| TED SPEAKS...ABOUT ADD |
| SOME THOUGHTS ON THINKING |
How can I describe my problem in simple, non-clinical jargon? There’s a lack of focus, a disconnected-ness when it comes to mental activities. It’s like perceiving the world through slits that broaden on better days and become narrower on not-so-better days. Remember that game show, “Concentration?” The contestants have to solve a picture puzzle that’s revealed only two squares at a time. That’s the way I see things in my mind. I could never play “Concentration” because even when the entire puzzle is displayed, my mind cannot embrace it all at once. I would need to study it for a while—perhaps take it into the bathroom with me, since that’s where I seem to do my best thinking. Then I might grasp it.
Processing what I read, unscrambling words, constructing sense out of what I’m looking at, has become such a slow, tedious pain in the butt that it almost doesn’t seem worth the trouble anymore. Plowing through an entire book has, in recent years, become a major project that requires more mental resources, and patience, than I can spare, given the host of other tasks that beg my attention during the course of a day. I’m painfully aware of how long it takes me just to read a book jacket. I was never what you would call a fast reader. But there was a time when I could at least lose myself in a book. Now, the more I try to escape, the more likely I am to find the part of me that I'd like forget.
Certain skills that normally improve with practice actually seem to unravel the more I hammer away at them. Hard for me to believe that I ever performed on a stage. And yet I did, with confidence and much gusto. I was fearless, I was powerful. For fourteen years, my soul thrived in the spotlight...until the age of thirty, when the gyroscope in my brain began to lose momentum. That dauntless, single minded spirit that kept me in synch had departed. I became afraid of the stage. Lines, cues, actions, orientation—there’s no way I could keep all those elements together now. I wouldn’t even know where left field was. Used to be that I was at my best when taking on the character of another person. These days, it’s a challenge just "playing" myself.
I’ve had some form of...how should I put it?...mental irregularity all my life. Only now, in my middle age, it appears to have gotten worse (emphasis on “appears”). It’s the old riddle: Is my nose getting larger, or is my face shrinking? When I was younger and life was simpler, I could transcend, circumvent or simply ignore these mental glitches. I thought that if I worked really hard, I could retrain myself to think and operate more efficiently; I could undo a lot of the stupid habits I’d programmed into my system over the years. But I’m older now, I’m running out of steam, and I’m getting fed up with the way I am.
At first I believed that the problem was something I had invented as a lazy man’s defense against taxing my mind. For example, when I was in junior high and high school, I used to lug a 35-pound briefcase around with me to and from school, from one class to another, up and down long flights of stairs---everywhere I went. Why, for heaven's sake? Because I couldn’t trust myself (I believed) to remember which books I needed to take or leave behind. So I hauled everything with me. A great metaphor, don’t you think? For what, I'm not sure.
But that was a long time ago. If I have difficulty keeping things in my mind today, it’s not because I haven’t tried most of my adult life to swim against the current, to exercise that muscle between my ears so that I can hold at least as much in my head as I used to hold in my briefcase. It’s certainly not because I enjoy hiding behind a handicap.
More than one doctor has defined my condition as "ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER"---or ADD.
If you’ve read anything about this problem, then you know that ADD has become a very popular handle these days, too popular for my tastes. Anytime a condition is too glibly diagnosed, whenever I hear about a so-called ADD community, I become suspicious. I’ve never been one to jump on a bandwagon, never liked being pigeonholed or categorized. Everyone belongs to a community these days. You’ve got political activists, white supremacists, heavy metalists, pro and anti-abortionists—a virtual cafeteria of “ists” and “isms” to which people profess allegiance. I’m not into that long-to-belong thing. I avoid pastures where too many cattle have trodden, and I keep my “flops” to myself. The only reason I would identify with a known disorder is that there are known treatments for it. I figure: Why should I let my mind hobble through life when there are medications on the market that could help it to sprint?
On the surface, I appear to fit the typical adult ADD profile. Inattentiveness, difficulty finishing projects, difficulty getting organized, restlessness: that’s only a general sketch. I do, however, have other problems that are not covered in the standard recipe: subtle, oddball things that have bugged me as far back as I can remember, long before space age analysts invented trendy names for them.
Whatever I have---call it what you will---it isn’t life threatening. Nor is it so debilitating that I can’t work or operate a vehicle or lead a reasonably normal life, considering that the spectrum of “normality” is broad enough to encompass a multitude of dysfunctions. I don’t rant, I don’t slobber, I don’t mess my drawers. I don’t climb fire escapes and eat bananas in my sleep. Just how badly this handicap has held me back is a matter of perspective, not personal policy, as in: I can’t be expected to show up for work on time because I suffer from "Chronic Late Syndrome." When you think of all the things that can go amuck within a person’s brain and/or body, my situation is hardly interesting, not destined to take its place among the celebrated cases of clinical neurology.
Although many adults suffer from this disorder, most of the information on ADD you’re likely to read or hear about these days has to do with children. Frankly, I’m sick of it. Everything now is kids-this and kids-that. Where was all this information when I was growing up? Hardly anything was known about learning disabilities back then. Used to be that if a child did poorly in school, parents and teachers assumed he was stupid or lazy or had an attitude problem. Now we see that that wasn’t necessarily so.
I was anything butstupid, and I did rather well in school, in spite of the fact that...well, I was lazy and I did have an attitude problem. I possessed an uncanny ability to fool a lot of people, mainly myself, into thinking that I was a lot cleverer than I really was. I was actually a superior reader when I started out. Gradually, I began working my way backwards. So far, nothing I’ve read about ADD or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) has addressed this phenomenon of retrogression. I was not hyperactive. Screwy, perhaps, but not hyperactive.
Thank God, I’m not a kid anymore, I haven't any small ones of my own, nor am I concerned about anyone else’s dysfuncional brats. All I ak is that they don’t run me down with their skate boards or mug me while I’m at an ATM machine. (No, “ATM” is not a disorder.)
You may have heard that people with Attention Deficit Disorder are highly creative. Supposedly, the affliction is father to the benefit. Or maybe it’s the other way around. (Don't expect me to keep these things straight. I've got a disease, remember?) Members of the ADD community like to flatter themselves by pointing to some of the great minds of the Western World who, they theorize, were afflicted with a similar disorder. Ha! Now, isn’t that a neat conceit! If a man’s affairs are in disarray, if he can’t balance a checkbook or pay attention to what someone is saying, if he can’t bother to wash himself or remember to change his underwear, it’s because his mind is operating on a higher, loftier plane. Behold, another Beethoven! Another Van Gogh! It’s the old Decartian proverb: "I think, therefore I stink."
It’s hard to separate the facts from the froth. My feeling is that there’s more to being a genius than choosing the wrong socks or dropping pizza sauce on your pants. That’s a shame because I really coulda have been somebody!
Whether or not certain artists and thinkers had ADD is pure conjecture. But this much I do know: Without the strength to rise above this infirmity, the pit bull tenacity to focus upon a goal or project and see it to completion, they'd have had nothing to show for their brilliance. A simple principle, yes, but often overlooked. As a writer, I may have a smattering of talent (although that's debatable). But my face isn't likely to end up on a postage stamp when I'm deceased. My tombstone will probably read:
HERE
LIES A CHUMP...
HE BUSTED HIS HUMP
Like it or not, ADD is mine for keeps. Like my thumb print, like the color of my eyes, it defines who I am. The mental block is made of concrete. I will probably erode before it does.
Were it possible to work out bargains in life, I’ve often wondered what I’d be willing to give in exchange for a dynamic, glitch-free mental apparatus that would serve me from this point on, for as many days as I have left on this Earth. It occurred to me that taking five years off the end of my life would be a fair swap. Mind you, I’m not talking about ending my life, simply trading quantity for quality. I mean, if it takes me an hour to read 10-15 pages of a book when I’m 57 (and that’s when I’m not distracted), it might take me a day and half to read a fortune cookie when I’m 95! Who needs five extra years of this garbage? I’d rather live a creative, productive life now. Why not just settle for 90, and donate those five useless years to some useless person who could better appreciate them. God knows that Ted Gargiulo has too much urgent business this side of Glory to be saddled with a handicap.
Sounds like a reasonable deal. Then again, it’s risky. Does anyone know for certain (other than God Himself) how long he has to live? Sacrificing five years of ones life is the sort of deal a person is apt to make in his youth when he thinks he’s going to be around forever. By the time he reaches 57, he’s got to figure that he’s well past the half-way mark. If I’ve learned anything in my time on Earth, it’s not to write checks without first checking my balance. In the game of life swapping, a man can never know the balance of years he has yet to live until after he has gambled them away. Those are the rules. (Glancing at your “statement” is a classic no-no. That's like peeking behind the curtain on "Let’s Make a Deal." Or wishing for more wishes.) How do I know I’m going to live to be 95? Do the math. I sign away five years of my life, sight unseen, then discover that I was only allotted a total of 60. Turns out I’ve been dead for two years and didn’t even know it!
Perhaps, I need to lower my expectations. One less goal equals one less burden, equals one less dream to loose sleep over. It could be liberating. Like discovering a corpse on an overcrowded life raft.
Even supposing that medical science opens doors for me, there’s no guarantee that anyone is going to walk through them. That’s a matter of character, not chemistry. I still recall the words of my Latino foreman at the print shop back in New York where I used to work. Whenever I blamed the defective feed mechanism on the book binding machine for my poor production, he would say: “Eees nut dee mah-cheen! Eees nut dee mah-cheen! Eees yaw aaah-tee-tood!” Thus spake the eminent Dr. Sigmund Rodriguez.
Attitude. There’s a key ingredient that you won’t find in a pharmacy.
Story has it that Mozart had such an acute sense of pitch, that hearing anything played even slightly off-key made him physically ill. Were it possible to transport Mozart through time, can you imagine how he would respond to today’s so-called “music?" That poor little tone-perfect genius would probably self-destruct.
One advantage to being partially blind, off-balance and/or inattentive is that the rest of the world appears straight. Crooked pictures, for example, don’t offend me the way they offend my highly sensitive and visually discerning Better Half. Neither do crooked situations. Flaw cancels flaw, error cancels error. Bumpy roads, filtered through a bumpy mechanism, seem smooth. As for noise, it doesn’t sound so noisy to me because my head is already filled with it.
Consider a person, deaf from birth, whose hearing has been suddenly restored. Not having learned human speech, he would find it incomprehensible, just as a foreign language would be to our ears. Gaining a lost sense is only the beginning of a new struggle; learning how to use it is what true growth and therapy are all about. Thus, it seems to me that if a hidden door in my brain were fully opened (assuming, of course, that there is a such a door), or if a dimension of reality, previously hidden from me, were suddenly revealed, then life itself would become a foreign language that I'd have to learn all over from the beginning. Who knows, but that what I regarded as a disability might have been a blessing after all.
Pharmacology, for all its benefits, is hardly a cure-all. My neurological mis-configurations are too deeply gouged into my foundation to be wiped clean by an attention enhancer. Even on Ritalin, I still become confused in parking lots, am still just as likely to mistake my death warrant for a library card. What the medication does provide, however, is the mental energy to manage these dysfunctions more effectively by interfacing with whatever activity I’m engaged in. That's especially true when I'm writing. It sharpens my focus, pulls me into the picture, helps me foresee areas where I'm likely to stumble and take preventive measures.
Believe me when I say that anyone who practices the rare art of living in the moment will find himself painfully out of synch with a culture that nurtures inattentiveness. Every day, we are bombarded with interruptions, sensory overload, and stressful, mind-numbing demands that steal us away from ourselves. It may be that attention deficit is not so much a chemical imbalance in one’s brain, as it is the spiritual by-product of an imbalanced environment, a natural adaptation to a fragmented existence no pill can ever remedy. Therein is a story in itself.
l often imagine that the force that made me sore in days past, that filled pages and stages with creative energy, has reduced me to a cranky, twitching slurrer of words, pacer of floors, forgetter of keys, looser of temper, stacker of boxes, tolerator of mediocrity, weaver of convoluted excuses for being everything in life but what I want to be. I see myself wading in a tepid, shallow pond, longing for the open sea. Or I’ve been cast in a retarded school play for which I’ve been given no lines. Or I’m stranded at an intersection with a broken traffic light. Or forced to wait in an endless checkout line for something I don’t want. I’ve become identified by all the things I never intended to be. I’m accepted on the basis of how well I take on the characteristics of people and traditions I purportedly don’t care about. I think caviar; I live cornflakes. I aspire to Shakespeare; I settle for Hallmark. I am torn between a numbing indifference to life on the one hand, and a desire to punish, to punish, to punish, to punish the impostor who dwells inside my head.
Why do I put myself through all this? Because I love the drama of it all. For me, suspension of disbelief begins, not on a stage, but in the upstairs "theater” I carry with me, where the most vicious battles are waged. May the farce be with me.
But I think you already know the moral of this strange, serio-comic tale off Dr. Gar-jekyll and Teddy Hyde. I already have the best possible deal I’m ever going to have in life. The Law of Escalating Priorities states that, however many blessings a person currently enjoys, he will inevitably require something more than what he has. Not content to have his basic needs met (food, clothing, shelter), he wants to feel useful, influential, personally fulfilled, respected, loved, and so forth. The fact that I can afford to rail about this so-called “handicap” of mine, let alone rhapsodize about it on paper, only goes to prove that my life is already rich in all the things that truly matter, as well as those that don’t.
What if our home were suddenly ravaged by a flood or an earthquake, and everything my wife and I owned was destroyed—clothes, furniture, family photos, computer, CD's, manuscripts, my belly bear bank—everything. How quickly these little neurological glitches of mine would drop to the bottom of our list of concerns. I shudder when I remember of how close the faulty transmission in our Dodge Dynasty came to doing us in, back in 1994. Had we not brought the car into the shop when we did, we would never have seen the worn metal shavings that could have jammed the gears without any warning. What if the transmission had locked up on the freeway while we were doing 65 mph? One minute, Ted and Jann are driving home with a pizza. The next moment, Ted and Jann ARE pizza!
When I consider all the hidden dangers, natural and otherwise, that loom just beyond the horizon every moment we're alive, I realize that the gears inside my head pose no real threat to either of us. We can live with them.
Finally, in any discussion of “Why Do Things Go Wrong?” one must consider the flip side of that overplayed hit single. Surely, “Why Do Things Go Right?” would prove an ever more fascinating conundrum. Let’s say that I had been in full possession of my faculties since Day One. Say that I'd had the mental stamina to stay on course while I was in school, and to keep my mind from wandering all over the proverbial page. Say I had finished college. Say I’d had the focus and hard-ass consistency to pursue a career I really believed in. What if I hadn’t succumbed to the lure of unchallenging, mundane, risk-free work and regular paychecks? It’s indeed possible that I would have pressed on in the theater, excelled in it, taken it further than off-off-Broadway, beyond the few professional acting gigs I enjoyed back in the 70's. Who knows, but that on April 20, 1979, I might have been under contract to some little rinky dink dinner theater in Two Shoes, Nebraska doing No Sex, Please, We’re British, instead of where I was supposed to be that day: at a Trailways bus station in Detroit, Michigan. For it was there that I met my wife-to-be. And what a grand, life-changing day that was! Imagine if, while I was off somewhere taking a bow or signing menues, the bus carrying Jann had left without me. Without me! Ah, talk about God’s grace! Here is grace that boggles the mind!
Hear, then, the conclusion of this matter. IF I am cursed because I have a crack in my woodwork that forces me to compromise my standards of personal excellence and fulfillment, and IF, for all my compromising, I have yet found such sublime contentment in a woman more precious than fine gold, who is utterly devoted to my happiness and well being, and who loves and believes in me in spite of my glitches and hitches and crotchets and quirks—then I say that all men should be so “cursed.”
Thus ends my sermon.
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