A personal, anecdotal approach to ADD
I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD, nor ADHD. Also never have been tested.
I’ve always been teased about having ADD. I am a bit stubborn about being diagnosed by people that don’t know what the h they are talking about. Come on, know what you are saying!
So, one day, I am taking a client to see houses and I start whistling a tune as I am driving. Client retorted, Do you have ADD, why are you whistling? Let’s say he did not mean anything personal about it, but it pissed me off due to the history of it all.
I’ve always joked that part of the alphabet soups is that people like me have a very high association of ideas, a different set of association. You could say, look at that tree, and I’d think about it being in a forest, or even visa versa. If I were to make a comment about the forest, you’d go ‘Huh?’.
This all came back to me today while having a conversation with someone. This person was constantly changing the context of a very technical conversation as we spoke. Very annoying. After a few minutes of this, I purposedly brought up something earlier in the conversation and her response was, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’. I figured out to do little tika-taka responses to get the context re-established so we could proceed with a ‘normal’ conversation. This is probably the first time I had knowingly tried this approach, but I will print it out and have it sitting on my desk.
Where am I going with this? Diagnosis or not, how you handle ADD is up to you. After the whistling episode, I bought a book on ADD, Driven to Distraction. To my amazement, there was a list of items used to determine if you have ADD! Wait, if I eliminate these, I can better manage other people misconceptions of my having ADD!
Note that I am not saying to avoid getting tested. This list is meant to be an informal list.
I remember laughing, the first item was ‘Are you left handed?’ Um, yeah. Nothing to do here.
Do you drum your fingers a lot, tap your feet, etc.? Yes. So I worked on not doing that. I guess this includes random whistling.
Are you excessively impatient? Yes, a bit. Huge thing I’ve been working on.
Are you easily distracted? Definitely. Squirrel.
I abhor waiting in line. I am not changing that.
I get in trouble from making jokes during meetings. Always working on that.
Do you break what you think are stupid rules? Well, I think they are stupid, so yeah.
There were other items in the book, go for it and see!
There are 100 items in the list. I skipped to see how many. It asked, Did you read the entire list? Nailed.
Honestly, that list could be more than 100 but I guess a cutoff is needed somewhere.
One item not in the list, if I work with someone that is not organized, I punt, punt, punt. Need to figure out a way to get that someone organized!
I’ll not belabor the list, get the book for yourself, easy to get for less than 10 dollars.
I rarely have anyone use that ADD phrase on me anymore. I still have the issues, not denying that, but I definitely have mitigated that.
My joke during fantasy baseball drafts is ‘How do you guys remember something 30 seconds later?’. Generates a bit too many laughs.
Hope this helps!!
