Book notes

"Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home.

Terrified of my mind, I had always dreaded spending a moment alone with it. There always had to be a book in my pocket as an emergency kit in case I was ever trapped waiting anywhere, even for one minute, be it a bank linkeup or supermarket checkout counter. I was forever throwing my mind scraps to feed on, as if to a ferocious and malevolent beast that would devour me the moment it was not chewing on something else.

Recognition revealed the reason for my life-long sense of somehow never approaching my potential in terms of self-expression and self-definition--the ADD adult's awareness that he has talents or insights or some undefinable positive quality he could perhaps connect with if the wires weren't creossed.

The hallmark of ADD is an automatic, unwilled "tuning-out," a frustrating nonpresence of mind. A person suddenly finds that he has heard nothing of what he has been listening to, saw nothing of what he was looking at, remembers nothing of what he was trying to concentrate on. He misses information and direcitons, misplaces things and struggles to stay abreast of conversations.

The restlessness coexists with long periods of procrastination. The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on. Without the rousing adrenalin rush of racing against time inertia prevails. On the other hand, when there is something one wants neither patience nor procrastination exist. One has to do it, get it, have it, experience it, immediately.

An adult with ADD looks back on his life to see plans never fully realized and intentions unfulfilled strewn about the landscape like abandoned casualties on a long march. "I am a person of permanent potential," one patient said. Surges of initial enthusiasm quickly ebb. People report unfinished retainer walls begun over a decade ago, semi-constructed boats taking up garage space year after year, courses entered and quit in languages, in woodworking, in music, in art and in sundry other subjects, books half-read, business ventures forsaken, stories or poetry not written--many, many roads not travelled.

Men and women with ADD have about them an almost palpable intensity to which other people respond with unease and instinctive withdrawal. "It’s as if I was from Mars and everyone else was from earth," one forty-year old woman said. Or, as another put it, "everyone else seems to belong to some nice persons’ club, only I am excluded." This sense of being always on the outside looking in, of somehow missing the point, is pervasive. At social events I tend to gravitate to the periphery, conscious of a feeling that somehow I cannot enter into the spirit of things. I observe people talking to each other, people I may know quite well, acutely aware that I have nothing to say to anyone. Social conversation has always been a mystery to me.

To interview adults with attention deficit disorder is often to traverse a minefield booby-trapped with jokes. Unexpected turns of phrase and consciously absurd associations pepper life histories which, in themselves, are often not much to laugh about.

The common theme on all days, good or bad, is a gnawing sense of having missed out on something important in life.

The ADD mind is afflicted by a sort of time illiteracy. "Time blindness." It's as if one's time sense never deveeloped past a stage other people leave behind in early childhoo. The not-now is infinity.

...the chronic incapacity to consider the future. The guiding assumptio of the ADD adult...seems to be that only the present exists and needs to be taken into account. He lives as if his actions had no implicaitons for thf future, no effects on future needs, relationships or responsibilities.

"Counterwill" is an automatic rsistance put up by a human being with an incompletely developed sense of self, a reflexive and unthinking opposition to the will of the other. It is a natural but immature resistance arising from the frear of being controlled. Counterwill arises in anyone who has not yet developed a mature and conscious will of her own.

Wow. We all have a touch of ADD, I more than others. I immediately recognized various sides of myself in Maté's narrative: workaholic, singular/intense focus, not noticing something new in the living room until six months later....

Maté has put the first two chapters of Scattered (also called Scattered Minds) on the Web.