“On With My Vent In All Its Offensive Glory”

Salvador Dali's "Raphaelesque Head Exploding" (click to see larger image)

What does it feel like to have ADHD in a world that doesn’t always “meet you halfway” and can in fact feel devoid of empathy?

What does it feel like to never meet anyone’s expectations or to be constantly admonished for what you’ve done wrong but seldom praised for what you have worked so hard — five times as hard as most people — to do right?

This guest essay below (in the black type) from L. Friesen should give you an idea.

But first some background. For  many years, I’ve read the online “rants” from the partners of adults with ADHD.  A rant is a post wherein the writer releases long-simmering frustration. Typically, the most tortured rants come from those who are living with adults “in denial” — that is, those who cannot or will not see the adverse impact of their ADHD symptoms on everyone involved. Sometimes these adults with ADHD are so lost in their own symptoms they blame everyone else around them for their problems.  It is not a pretty picture.

Yet there exists a parallel phenomenon among adults with ADHD who must deal on a daily basis with people who are “in denial” about ADHD and the challenges they, these adults with ADHD, are up against. The denial sword cuts both ways.

Even though I do facilitate a face-to-face group for adults with ADHD (and receive many e-mails from readers of my book who themselves have ADHD), I’ve not been privy to rants from adults with ADHD (excluding those who flame me as being a Pharma Shill or other anti-psychiatry expletives). Perhaps the adults in our local group are simply polite or else their friends and loved ones are more enlightened about ADHD. I’m not sure, but I intend to ask at the next meeting.

Recently, I received this e-mail from L. Friesen, a woman who had read some of my posts on an ADHD discussion forum:Months ago I wrote to you about wanting to send you something I was writing. I realised that I was having difficulty articulating what I felt needed to be said. It’s taken months of going back and forth with it and it’s evolved from where I first started.

It’s not all that polished and I apologise for that. I find there are few in the helping area that I truly respect and you write with a sensitivity that is often very touching.  I’m curious about your response to what I wrote.

My response: a  visceral kick to the gut. I’ve always felt empathy for the challenges of adults with ADHD, including the pervasive misperceptions and myths about it, because I made a point to educate myself. But still this essay’s raw and heartfelt emotion stayed with me for days.  My gratitude goes to the writer for allowing me to share it with you, whether her words resonate for your personal experience or help you to understand the people with ADHD in your life.  Now to the essay:

I’ve observed that prefacing what you’re going to say with “I’m just venting” means you are declaring immunity from criticism for being irrational or unfair. You can be irresponsible about the casualties that read what you spew or be as bigoted as you want.

I’m invoking this “right” for myself. You will simply have to put up with my impertinence because as you already know venting is not something allowed to those who are neurologically questionable. For us it is called “making excuses” or, gotta love this one, “being negative.” I don’t care to be objective because it’s my life and my experience, which isn’t an objective experience. I’m out of control, I’m breaking the rules. This is my “oppositional defiance” and not a legitimate “vent.” Legitimacy is only for the normal. So on with my vent in all its offensive glory.

From my earliest years I recall the disapproving voices.

“Little girls do not run up and down the block screaming.”

“Look at you, you got mud all over your dress!”

“What were you thinking?”

“What is wrong with you?!”

Why did you do that?”

There was never an answer to these confusing and hurtful questions. My parents, injected with fears that they were bad, permissive parents left me no shelter from this storm of accusation. No one was coming to rescue me.

I felt like a sacrifice to public opinion and as I watched the people who loved me, more than anyone else in the world, berate me, scold me and many times slap me for reasons I not only did not but could not understand. I was just having fun; why is that wrong? “With a spoiled child this is what you do,” they were told. Or, “Just give me that child for a week and I’d fix her.” All this tough love was doomed to failure because it was based on the presupposition that I was just a “bad kid.”

I began to believe that I must be bad, that everything was my fault even if I couldn’t figure out what it was that I had done. Now I am told I care too much what others think and that I “have low self esteem.” I don’t actually believe this, it becomes impossible to manage a self-image that is bombarded with negative attributions and I need to be ever vigilant in order that “others” do not penalize me for just being myself.

From the earliest memories of my life, the treatment I received hung upon the whims and mercies of an unmerciful other out there. Never knowing when the looks would come or why. The disapproval hung thickly as if I was followed by a flock of crows. A group of crows is called a “murder,” and perhaps in some ways this is apt.

At least I was spared the indignity of having my parents “grieve” over me, and blessedly I never once grieved for my children. I never felt I was put upon by all their energy, or the homework we had to get thru each night. They broke stuff and got into all sorts of things. They did try my patience on certain days but each night, when they were asleep I’d go into their room and see what a little angel I had in each of them.

There is a certain rage  that wells up inside of me when I hear parents who are angry and resentful of their child. Or those teens who are floundering desperately and get heaped with all sorts of lingo about consequences and contracts and threats of being thrown out to fend for themselves. I look at the grievances and the blame that gets heaped on those young shoulders and wonder how they will do well. The steady drumbeat of criticism has already done its damage.

I don’t think there’s anything more offensive to me than seeing the blame perpetuate onto another generation. When I read of the suffocating control that some parents feel a need to impose to “keep their sanity,” I am filled with such that only one who’s been there can know. I was just a mom with wonderful spirited children. This must be the “distortion” that’s been invented for those of us with  ADHD that we supposedly have.

Now, as an adult, should there be leaking of any symptoms there will be room for interrogation, lots of “should” and recriminations. You see, to have ADD means that you will be subject to the continuous and damning refrain that there ‘is no excuse.’ I must look normal, and act normal, because there is no excuse for having ADHD. Oh, we’re told that it “can” be an explanation but it’s just a well worded and appropriately self deprecating acknowledgment of culpability for our crimes.

What are these crimes? It appears to be refusing to take our designated place as unworthy of actually being excused. We must always be pardoned by the grace of those rising above our behavior and proclivities. As if they’re walking around with that condescending smile and token accommodations saying “you’re welcome” to me all day long. The message also gets sent that we are ungrateful and callous for not saying thank-you for any allowance at all.

Yes, I know that mouthings are made here and there, a much rarer event than the monkish intonations of  ”You must not use ADHD as an excuse.” I am, in theory, absolved upon a rare “bad day’” but in practical terms this is not the case. I can be called to account for any leakage, the disparagement or disapproval of my failure to utilize one such device or another will inevitably come.

There really IS no excuse for having ADHD. Messages to the contrary are a salve doled out so sparingly that any usefulness is moot. My voice will not be heard and it will be excluded, my reputation precedes me. I’m one of “those” who can’t be trusted for we are ever under the critical and suspicious gaze. I have been positioned as someone of inferior reputation. I must be lying, I must be making an excuse.

It’s true though, after a lifetime of interrogations you do learn to be careful what you say when those questions begin. You learn that it’s humiliating to hand someone the stick that they will beat you with. I will be dismissed with lines like “People with ADHD lack self awareness.”

The crows overhead delight in this repetition. It doesn’t matter that the studies that noted this was true for those who were young adults and that those same studies showed that with the passage of time I become very aware. It won’t do to allow a voice that isn’t filled with anxiety and trepidation for your favour that today I performed ok. For when you accept a conspiracy theory that takes as foremost presupposition that anything offered in counter, any attempt at rebuttal, is necessarily part of the conspiracy’s attempt to deceive…then there is no truth. There cannot be, for if there is no possible falsifiability than there is no possible verifiability. No potential for error renders accuracy meaningless…no way of saying something false renders not only criticism impotent…but truth hollow. In short, any defense is labeled patronizingly as “defensiveness.”

When you’re losing ground in an argument you can always push one of the buttons on the laundry list of my diagnosis; self doubt works wonders as you throw at me that my view of reality is skewed by my condition. That I lack self awareness. It doesn’t do to point out that this lack of self awareness cuts both ways, that you are no more aware or understand the cues I send.

It is irrelevant to mention that I am inconvenienced by any number of rituals that slide so fast past your awareness because you expected and demanded that I be normal. Your reasoning becomes harsher as your unchecked expectations escalate. Your complete lack of awareness of my state leads you to characterizing your observations in the most negative and hurtful ways. I am told that should I ask for consideration that you are forced to ‘”lower your standards.” It’s a pointless exercise to wonder or dare to ask aloud; Why is it always me that needs to learn their verbal, emotional, physical language and translate mine into theirs for their comfort and heed theirs as the default rules of conduct? Why is their communication style…their processing…their outputting the one used as the template I can fill in with bits of me that are whitewashed and made more palatable for them?

Leading a simpler life with fewer things is inadequate and you will not be victimized by my needs. This leaves me no choice but to struggle onward trying to be someone I’m not. You say I mesmerized you with my hyperfocus — a bit of magic dust I covered myself with to trap and enslave you. It wasn’t that I was actually a warm, funny, decent human being with any redeeming qualities. Now, with bitterness and rank self-pity you complain that the real (inferior) me was concealed beneath a magic glow; the resentment you express over my “deception” just adds to my disorientation. You’ve made a twin of me in your mind, my normal twin, the one you really want. The one no human could ever be but that’s not really the point.

I am constantly measured against this figment twin of yours and predestined to fall short. At some point you will threaten to abandon and scorn me; and as the anxiety and the part of my brain that allows for super performance tries to stave off the loss, you watch and sighhh and commiserate that it’s just a manipulation to stave off the inevitable. I won’t truly change, you say ruefully. Because to truly change, to your standards, would require a level of perfection impossible for anyone…and ultimately the thing is that you don’t want to participate in the give and take of my coping strategies. That requires that you also maintain an uncomfortable level of vigilance while making changes to habitual ways of doing something. When you find this difficult and sometimes impossible, you throw at me that you do everything and then insist you can do no more all the while insisting that this same level of effort be maintained by me.. I’m told that you shouldn’t have to be affected by me, I should make it effortless for you.

Why is the ideal me…the “goal,” me the one in your head? On precisely what grounds did you ever conclude that you know what’s best for me?? Do I get to know what’s best for you? Show you the lovely box I’ve constructed for you from my ideality template and take you through the instructions you’ll need to follow exactly in order to wedge yourself into it so I can then fit you snugly onto my spiffy little warehouse of ideals?

You will, however, oblige me and allow me to show you how much I care for you by throwing some “opportunities” my way to make me feel better. To let me feel slightly less like I’m trying to keep a raft afloat with duct tape as little parasitic fishes poke hundreds of microscopic holes in it. You’ll let me think my floundering is potentially getting me closer to your realization that I do in fact love you and want you in my life, since you know it makes me feel better to think the often futile struggle is meaningful. Oh, and you’re welcome..

Super-efforts only last a few weeks and you can’t understand why? They do for you as well but then, you don’t have to use this part of your brain for normal performance as well. Many times you will leave, grieving for the hypothetical twin you invented making it clear I was a second rate substitute. I am left wondering if I can begin again and maybe find someone who will care about me without my own loving feelings being rated in a performance based system.

Sometimes you become bitter, angry, furious as if I’ve killed the perfect twin little by little, just by living and creating myself as doing/thinking/feeling/being/knowing _____. Each time I act/think/feel a little part of the ideal I was supposed to have been is made effete and imperfect. Where there was this glorious template, I’ve filled it in with my sh*t…my inadequacies, failures, neediness, etc…

My social timing will never be perfect and I’ll stand out from the crowd, which will lead either to unsolicited and often unhelpful advice or they will back away slowly. I strain to contain the thoughts to remember the hundreds of niceties, the correct postures, the correct lines of the conditioned script you call empathy and socially adaptive behaviour. My anxiety will spike as my mind is flooded with potential social landmines, things you give no thought to. I know that should I find myself feeling enjoyment that this is generally soon followed with a laundry list of how I’ve socially failed and embarrassed you. When I’m enjoying myself the tight hold I must maintain on my body, my facial muscles, and my thoughts loosens and “here there be dragons.”

As we finally leave this field of landmines, the exhaustion overwhelms me leaving me little ability to fend off the recriminations over my moments of unchecked control. This will be followed by finishing the list that I must accomplish before my day is done for to not do so means having to listen to you telling me I never “do” anything and you have to “do” everything. That I have just exhausted myself in “doing” for you so that your social needs will be met is swept aside as negligible. Those efforts can’t be seen so they don’t count as “doing”.

I will then awaken the next morning to go to work where similar landmines await and I’ll spend the next 8 hours jogging around them in order to preserve my employment. Should my attempts be too imperfect, the axe is waiting for me and then you will wonder why I quit yet another job. I see it coming now, when my differences reach a critical level and I begin to be treated with disdain. I move on, you unaware and nor can I tell you. I never “do” anything.

One of the “experts” is writing a book right now, it’s for you, about the “dreams” you have had to give up by getting this inferior twin you didn’t hope for. I am responsible for your dreams, how things might have been had I not been me. Did you just hear someone say “you’re welcome”? My dreams? pfft who am I in this inferior neurological caste to have dreams? Will you acknowledge several times each day that you have not lived up to the ideals imposed upon you by society, or will you make some pretense? Will you spend time lamenting your lost dreams given that you’ve perfectly executed the ideals life has set before you?

I look for support and see none around me so I go online. On many of the venues I feel vilified and if not vilified then I am certain to run into the overly cheerful, overly pumped up, positive voice of what appears to be a special ed teacher transitioning into adult practice.  These places where commentary and narratives of the non-ADHD partners share their pain. Where embarrassingly over-confident cheery tips for “handling” my  ADHD are doled out like recipes for “never fail” pastry. Where bigotry and ADHD-ist statements flow freely, where I dare not chime in my own experience as it might contradict the ongoing debasement, censure and denouncements. I was personally told it’s a measure of their pain and I have to understand. The unspoken message being that I am insensitive and blissfully unaware of my bull in a china shop ways. I need to “pay attention” so that I can learn just how destructive I am.

Reputation? I can only strangle out a bitter laugh. I damn myself the instant I confess my condition, do I not? I must indeed be selfish to be so unaware of your pain and do nothing. It couldn’t be that after a life time with no treatment and a lifetime of abuse I am in no position to do so? This, along with a complete lack of acknowledgement that what I’ve faced is a condition at all. I don’t know how to help myself, much less your pain. Your pain eclipses mine, as you are the innocent victim of my ADHD. I am cast into the role of victimizer, which adds to a lifetime’s burden of guilt. It couldn’t be that your comparing of me to “what I could be’” this fictional individual that I can never be is more often the source of your pain than anything I do or do not do?

You are my accuser/victim, you stand in the white light of absolution, for you will receive the comfort and understanding of your majority peers. As you regale your cohorts of your countless charitable acts towards me I become the freak child walking across the stage. The experts who will help you fix me have the distinct resemblance to Jerry Lewis, who pricks your conscience upon occasion over my victim status while absolving you of your resentment, your anger and your humiliating and belittling treatment of me. It’s very understandable, you’ll be told; “they” can make you crazy. You’ll toss out the occasional “I’m not perfect, either” but you wield the weapon of our symptomology and your lack of perfection remains concealed. Not very much of a level playing field is it?

Your virtues are extolled, what you put up with you poor dear, it’s a chaos and madness, the terror of the roller coaster. That flock of birds. The evil ones. They circle. Constantly ready to take yet another piece of me.… as I stare.… helplessly, emotionlessly, for you see .. to cry, to rage, to acknowledge what is being done and how my reputation is being shredded will only bring on yet another accusation of self pity. I am evil by nature. Tis my nature, said the scorpion. I must mask my nature in obedience.

I actually care that you are in pain, I’d like to help, I’d like to share with you so that you could understand where you are mischaracterizing, where you can push for more, how you can be more effective. Unfortunately, I am not credible, that crazy ADHD brain is described as out of touch with reality, it’s ‘”skewed.” Then there is the implied motive that I’m gaming you, which will drive me further from any ability of reconciliation of two very different realities. Who would take advice from a Dr. or a lawyer or a banker whose view of reality is skewed? If I correct a misperception, I am being “defensive.” There are so many methods to silence me, to discredit me, that I am left mute while the flow of your rage burns a psychological acid on my character. It would appear my role is to be one of acknowledger of how we run around and wreck people’s lives.

It’s all sewn up quite neatly and I am immobilized, a silent stone, because speaking out will bring chiding or censure; emotional reactions are forbidden to me. I must apologise and comply. After all, I need to be examined, treated and cured. Emotional reactions are a symptom of my bad brain. I must be grateful and feel privileged to be your affliction. And most of all learn to be polite about it and say “thank you.” Did you hear another “you’re welcome”?

To acknowledge shame is shameful; to acknowledge my hurt frightens you. I might “give in” and no longer march towards that destination I can never reach. That destination is to look and act and perform like an NT [neurotyical]. Everyone is taught to conceal weakness, to mask “the problem.” to hold your head high, stiff upper lip and soldier on. Should I try and conceal mine, the accusation of lying or deception is forthcoming. You will never accept that I was giving my best performance because it wasn’t good enough.

I dare not mention it for I know what’s to come. That relentless urging to be better than I am, as I am clearly not good enough. “What could you have done differently?” the kindly yet patronizing voice will ask. I dare not express frustration or demand acceptance for that lightly scolding tone will tell me I’m “being negative.” I learn that my reality and my experience and my nature is negative. To speak of the reality of it is to jeopardize a cultural need for everyone to be the same.

“Moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part. In order to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence a Negro is forever in combat with his own image” — FRANZ FANON

I too am always in combat with my own image. I must not identify with my genetic difference for I am not the “taint,” you tell me. I should hate this part of me for it’s troublesome under functioning ways. I must play a role of diligence that at times causes such strain I feel I’ll collapse. I sneak in ways of soothing and resting myself for the next onslaught and I’m told that these methods are “not good enough.” They are in fact relieving and pleasurable and naturally that’s maladaptive. I must employ and perform a inexhaustible amount of compensatory strategies, and I must go to bed at night at a prescribed time so that I can lie awake and perform an inventory of my actions to satisfy any recrimination that I am not “taking care of myself,” making excuses or lacking empathy for you.

If this doesn’t work, then while it might be a strain on my liver, medication is the answer. My partner now sees that all is right in the world as I behave closer to “normal.” I’ve become medicalized, a project that feels like a punishment, the demand to obediently take the medications despite the intolerable feeling in my body from the side effects. The demand to obediently follow the script of wellness and getting better. I’m getting better! I’m doing better. I didn’t forget to do that thing you asked me to today. There are moments when the thinly veiled disgust washes over your face as you find my small triumph an embarrassment for it’s mundanity. It’s the price I pay to atone for being different. It’s also glaring evidence that you are living in blissful ignorance of the real struggle I am expected to make look easy. You can then sit back and say, “I can’t see you doing anything?” How true indeed.

The weird thing is I need and want to develop strengths, to pursue my goals and to live in a certain way that allows for me to be comfortable, and yet in all this narrative I feel oddly left out. I am invisiblized again. I only work at the crack of your whip not because I care to. My experience of desiring to achieve is overshadowed by your fear that I don’t have the correct desires or that I have no desires at all. Your fears and demands create such anxiety in me that my head swirls, I know something is not right, I know that I feel offended by many things, yet the relentless herding towards a satisfactory goal leaves me on my personal “trail of tears,” exhausted, confused, parts of me so undernourished that I become lost and disoriented in my own life.

I have been battling for my survival all my life. As I am disallowed any legitimate symptom I am now in a double bind because the rhetoric is designed in such a way that should I complain then I am just “buying into” a defeatist attitude or that the judgment is all in my head or that I lack empathy for those who are affected by my ADHD. It is expected of me that I will labour perpetually to become that which I will never be, a goal forever out of reach. To prove I’m normal.

Even though you can’t see all of the labours I put forth daily, I am labouring and it’s a heavy burden. What makes my burden unendurable are the needlessly ever-present insinuations and devaluations that like rain, weigh me down, often past the point of my endurance.

L. Friesen
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