It doesn’t help that I crave conversational completeness; I can’t abandon a topic until it’s been fully developed, until all has been said (largely by me), a thorough working through of my theory. (Look at these blog posts!) I need to reach a satisfying conclusion, for some reason, and I feel a sensation of frustration, a frantic anxiety, if the conversation ends before that point. Which it always does.

Often, half way through a diatribe, having pursued every digression and bored my poor companion almost to death, I’ll lose my place, forget why I was saying all this. Then I’ll feel a sensation akin to desolation, as if my whole identity had gone slack, lost coherence, as if I exist, properly, only in the activity of the telling, as if, at rest, I’d disappear.[1]

Realising what I’ve done, then, I’ll try to return to my companion’s subject, give them the chance to voice their ideas.  But the moment has passed; they couldn’t be bothered to talk about it anymore: the laboured extension of the topic is incongruous. If I know then quite well, I’ll switch abruptly to firing clumsy questions at them. This doesn’t work either. I’m still setting the agenda. I’m so anxious to involve them that I’m not engaging with their answers properly. I’m badgering them. It’s become an interrogation.

Anyway, asking people direct questions makes me feel shy and embarrassed. It doesn’t seem my place to pry: perhaps I’ll be intrusive and offend them. I want people to like me. I’m venturing out of a safe harbour into a tempest-torn open ocean.

So, you see, I hop from one topic to another, trying to complete them all, pecking at them, like a foolish blackbird on a lawn. I bore people.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to attribute all this to a medically sanctioned condition, rather than to moral weakness?

Footnotes:

[1] I also feel I owe it to my interlocutor (my listener!) because, if there’s no point, no punchline, why have they been putting up with my deluge of shite?

 

So now I’m searching every aspect of my personality for evidence of ADD. How about this one?

When I developed an eating disorder, I became very anti-social. It was an enormous relief, which surprised me, given how highly I prize friendship. It was a return to nature, a rewilding, because I’ve always been rubbish at relationships. I didn’t realise this: I wasn’t aware that there were alternative ways of being and I thought everyone experienced things as I did.

Thinking about it, I’ve always floundered across those dance floors, making heavy weather of the simplest interactions, while (some) other dancers move around me with ease and grace. (Though, God knows, there are a lot of flat-footed bastards out there.)

Every conversation is a nightmare of frantic improvisation. I’m out of my depth and comfort zone, so I gabble. I fill the space between us with words, because I want to relate to people, and that’s how it’s done: by talking, right?

Any time somebody volunteers some information about themselves, I try to show interest and engagement by responding. I talk. I take over the conversation. I witter on until their attention wanders. I’m doing it because I’m trying to connect. I’m trying to talk my way into a connection, because all I can offer is my words.

It has the opposite effect.

This might be a link to attention deficit disordered behaviours: if I was calm and centred, I could foster some wonderful stories. As it is, I’m filled with an almost anguished pressure to speak. My unspoken words seem to be stifling me until I can get them out.  Then they smother everybody else’s. It’s impulsive.

For example, my next-door neighbour revealed that his family was Irish. His grandfather had Anglicised his surname to avoid prejudice when he’d first arrived in Britain to work in armament factories in the Second World War. I didn’t coax the details out – did he feel Irish? What did he think was the cause of his grandad’s sense of persecution? Instead, I matched it with a similar story about one of Jo’s friends.[1] Both are excellent stories, but I’d taken over, and couldn’t get back to next-door’s one. We’d only passed on the street. It was time to go.

I have a new friend at work. He arrived in Britain as an asylum-seeking child. He showed me a poem he’d been given by a well-meaning colleague. It was clever piece of writing which, read forwards, expressed a fear and suspicion of immigrants, but read from bottom to top explained the importance of embracing people who come to you in need. My friend said it was good, but, as an asylum seeker himself, he felt it was a little obvious, a little Anglo-centric, perhaps. He wondered if he was being reduced to a type, rather than being regarded as an individual.

Instead of encouraging him to explore this idea, I rushed in to respond supportively. I said, “I see what you mean. We’ve all heard these sentiments before, haven’t we? The poet knows it’s the pious position to take and bla bla bla and bleurgh, and on and on” until I noticed that his eyes had glazed over. Then I tried to haul on the reins and, swerving violently back towards him, I said “so, is that what you found?” but at that point all there was left for him to say was, “Yeah, I guess…”

Today he told me he was reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I told him I hadn’t read it, but I had read The Trial. Then I told him a lot of stuff about The Trial. That was effectively the end of the conversation. I didn’t learn much about Metamorphosis, or my friend’s thoughts on it, other than that he liked the simplicity of the prose.

• Footnotes:

[1] He’d started going out with a Jewish girl at university, at which point his grandfather told him that his whole paternal family was Ashkenazi German Jewish. They’d escaped the Holocaust and had tried to totally obliterate their Jewish heritage in case it happened again!

I needed a firm, medical diagnosis if I was going to feel comfortable with my new ADD identity. I wasn’t going to get it, but I could search out corroborating evidence for myself:

1. I can’t concentrate on tasks for more than about 10 minutes. Then I have to do a burst of something different. This has been exaggerated by anorexia, because I can’t simply change activity, I need to leap up and burn off calories.
2. When I am at my computer, I’ll have 3 separate documents open and will flick       between them, often mid-sentence, often to add a single phrase that’s occurred to me while doing something completely different. I do this both at work and when writing at home, on this blog, for example.
3. Half way through any book, no matter how light and enjoyable, I start thinking, “Oh god! Please can it end, now!” It’s not because it’s boring, but some force pushes me away. I crave a neat conclusion, a goal achieved, which is why I don’t like books that just entertain. They’ve got to be illuminating, instructive, profound.
4. This isn’t helped by my inability to concentrate. Any distraction at all is instantly taken up as the main topic for thought, lightly dusted by the book’s words. I read and read and read the same words over and over again, until they are nothing but gibbering sounds.
5. When I am particularly relishing an author’s writing, I have to break off, before I get bored, before that whole sustaining illusion of edifying meaning is punctured  and deflates into pointlessness. Then I can savour it, enjoy its after-glow, for a while.
6. I’m always reading 3 or 4 books at the same time, usually a novel, a non-fiction book, a history book, a literary theory/ analysis book, a poetry book. I’ll read a couple of pages or a couple of paragraphs and then switch to another.
7. I can’t watch a whole film in one go, either, even if it’s brilliant and illuminating. I’m driven away from it after about 20 minutes by the urge to “Do something useful” Going to the cinema is purgatory: manacled to my seat I moan and mumble to myself like some wasted old man in rags, with a beard to his feet, who’s been locked in a dungeon for 40 years.
8. As with books, I always have at least 6 Netflix or BBC documentaries on the go simultaneously. I flick between them every twenty minutes or so, which means I have to watch them on my own.
9. I’ve seen great plays and thrilled at their immediacy and inventiveness, while simultaneously just wishing they were over. If Jo pins me down for a twenty minute “Family time” episode of Derry Girls or Father Ted, a game of cards, a family film, I squirm with the need to escape.
10. I hate box sets and series where the story goes on and on and on without ever reaching the promised resolution, the comfort of a narrative structure. It feels like waiting for a bus that never comes, my idea of Hell – I think I might eat myself with the screaming, suffocating frustration of it.
11. I can no longer watch Dr Who or the new Star Wars movies, both of which I used to love, because there is now too much material to get my head around. It’s formless.
12. I loathe soap operas for the same reason, but also because they commit such violence on character. They’re always turning mild, henpecked husbands into monstrous crack-addicts, just to serve their clumsy attempts at melodrama. I find that existentially threatening. It gives them the quality of nightmares, where things can morph horrifyingly into other things.[1]

Is this desire for structure, control and order a response to anxiety? Is it normal behaviour? I know all such conditions exist on the ends of spectrums (spectra?), but am I pathologising something completely ordinary to excuse my pathetic self-pitying fuckwittery?

• Footnotes

[1] No doubt, if you challenged the script team, they’d tell you, wisely, that humans are inconsistent, to which you could reply, “Yes, but fiction is supposed to rescue us from that, you bastards! Fiction gives reassuring meaning and structure to the world!”

Jamie, the therapist at Ascot House (the eating disorders clinic), wondered if I might have a mild form of ADHD or ADD, rather than (or in addition to) mild dyslexia! It sounds laughable, at first. I work with ADHD kids. They jitter around, flaring skittish energy; babbling, climbing the walls: I’m not like that at all.

But, asked Jamie, was this because I’d starved myself into an approximate stillness?

Hmmm…I was still doubtful. Jamie gave me a questionnaire of, maybe, 15 questions, and I scored in the ADHD band in all but 3 of them. Wow. It made me weepy, for some reason. Relief? I know self-diagnosis is incredibly unreliable, but this result brought up the possibility that I struggle valiantly and determinedly to overcome difficulties that others don’t have to contend with. An eating disorders clinic is a place of shame, but at least reading, writing, concentrating may genuinely be more difficult for me. That would mean I’d been battling all my life, which would be pretty impressive, right? It would also explain why I have always irritated and exasperated people. The ADHD kids at a school are always the most punch-able.

It’s a liberating idea, though bewildering: a small paradigm shift. The mental disruption caused by ADHD seems a cleaner, truer explanation for my partial problems with words and concentration than dyslexia. I always felt like a fraud claiming to have that, given how disadvantaged my poor students are with the condition.

I guess I could have both, given my problems with time, and so on. I could only justify the diagnosis if I accepted that it was one part of a complex of mild symptoms of an underlying, inoffensive psychological construction. My ADHD students are often desperate to fit in, but their condition makes them just a little too weird to get close to other students. Their inability to concentrate also undermines their ability to learn and achieve at school. They are lonely, isolated, frustrated and humiliated. It would be monstrous to claim the empathy, support and understanding that they deserve.

Still, it’s an attractive thought that I keep coming back to. ADHD would also provide me with an excuse for being unable to maintain focus on other people, despite being so interested in them: it’s not monstrous selfishness, it’s a tragic ailment I battle with, heroically! It would excuse my horrible, endless, dominating talking!

Of course, obviously, down in deep foundations of myself, I don’t believe a word of it. A miasma of disbelief floats always through the fungal, bricked up basements, the dank and festering cellars of my most fundamental thinking.

How to account for my difficulty in reading? “Difficult” is a relative, comparative term, and reading, unlike spoken communication, is a lonely, interior road. How can you tell how other people process written symbols?

Growing up, I assumed everybody’s experience was the same as mine[1]. Reading is always a laborious activity. And everybody sings their way through the alphabet to find their place in a list, right? If I realised I was performing less well than other people, I probably assumed it was a moral failing, a lack of application but I’d catch up at some point. I didn’t think about it, much.

More recently, I’ve realised that isn’t quite true. I read very late. I experience trouble understanding that at least some other people don’t experience. I know lots of people who can read with ease but don’t.

The working assumption is now that I have a mild form of dyslexia. Jo swears by it, because it helps her explain some of my exasperating behaviours and reassures me that I’m not “putting it on”[2]. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence, and there’s clearly something, going on, or I’d read more swiftly and would experience less resistance to understanding.

I’ve been assessed a few times, but the tests have been inconclusive. My word recognition seems fine, and my spelling is above average. There’s a theory that mildly dyslexic adults have internalised their coping strategies so thoroughly and effectively that they fool the tests (and themselves), though. Or maybe skilful readers are just unusual.

I am quite willing to milk the partial diagnosis for attention or excuses, but I also secretly disdain it. Dyslexic, forsooth! I’m an English literature graduate and ex-English teacher! It’s just pretence, attention-seeking! I work with severely dyslexic children. The enormous obstacles, the enormous toil, they face every day put my little doubts to shame. I had one lad a few days ago, who, three times, spelt “Dangerous” DABOURNESS, and couldn’t identify it as an error.  Imagine how much hard work goes into even the simplest reading or writing tasks, for him, for more than a decade of full-time education. It is a testament to dyslexics’ strength and resilience that they don’t all give up completely and just refuse to get out of bed on school days.

Philip, my therapist, asks why I can’t allow myself to be (possibly) mildly dyslexic. Why does it matter that the children have a more acute form of it? He thinks this all goes back to my sense that I am somehow unreal, that my identity is insubstantial or fake.

• Footnotes

[1] I universalise all my cognitive experiences. I understand the autonomous self-hood of other people’s consciousness, but I have to fight my assumption that everyone apprehends the world just as I do. This isn’t megalomania or psychopathy or narcissism. It’s just that I know I am very unexceptional and so assume my mental constructions are very ordinary and very common.

[2] She likes to reassure me; I like to be reassured.

When I first read something, I’m left with a sense of blank incomprehension. I have no idea what the writer was on about. Yet if you asked me questions about it, I might get the answers right (if they, and the text, were simple and straightforward). When I talk about a book, the meanings can sometimes seem to fall into place. This is why I was able to teach English literature. Teaching enacted understanding[1]. It felt like I was blagging, making it all up, but what I made up often seemed to be true.  On good days, as I asserted my instantaneous judgements about Othello and Macbeth, they would be simultaneously dawning on me for the first time. I’d be thinking, “Oh my God! I think that might actually be true!” But, Jesus, did I feel like a charlatan[2], careering out of control, over the pedagogical landscape, only ever one step ahead of the students, verbiage spewing from my lips!

Some texts are easier than others. Anything with a narrative or characters is easier than raw, unrefined facts and concepts. Philosophical overviews of things, full of abstruse terms, are a foreign language to me, unless substantiated with concrete examples[3].

I also can’t follow recipes, invariably leaving out whole chunks of instructions because I simply don’t see them. Meals are always late and missing one umami-ish element. Even the simplest Instruction manuals are completely beyond me. They literally mean nothing. After reading all the instructions on how to connect up to the superfast fibre-optic broadband service, I still don’t know the first thing about connecting to the superfast fibre-optic broadband service.

Of course, doubt dismantles thought itself. Understanding, especially of difficult, conceptual stuff, relies on a sort of trust. If you question meanings, meanings slip from your grasp.

That’s another advantage of anorexia: When you are starving, you don’t have the energy to doubt fiercely, or resolve those doubts . Although you gently, anxiously, endlessly dither, in the end, you just have to tolerate being in two minds about things. In fact, duality of mind is our default setting, as I’ve said A MILLION TIMES before. (Sorry guys!)

Ironically, though, this leads me away from popular novels. The writers employ great intelligence and skill to make their books enjoyable to read, but they’re no more easy, for me, than any work of abstruse philosophy. I read a sentence and instantly doubt and review it and discover I’ve already forgotten the meaning of it. How is this different from philosophy? Both are so opaque that the provisional understanding I hoped for, that I hoped would sustain me until it all became clear at the end, turns out to be no more than an optimistic recognition that the words were in English and in recognisably grammatical/ syntactical sentences.

That’s why I’ve “read” Ulysses and Kierkegaard, recently (or, at least, my eyes have laborious scanned every sentence.) My sense of urgency, intensified by aging, insists on meaningful and edifying texts: if it’s not edifying, what’s the point? A little amusement? I haven’t got time for that! I even get impatient with Tintin! (I know!)[4]

• Footnotes

[1] I guess this is unsurprising. The art of analysis is the ability to break your engagement with a work into a series of manageable, answerable questions: “Is this writer using the sort of ordinary everyday language that I’d use in conversation? If not, in what ways is it different? Why might this be?” “what sort of mood does this speaker appear to be in? How can you tell?” From such humble beginnings spring all great penetrating and rigorously argued analyses.

[2] Still do!

[3] Although metaphors and similes are distracting. I start to think the metaphor is the subject, rather than an allegory of it. Reading that someone is going to vote for the American president again, because “You don’t change horses in the middle of the river”, I can’t get it out of my head that the American presidency has something to do with horses. (Maybe there’s a presidential ranch.) If you said this to me, I think I’d get it much more easily.

[4] Looking back, I always did as a child, too. I loved them and tried to dwell on every panel and each speech bubble, but I just couldn’t do it. I had to flick through.

I realise this blog has degenerated into a tedious mumble as I pursue various self-justifying fictions into my past. Forgive me. Everyone hopes there’s a dangerous alchemy of childhood experiences that explains why they are such a fuck up, right? There’s an alluring simplicity and neatness to that narrative, so, please grant me five more minutes on the philosophy and origins of boredom.

Could it be the result of some mild attention deficit disorder? My immediate response to this question is disbelief, to accuse myself of pretention. My default position is to assume the unreality of my inner states. And I’m certainly not manic. I’m gently, indolently jittery at worst, not a full-blown climber of walls.

But I ought to weigh up the evidence before I dismiss the idea completely.

Take, for example, my rubbish reading and concentration. I am the slowest reader of anyone I know who reads. I don’t seem to be able to screen out competing data, and I’m constantly losing focus, going back and back and back to the top of the page. With each repetition it makes less sense, not more, but I’m hoping to use the re-reading as a run up to the next bit, which, if I just keep going, will make more sense, overall, will build up to a general impression of sense.

Blocks of text, paragraphs, seem to have a surface tension that resists me. Every time I try to penetrate their depths, I get bounced back out again. I’m staring at black marks on paper. I can translate those marks into jabbering sounds but they’re just as meaningless, so I keep reading, scudding across the surface like a small boat in a slight breeze that’s barely troubling deep waters.

Or maybe a better image would be of somebody running across thin, cracking ice that covers a deep, cold lake of incomprehension, knowing that, if they slow down, they’ll fall through.

You can see the anxiety in that image, how closely it mirrors the impetus for my actual compulsive running, the sense that, if I stop moving, if I stop doing, I’ll simply evaporate – become as insubstantial as water vapour in hot sunlight, because my latent, resting selfhood is non-existent.

For example,

I spent whole family holidays in a state of excruciating boredom, desperately impatient to reach the end of each activity, keening for some as-yet un-realised future goal that would be more satisfying. At that age, you miss the point of the whole outing, which is, of course, to deliver memorable and edifying experiences, but more than this, to share the experience as a family, to enjoy being together. To relax.

I didn’t read well, so I was never going to be absorbed in guidebooks or in information cards. My parents were good at exposing us to culture and history, but perhaps we could have done with more discussion of it: placing of things in wider contexts, relating them to our own life experiences. For a voluble family, we were remarkably reticent.

Or maybe they tried and I just wasn’t interested, because I seem to remember a lot of wandering around gazing wordlessly at interesting artefacts, wondering how it was meaningful to travel somewhere simply to look at something. How was gazing at something a useful transaction?

So, every walk, every National Trust property was, in a quiet way, a horrifyingly unrewarding experience, momentarily alleviated by gaining a hilltop before the rest of the family, stopping for a ham roll, seeing the armoury: vanishingly brief moments of relief.

It was a gentle, manageable despair, but often so profound I would have classified it as an existential crisis, had I known the term.

My ennui could hit truly cosmic proportions. Don’t laugh at me! Half way through an activity, the thought would pop into my head, “what’s the point in this?” That thought would rapidly expand outward to encompass any answer I could give myself, no matter how comprehensive and outwardly convincing: “What’s the point in this hike?” To get some exercise to make yourself fitter and healthier; to experience a beautiful landscape; to spend time with your family. “what’s the point in making myself fitter and healthier…?” on and on it would accelerate, in all directions, like a sonic boom, enveloping everything around me – cows in the next field? “What’s the point in keeping cows?…” “but what’s the point in producing food, having a livelihood…?”  eating up everything in its path: cities, countries, continents, the whole planet itself, all human endeavour, love, culture, society, family, and on out into the universe until, in deep space, despair would reach its limit, hanging there in blackness among numberless, purposeless and hopelessly distant stars.

And then the feeling would vertiginously contract all the way back down to the tiny point of myself, because what was the point in even asking the question? This is where I found myself and there was nothing I could do about it. Except endure.

Strangely, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this to anyone else. I wasn’t a very reflective child and I didn’t dwell on things. I guess when you’re young you just accept that this is the way the world is and this is the way everyone experiences it. It probably is. All teenagers moan about how bored they are. All teenagers ask what the point is. It’s just hormones. Despair is a chemical, empty of meaning.

When I was forced to challenge my restrictive behaviours and EAT MORE, I used to compensate for the increase in calories by running even more, and this seemed to mitigate the threat and made me feel better. If I felt I’d over-indulged, I could run it off. I was constantly looking for opportunities. In any lull, or when I felt at a loss, I could occupy myself with a quick trot around the block. I’d extend my usual run with little detours and digressions. Plotted on a map, my route contained so many extra loops that it would have looked like some baroque, ornamental filigree.

My theory was that burning off the extra calories made the extra food bearable. If I didn’t tell myself that I could run it off, I wouldn’t eat it in the first place. Then, over time, my natural laziness would re-assert itself and the extra running would drop away.

It didn’t work out that way. At least, it hasn’t so far, and it’s years since I started. I’ve surprised myself by having far more determination than I realised, which, confusingly, is something to be proud of. And isn’t.

It’s hard to give up these reassuring demonstrations of strength, these reassuring demonstrations of quiet but extra-ordinary anguish, and subside back into being another ordinary, slightly sub-average schmuck.

 I could continue running because, for a long time, even after diagnosis, I was blind to the link between exercise and anorexia – how strong it was, how faithful the correlation. The discrepancy between my calorie intake and expenditure was mathematical and simple, and, for this reason, Abi had forbidden any of exercise at all. Still, food and diet seemed to be the focus. Running was an obstacle to recovery, rather than a cause of the problem.

So, the words went in, I acknowledged their truth, but they didn’t mean anything to me. Perhaps my own experiences lacked authenticity, and thus so did the deductions I could draw from them. I couldn’t take my own psychology seriously. My interior existence was unreal, insubstantial, unconvincing.

I guess it’s also because running was my daily habit since long before the apparent beginning of my illness, and so seemed unconnected to it. This begs the question, though, how deep do the roots of these conditions go?

I reached a point when I suddenly started to look thin. Veins had crept, unnoticed, across my fore-arms, like fat blue worms. The fine, youthful bone structure of my face, which had reappeared for a season, and which I was secretly proud of, was replaced by a slack-cheeked, wasted look. The taught line of jaw and throat became…well…scrawny. My collars were too big. My wrinkled head protruded from them.

I looked like a startled tortoise.

But by this point, I didn’t care how I looked. It was all about the numbers, now, my continued progression. Or retrogression.

I atomised my body, examining individual body parts for signs of further wasting (encouraging) or heft (disastrous). It didn’t matter what I looked like overall.

Of course, the thinner you get, the more anxious you get, and the more running you need, to reassure yourself. You become obsessive about it, and you don’t sleep, so, when I woke in the middle of the night feeling alert, I might think, “maybe I could go for my run now, to get it over with.” But, if I did, I’d still feel the need to fill the up the time, and cultivate the hunger, the next day, so I’d do another run anyway.

I wanted to get it over with because I hated my run. It was so miserably painful and exhausting. And lonely. By this point I was shuffling around the park before dawn, barely conscious from exhaustion, and so bent up that my head was below my shoulders, face to the ground, like a little old man in bedroom slippers with severe osteoporosis. (and I do have osteoporosis) Just because you act compulsively, doesn’t mean you are reconciled to that compulsion. Perhaps the fox in the hen house is horrified by his own violence.

The weaker I got, the better: the more unpleasant the effort required, the more it made up for the indulgences of life. The challenge grew greater and so the achievement was also greater. Exercise became my job. It satisfied the need to work, to make account of myself.

Running was my urgency’s methadone. By the time I got to my actual job, I’d already made such a heroic effort, and it had so weakened and exhausted me, that I was incapable of expending much more energy. The run explained and necessitated sleepy languor. It excused my ineffectualness, especially after I’d been diagnosed (that double-edged sword), when I could claim that my poor performance was caused by an acute medical condition and I was, actually, showing great strength of character by continuing to turn up at all, even if I then just leant against the wall and passed out – a highly effective form of self-sabotage. No wonder more and more boys are joining the profession.