

But it is one thing to understand it theoretically; it is another to be confronted by a blunt denial of what happened. Your memories make you who you are: “I know this. I was there. I saw it”: “I, I, I”. You are the person who was there under these circumstances. If they deny this, they are dismantling your identity. They are threatening to tear it apart, letting the darkness in.  Because if I’m wrong in what I remember, my life becomes a fiction.

And my interlocutor becomes forbiddingly unknowable[3]: Who are they? How can they sustain and inhabit this alien interior world and still be a person like me? How can we empathise with and understand each other? In one rebuttal, someone I knew is lost to me.

Obviously, I can’t leave the contradiction unresolved, and it needs to be resolved in my favour. I need to hammer away at them until they adopt my version, admit I’m right. It’s an attempt to salvage our connection; it’s a matter of survival.

Anorexia makes this worse. Your thinking becomes even more rigid, but you also become far more anxious. You automatically struggle against any suggestions from other people. The wilful, unpredictability of other, autonomous minds is terribly threatening. They’re like bulls in the china shop of your delicate personal ontology[4]. You can’t control them and so they could destroy everything.

No wonder we become dishevelled, feral little creatures pushing people away with flailing arms, shouting “No No No”. It’s an alarm call, a call to arms, a resistance.

• Footnotes:

[1] “Oh let me not be mad , not mad, Sweet Heaven!

Keep me in temper; I would not be mad” – King Lear, I.5, 40-1

[2] With my kids, it’s just defiance of my nagging, rather than a different reality, but it still rattles me. I’ll say, “Do you have to stand right in my way when I’m trying to drain the peas?!”

Danny will say, “I’m NOT standing in your way!”

I’ll say, “What?! I’m trying to get to the sink and you’re standing between me and the sink. How is that not standing in my way. It’s a statement of fact!”

Danny will stoutly maintain, “Dad, I am NOT standing in your way!”

Jo will say, “don’t engage with it.” It’ll be unclear if she’s addressing Danny or me.

[3] I feel the same way about anti-vaccers, conspiracy theorists, religious fundamentalists, Trump supporters and people who think they can cure cancer by changing their diet. I don’t feel this way about Conservatives, Brexiteers, Soviet/ Russian apologists or those who have a sneaking sympathy for the Cambridge spies. I don’t agree with them, but I think I get where they’re coming from, misguided though they are.

[4] Epistemology?

As a young man, I liked pitting my wits against those of my peers. Or I thought I did. I was both self-obsessed and blind to my own psychology.

In truth, I found it mildly distressing and distancing. I’d have been happier and more secure in my friendships if I hadn’t argued. When people are annoyed with you, they dislike you.

I just assumed humans were argumentative creatures, until Jamie brought up the topic of ADHD. Then I began to wonder if it was more pathological behaviour than a natural response to individual situations. Perhaps it was just me. But, if so, why? Was it caused by that ill-defined quality I’ve been calling impulsiveness: the unfocused, distractible brain?

I’m impulsively free with my opinions, it’s true, but uncomfortable if people disagree with me. I’ll make some outrageously provocative statement then gasp in horror if someone takes issue with it. I’m not sure my relationships are robust enough to absorb the damage.

Yet If we have to break off I feel like I’m suffocating. It feels unjust, unnatural, not right for the conversation to remain incomplete. I have a compulsive need for intellectual resolution as well as reconciliation. And I’d like to be right, please, because being wrong is a sign of your alienation. You didn’t understand life. Your mental landscape was a fiction, which makes you more unreal. And that sounds like anxiety.

So even superficial matters of personal preference became contentious and laboured. Music, books, films, art: no one was enjoying themselves, but the only way out seemed to be to plod through the debate. I’m boring.

Like you hadn’t noticed.

I’ve adopted the word “impulsiveness”, to describe a quality I discern in my own brain activity – a sort of undirected neural charge that seems to leak out of its proper channels and cause interference. It seems to fill my head with a hiss that degrades my clarity of thought. It’s not the right word but at least it gives the sense of an interior, intangible property of mind that has real-world consequences[1].

I employ the term to describe various bits of my psycho-pathology, why, for example, before I became ill, I couldn’t walk away from any discussion. Everything had to be explored and developed to its bitter end. “Bitter” is the significant word: as a student, enlivening political debates would be corrupted by this urge. They’d degenerate into exasperated arguments, become nastier and more personal[2], as all participants refused to compromise, agree to differ, or even change the subject, even though we were all completely sick of it.

I was the worst. I wasn’t a megalomaniac: I didn’t need to win so I could glory in my triumph and superiority. I just became stuck on developing my line of argument until it was undeniably logically correct and thus undeniably convincing. I was trying to prove to myself that I had rational intelligence. I was obsessive not domineering. The ideas of logic and reason were reassuring in their neatness and order. They promised control over your world and thus safety. It’s a pity that they are both illusions.

As a teenager, this inability to let things drop led to some furious rows with my parents. If I was warned off saying something, if it would be a really bad idea, then I felt an urgent need to say it. With strangers, cowardice usually held me back, but I guess I felt safe with the Old Pair.

It was probably just truculence, combined with an anxious lack of trust in myself. I’m no different to anybody else in this respect. Nobody likes being pushed around, and everybody worries that they’re going to shout “BUM” at a funeral, or jump off a cliff, for no reason. Those are just your typical intrusive thoughts.

I thought of it as standing up for my rights. I wouldn’t back down until I was hit[3]. That seemed to mark a natural end, a resolution, because I’d refused to be intimidated by the threat of violence. Once I’d been hit, Honour was satisfied. I had successfully resisted the threat, so there wasn’t any need to continue.

A few years ago, my dad said, “You were a strange teenager. You just wouldn’t stop. It was almost like you wanted to be hit. It was like you intentionally provoked us until we hit you and then it all blew over.” I was horrified. I’d been signalling my heroic defiance exclusively for them, yet, for years, my parents had misunderstood my gestures as some weird, masochistic abnormality, my victories as a sort of necessary quelling.

• Footnotes:

[1] And, who knows? It may have an actual electrical signature, synaptically, which would make it more real.

[2] Argumentum ad hominem

[3] They were excellent parents, but this was the 1980s. Everybody got smacked. I wasn’t physically or psychologically damaged, because I knew my parents loved me and would never take it too far. I appreciate that this was not the case for many others.

So I was sceptical of the ADHD suggestion, but still sifted eagerly through my life, looking for signs of scattiness. I registered, hopefully, how distracted I got by the TV at Ascot house, which, by Diktat of the management, must be kept on at all times.[1]

TV thought-proofs my brain, jostling out all ideas with its hyperactive chatter, making them seem distant and unreal. Perhaps I lack the ability to focus or to filter out incoming sensory data or at least to prioritise one sort of brain activity over an another [2]. Is it a deficit I was born with, or has starvation compromised my pre-frontal cortex (which governs concentration)?[3] Or does TV do this to everybody?

I knew I talked too much. That was why I’d starved myself silent. Unsure of the right expression, I’d repeat and repeat myself. I hated my gabbling word-hysteria, which left me dry-throated, headachy and embarrassed; bored, because I’d heard my own anecdotes so many times before; frustrated, because all I had to offer was my own experience, my own opinion, and I offered it, and this was the result: in trying to reach out to another person I’d completely failed to connect and was just as isolated as ever. But was I talkative to an abnormal degree? Or not?

And what about impulsiveness? am I impulsive? If so, ADHD could be the cause of such sudden lapses of will-power. It would excuse my moral weakness. Impulsiveness could be a catch-all term, the fuel that drives my conversational completism, my digressiveness, my interruptions and over-talking, my badgering and bullying, my (slightly) (obsessively) compulsive refusal to let things lie; my over-thinking; my fussy over-writing.

Is impulsiveness the reason I had to be one of the main contributors to every therapy session? I told myself I was being kind to the person who was running it; I wanted everything to go well, but I was downcast if somebody else came to the rescue. It needed to be me. Was this solipsism? And was it obviously so? Did I sound like a twat, or stupid or critical or attention-seeking?

• Footnotes

[1] What is the logic for that?

[2] See Hannah Critchlow, 2018, Consciousness: A Ladybird Expert Book, London: Penguin, p30

[3] Although mental functions seem to be governed by a complex alliance of different neural structures, that stretch throughout the brain. See Carrie Arnold, 2013 Decoding Anorexia, Hove: Routledge, pp22-27

At Ascot House, Jamie’s suggestion that I might have ADD started a mad scramble through my behaviours looking for things that could simultaneously prove the suggestion true, and that would be excused by the suggestion.

A quick glance at the NHS website turns up LOTS of interesting, possibly self-validating, information. Here is the full list of “Symptoms in Adults”:

• carelessness and lack of attention to detail (Yes, that’s me)
• continually starting new tasks before finishing old ones (Oh my God, Yes! All the time!)
• poor organisational skills (Absa-bloody-lutely!)
• inability to focus or prioritise (Yes!)
• continually losing or misplacing things (Hmm…I guess so, but who doesn’t?…)
• forgetfulness (My memory is non-existent. It’s one of the main reasons why I feel so cast adrift in the world.)
• restlessness and edginess (Yes, a bit, and much worse when I was younger.)
• difficulty keeping quiet, and speaking out of turn (Yes, definitely.)
• blurting out responses and often interrupting others (Yes.)
• mood swings, irritability and a quick temper (Not the mood swings, really, but I’m highly irritable and occasionally quick-tempered. But, again, who isn’t?)
• inability to deal with stress (Oh, yes, indeed!)
• extreme impatience (Yup.)
• taking risks in activities, often with little or no regard for personal safety or the safety of others – for example, driving dangerously (This one is more complicated. I’m probably kind of anxious and risk-averse, but I also don’t think through the consequences of my actions.)

“Related Conditions” suggested include depression (perhaps, probably, maybe…), OCD (Hmm…again, maybe? Mildly?) and dyslexia (as previously discussed). Most importantly of all, though, “The behavioural problems associated with ADHD can also cause problems such as difficulties with relationships and social interaction”.

This is all brilliant stuff. I’m like the proverbial anorexic in a bakery: I want (and don’t want) everything, every symptom, every associated condition.

However, “In adults the symptoms of ADHD are more difficult to define…hyperactivity tends to decrease in adults, while inattentiveness tends to get worse…Adult symptoms of ADHD also tend to be far more subtle than childhood symptoms.”

ADHD is a pathology: it exists in the manifestation of its symptoms, rather than being a definable condition with symptoms, like cancer or heart disease. These symptoms exist on a continuum with perfectly normal behaviours. If you can have the condition without strongly manifesting the characteristics of the condition, if a diagnosis is so easily purchased, you can have a character-altering affliction without really having it. Everything dissolves into a vague and uncertain mist.

This does nothing to allay my sense of anxiety and uncertainty, my sense of the insubstantiality of identity. How can I tell if I’m a charlatan? A fiction? How much reality can there be in the world?

And beyond this is the unknowability of other people, because I don’t know if the way my brain works is the same as the way yours does. I don’t know if my thought structures are normal or abnormal.

I don’t feel so bad about laying off to my family.[1] I’m forced to have meals with them so Jo can check what I’m eating. I like to make conversation by regaling them with some interesting story I’ve read in the newspaper or a book. They are safely neutral topics.

Meggie won’t have any of it.[2]  As I start, she’ll cut in and say, “I don’t want this. I don’t want one of your stories. I want talking – conversation. Talking is good.” Of course, I can see the justice in this comment, but I still find it hurtful. I subside back into my shell muttering, “But that’s what I do; that’s what I am.”

• Footnotes:

[1] Family (noun, count.): a group of people you can constantly bore, irritate and be nasty to, without being abandoned; a connection you can’t quite break, no matter how much you twist it; a bunch of people you can’t get rid of.

[2] Children (noun, pl.): family members with the right to be rude, insulting and neglectful.