I was just diagnosed with ADHD.

I always suspected I fell into that flavour of neurodivergence, so it’s helpful to get the empirical confirmation. I have a strong bias toward the AD part, although in my early years I scored top marks in both attention deficit and hyperactivity. Over course of my life, the most debilitating consequences of my symptoms were masked by two attributes, one internal the other external.

As for the internal attribute, I’m ‘blessed’ to have a high level of intelligence. I put blessed in scare-quotes not because I’m nonreligious but because for most of my life I’ve been too smart for my own good! (Not really a blessing.) High intelligence is a real roadblock to recovery from addiction. The recovery model I work, the Secular Twelve Steps, is often referred to as “a simple program for complicated people”. For so many years, I not-so-smartly developed expert skill in conjuring all kinds of rationalizations to fortify my grasp on denial.

Externally, I have been supported by scaffolding since birth and well into adulthood. Scaffolding is just what it sounds like: constructive support for learning, growing, and living. I had it at home growing-up. I had it in elementary school, having been selected for an ‘enriched’ program for gifted students. This was a small class that stayed together through grades five to eight. In high school, I was lucky to have a couple of very good teachers who met me at my level of learning and supported my education. When I entered into the workforce, I had an attentive mentor during my apprenticeship. I struggled for a while without scaffolding, but in my late thirties, when I went into recovery from alcoholism, my family was there to support me. I have been very lucky.

When I first admitted I was an alcoholic and sought help to get sober, I was able to look back on my life, my relationship with alcohol, and my behaviour and choices when drinking, and a lot of what baffled me about my chaotic life sort of fell into place and made sense. I am experiencing the same sort of epiphany now that I reflect on my life as a person with ADHD.

For example, I have a learning disability. I never considered the possibility. After all, I was one of the smart kids, and later in adulthood I got a university degree, then a free-ride with scholarships through masters and doctorate degrees. Yet, I am hindered by an inability to retain information when listening to a lecture. I can’t even take notes! Words go in one ear and out the other. When able to select courses, I always opted for seminars, classes that involved reading and sharing knowledge in smaller groups. At the time, I figured that was just my preference. I didn’t really dig into the why of it.

My alcoholism works with my ADHD in a couple of important ways. First, any symptoms of attention deficit were mixed and muddled with the state of drunkenness. Nothing says inattention like seeing double and being blackout drunk. This is the obvious role of boozing as an adaptation for ADHD. The second purpose, however, is more complex, as it has many facets. I didn’t see it before, but now it makes so much sense to me. I adapt to ADHD by leveraging my intelligence. It takes a lot of work to sustain the effort needed to adapt. My brain was always working on overdrive. Drinking is a way to park it and ‘turn it off’, and once my brain found that solution to the constant noise, it didn’t need to find another.

Neurotypical people manage large projects sensibly. They set goals, make timetables, determine priorities, and structure their time. I don’t do any of that. I get from A to B in one go, finding my way through the fog using intuition, holding all the pieces of the puzzle in my brain and placing them down as I go. I’ve been doing this my whole life, and I’m good at it.

Like any child, I explored various interests until something stuck. I tried playing the piano. I had perfect pitch and innate talent for it. But when I reached a level where I had to learn more complex theory and do the required study to master it, I lost all motivation to continue. It was the study part that I balked against. As soon as it became work, I turned away from it. This pattern continued with just about anything I endeavoured to learn and master. I was good at play, not so with work. The one activity that I did stick with and still enjoy immensely is chess. Why was chess so different from anything else? Chess is all about pattern recognition and it is also nonlinear. My weird brain is adept at complex patterns, not so good with lists and tables. I could have been a master. I know what held me back: remembering opening lines and the analysis of variations. That’s a linear, list-type of learning. It involves the heavy memorization of a volume of divergent paths. Pattern recognition, however, happens in another part of the brain. I played intuitively, and that served me well.

I didn’t complete high school. I lost interest as the science and math courses became more specific and the studying more about memorizing lists and tables. Thick textbooks terrified me. I also suffered from increasing social anxiety which grew steadily from puberty through adolescence.

Again, if I look at my developing social anxiety through the lens of ADHD, it reveals understandings that evaded me in the past. From as long as I can remember, I have had impulse control challenges. There’s nothing like public school as an environment to police impulsivity. If I bark out the wrong thing, peers turn and laugh at me. If I act is a way that’s not ‘cool’, kids turn away and whisper among themselves. So I learned to monitor and control my impulses, and that effort demanded a lot of energy.

From my perspective, it seemed to me that my peers were more capable at navigating the transition between being a teen and early adulthood. They talked and behaved a certain ‘more mature’ way that seemed to come naturally to them yet not to me for some reason. To keep up, I learned to act ‘as if’. I constantly compared my internal world with my peers’ external behaviours. This fostered self-centredness and produced a lot of social anxiety. I become a neurotic loner with a desperate need for social validation, to belong, to be worthy.

And so I became a chameleon of sorts. Other kids were discovering who they were while I was busy trying to forget who I was and become someone that seemed normal. When I took my first drink of alcohol, it quieted my mind, which allowed me to temporarily forget what it was I was so busy trying to do.

to be continued