Mon Semblable, Mon Freud
Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 12:10AM in Cornelia Read "Inkblot #5" By Jason Krieger, print available here.
So I'm sitting here today filling out financial aid forms for one of my kids, which are due on Groundhog Day, and I keep catching myself wondering if that means I get another six weeks to file it all with the school if I spot the IRS's shadow or whatever
(of course not, I then suddenly remember. Again...), in addition to realizing for the bazillionth time how crappy I am at all this grownup follow-through/detail stuff. Oy, carumba.
And all THAT made me think back to a comment made by a new shrink whom I saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago. (Full confession: I have an extreme propensity for depression, inherited from both sides of my family, and not a little trouble with ADD cluster-fuckedness--just to complicate things. {Although, hey, I'm glad I didn't inherit whatever it was that made my Winthrop ancestress have to chain her husband to a tree whenever his "fits" came on.})
I liked this woman--which is not something I say about a lot of shrinks, or, indeed, about the foundational notions of talk therapy as practiced during the majority of the Twentieth Century (at least the way I've seen it dispensed, up close and personal.)
(see my second novel, The Crazy School, if you want to know from whence my disdain cometh--the "therapeutic" bits are really, really, really non-fiction).
The reason I liked this new chick is that she totally got that I was there for the meds, not to forge the uncreated conscience of my race in the smithy of my soul tri-weekly over the course of the next seven years @ $150.00 an hour, and she was totally copacetic with my preferred psych paradigm. Plus, she just generally struck me as a fine salty dame with a good head on her shoulders.
The only psychological observation she uttered, during this first meeting, was "Novelist? Jesus, that seems like a helluva profession to pick for someone of your organizational impairment. How's that working out?"
To which I replied, "not bad, as long as I go to my pal Sharon's house where my wireless connection doesn't work, in order to forcibly wean myself from my online Mah Jong Solitaire jones on a daily basis."
Which is not as much of a joke as it sounds. Well, actually, it's not a joke at all.
My ADD was diagnosed when I was thirty-five years old (depression I will address in a further post).
If this condition has never impacted your life directly, it's all too easy to buy into the pat, dismissive judgments with which I've heard it mischaracterised--usually boiling down to "A flavor-of-the-month pseudo diagnosis for ill-behaved children whose parents want to tranquilize them into drooling submission so they can enjoy their soap operas in peace" and/or "A new-fangled excuse for plumb laziness."
Here's what it feels like from the inside: Time is operated by a malicious deity with access to a wah-wah pedal, while objects (pens, socks, jewelry, essential tax documents, hiking boots, luggage, painstakingly typed thirty-five page term papers, sunglasses, ATM cards, family heirlooms, passports, Swiss Army knives, my children's mittens, pet hamsters, small appliances) fly away from me in flocks as if I'm magnetized to a polarity opposite that of every other molecule in the galaxy.
Also, teetering stacks of papers breed and spawn on all available horizontal surfaces while I sleep, my laundry pile consumes floor space like a flesh-eating bacteria, and a roving band of Kafkas hides my laptop every time I go back to the kitchen for more coffee--just to fuck with me.
My dorm room in boarding school, circa 1980 (photo: Bonney Armstrong)
Then there's this weird thing I've never found a name for, other than "tool blindness," which is when you put your pliers down on the workbench and then can't see them five seconds later amidst the suddenly random, depthless mosaic they've melted into. This turns everything into one of those old hidden-picture puzzles in doctor's-office copies of Highlights magazine, wherein all trees are filled with gumboots and wishing wells, and each suburban lawn hides a billy-goat, a 1973 Ford Pinto, and my checkbook.
Basically, it would come as no surprise if I were to learn that I have amnesia AND an evil twin. In fact, I think such a revelation would occasion, on my part, a rather profound sense of relief.
What you don't often hear about ADD, however, is that it also primes you for random instances of hyper-focus. This is a state of concentration so intense it renders you impermeable to external stimuli--think Superman in a Kryptonite sensory-deprivation tank--often for several hours at a stretch (e.g., the time last year when I was so engrossed in the stylistic restructuring of a particularly recalcitrant chapter-opening paragraph that I did not notice my monitor was on fire. No shit... like, bigass flames shooting out the airholes on top and stuff.)
Granted, this can be useful when writing a novel. Unfortunately, it can just as easily occur when you're doing something completely pointless (Mah Jong, op. cit.)
The ways this disorder has manifested in my life, from early childhood on, have earned me a monsoon of derision. Teachers and clinicians have labeled me--in turn--arrogant, passive-aggressive, contemptuous of authority, stupid, lazy, in denial, afraid of success, self-sabotaging, oblivious, irresponsible, and "pathologically averse to fulfilling [my] potential."
My ex mostly called me "the lightning rod for entropy in the universe."
I have tried to overcome my deficits with day-planners, oversized wall calendars, serially deployed alarm clocks, Post-It notes, talk therapy, a Palm Pilot, and even a Timex that beeped at me when I was about to forget an appointment. These objects (aside from the therapy) are no doubt still circling the lower 48 states on the seats of various buses, subways, and taxicabs--ill-fated Charlies doomed to ride forever on my cognitive MTA.
The only thing that really works is scrawling important stuff in big letters on my left hand. It's hard, after all, to forget your hand.
I have learned to buy only cheap earrings, second-hand winter coats, and waterproof watches--things easily replaced, things to which I won't form any sentimental attachments. My vacuum cleaner and wallet are, meanwhile, a noxious bright yellow.
(While it is difficult to misplace a bright yellow vacuum within the confines of one's own house [or, ahem,... living room], it is, alas, not impossible.)
In 1998, shrink-the-umpteenth asked me if I'd ever been tested for ADD.
And may rose-scented blessings rain softly upon her for all eternity.
One week later, I had a prescription for Ritalin (which is, by the way, SO not a tranquilizer.
The shrink said, "it's an amphetamine, basically."
I said, "Excellent. I love speed."
To which she replied, "Yeah, I bet you do." In a nice way. Supportive even.)
When people ask me if it works, I explain that the first morning I took it, I picked up the large box of Christmas-presents-intended-for-my-sister off my desk and mailed it to her, out in Berkeley.
It was April 17th. The box had been sitting there on my desk since the previous October (she was born on October 18th. And, um, okay... they started out as birthday presents.)
This does not mean Ritalin makes me by any means perfect--not even to the extent that your average sane person would ever ask me to serve as secretary/treasurer of ANYTHING.
It does, however, provide a floor. I can build on it.
Today I did not lose my iPhone, car, car keys, or shoes. I remembered my haircut appointment, got my nephew to school on time, and even recalled that this Saturday it was my turn to blog.
I have also had the same pair of sunglasses since March 8th of last year, my 45th birthday (a really nice pair of Ray-Bans. I bought them for myself as a sort of test--like how people fresh out of rehab are supposed to keep a houseplant alive for a couple of months, before they try dating).
I did, however, leave my favorite (second-hand) coat at my friend Sophie Littlefield's house about an hour ago.
And to go back to what the new shrink said, about being a novelist with an attention deficit? Hey, the act of writing is the ONLY arena in which I am organized.
It is a world where I have absolute control: the white screen, the 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. Chaos cannot touch me in writing land, for lo, I have parentheses and m-dashes, semi-colons and ellipses, and ye, though I walk through the valley of my own space-cadetness, these shall not fail me.
When I write, I am in absolute and total control: the Stalin of my own pristine snowy Kremlin, against whose ramparts entropy can hurl itself a million times over, before nonetheless expiring in defeat.
I think there is a strong correlation between neurochemical imbalance and creativity. ADD isn't something that shows up across the board, but depression is rampant among artists--especially writers.
Especially women writers.
I am not saying that you need to suffer to make art, but there are not a lot of happy-go-lucky novelists and poets. Vonnegut said that most of us wander around "like gut-shot bears," when out in public.
I am sure there are chipper, well-adjusted authors, but I'm for damn sure in no hurry to sit next to one of them at a dinner party (except for Pari).
Google "writer suicide" and you'll get 10,400,000 hits. There's even a Writers Who Committed Suicide Wikipedia article, which lists 277 authors. (A veritable global Who's Who of Depression: including Tadeusz Borowski, Richard Brautigan, Iris Chang, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Spalding Gray, William Inge, Yukio Mishima, Seneca the Younger, Anne Sexton, Urmuz, David Foster Wallace...)
I am very, very lucky. While I've struggled with depression since I was nine years old, I have never once become suicidal. Friends of mine have: of the three people in my college class who got published, only two of us are still alive.
Lucy is lost to us.
Major depression and suicide are so prevalent among female writers (especially poets) that one researcher has described the incredibly disproportionate incidence of both in that group, compared to the general population, as "The Sylvia Plath Effect."
There's a lot more I'd like to discuss about that--especially as to whether depression spawns writers or writing spawns depression--but I've babbled on enough here, so this is to be continued in two weeks.
To that end, as parting thoughts, I leave you with words from horror writer Nancy Etchemendy:
Over half the general population will experience two or more episodes of serious depression during a lifetime. Statistics gathered in a recent article in Scientific American indicate that the incidence of clinical depression among writers and artists may be as much as ten times greater than that among the general population. The incidence of suicide is as much as eighteen times greater. Why should this be the case? What exactly is depression? And what can we, as individuals who are apparently more vulnerable than most, do to protect ourselves from the specter of this often fatal illness?
From the abstract of a University of Kentucky Medical Center study of depression and creativity in women:
Female writers were more likely than members of the comparison group to suffer not only from mood disorders but from drug abuse, panic attacks, general anxiety, and eating disorders as well. The rates of multiple mental disorders were also higher among writers.... Creativity also appeared to run in families. The cumulative psychopathology scores of subjects... represented significant predictors of their overall creativity.
And from blogger grumpyoldbookman:
There is at least one piece of research which demonstrates that some (British) writers have a higher than average chance of being mentally ill. The research was carried out by Kay Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her study showed that 38% of a group of eminent British writers and artists had been treated for a mood disorder of one kind or another; of these, 75% had had antidepressants or lithium prescribed, or had been hospitalised. Of playwrights, 63% had been treated for depression. These proportions, as you will have guessed, are many times higher than in the population at large.
So, how high is your mental illness number, these days?
Reader Comments (27)
Hope today is one of those productive, find the car keys kind of days.
Sure with your were coming the SC Book Festival this year. It's been too long between visits.
You said: "So, how high is your mental illness number, these days?"************Actually, being unemployed since October, I have my good days and bad days. I just tell myself that the bad ones will pass eventually. Watching Veronica Mars helped the time pass. :)A couple years ago I skirted depression -- luckily didn't fall all the way in -- but I can completely understand it. Those who scoff at it as mind over matter are kidding themselves.Cornelia, you're the BEST and you take it with you wherever you go.Much love,PK the Bookeemonster
Cornelia, you could blame the coat leaving thing on the Bay Area weather. Freezing in the morning, hot in the afternoon. Right now in my car is my winter coat, two sweaters (one heavy, one not), a windbreaker, a wool scarf and a pair of sandals. I needed them all this week.
Honest, gut wrenching post. As always. Write your brains out.
And, no stress-pression for me at the moment, which is great after the last couple of years ;-)
But C, those are all the qualities I most love about you.
Wonderful, illuminating post. I don't have ADD, but now for the first time in my life I get what it is. Thank you for that - it will help me with all kinds of people I love.
I tend more toward the OCD, extreme focus kind of mental illness, which actually works well for me as a writer because writing is one of only three things that seem to balance my brain chemistry. Depression and bipolar disorder run in my family and I'm sure I would be dead of one or the other by now, if not for my addiction to dance and exercise. If I don't work out every day, I deteriorate so fast it's not funny. But it works, especially dance, and also meditation.
"Teachers and clinicians have labeled me--in turn--arrogant, passive-aggressive, contemptuous of authority, stupid, lazy, in denial, afraid of success, self-sabotaging, oblivious, irresponsible, and 'pathologically averse to fulfilling [my] potential."
I think I'm in love...
Glad you're getting the ADD under control. That sounds like a real bitch.
I've got family members who suffer from ADD, and I've been there every heartbreaking step of the way as they've struggled to get organized, tried their damnedest to not lose things and to not shoot themselves in the foot by being late somewhere. I stood outside a classroom and eavesdropped while a teacher called my son "stupid" (he has a genius IQ) and demoralized him beyond speech. (I had suspected something was going on because he came home destroyed every day. She knew he was "smart" and knew he was ADD, but she "didn't believe" in it. I asked her if she believed in diabetes, or heart defects, or hypertension, or cancer. That was the closest I ever came to actually hitting another person in the face. The principal of that school heard her comments, too, and, thankfully, fired her. We were not so lucky when he got to high school where it was hit or miss as to who was educated on ADD and who wasn't. It was also amazing to me, shocking really, that I could bring scads of scientific data to a teacher and she would dismiss it as me "making an excuse" for a "lazy" kid.)
He's done well, in spite of the ADD. Ritalin helped--I'm glad you've got someone smart in your corner. Plus, there's all of us, because like Dusty said, I think I'm in love.
Glad you've found someone you feel comfortable with - that's half the battle there.
However, I do have that focus problem . . . meaning the focus too intently on something problem. I'll be so wrapped up in thoughts I'll miss my freeway exit. I'll be so focused on writing that I don't hear anything--I play my music so loud because with it loud, I don't *hear* it, but if it's soft, I'm straining to listen. I forget to turn in forms at the school, forget to remind the kids to do the basics--brush teeth, do homework--I have forgotten to feed them on occasion, and they'll never let me forget it. I wait to the last minute on everything. I can't keep a day planner. I've tried. It last about a week. The one that lasted the longest is the iCal in my Mac, but I haven't looked at it in weeks . . .
My #2 daughter (almost 13), however, may have ADD. She is the most absentminded person I've met. My husband is, too. #2 daughter tests off the charts in English/reading--post high school level--and barely grade level in math. She forgets to get tests signed, give me important papers, or that she even HAS a test. She gets free dress days mixed up in school, tells me it's a minimum day when it isn't, or forgets that it's a minimum day (and forgets to give me the calendar, and I forget to ask her for it . . . ) and she also ALWAYS forgets to unplug her straightener. However, threats of throwing it in the trash has seemed to help . . . She's also very creative, incredibly talented artist--I mean, she draws PEOPLE . . . and they actually LOOK like people, with detail and proportions all correct, etc.
So I understand (a bit) about what you're going through. Toni and I have talked about it before, and I have an adverse reaction to putting #2 on any drugs, though we're watching closely for signs of depression. None in my family, but Dan has one really wack-o sister.
The second best is the school that wants my estimated taxes now, and the completed forms by February 15. Fortunately, my taxes are simple, I do them myself with a software package. If I needed an accountant, I'm not sure what I'd do.
Louise, if you make your brilliant posole again, you're gonna have lines of ADD writers around the block, beating on your doors to let them in...
Debby, I miss you too! (and think of you every time I see an author photo of Mr. Perfect.) Maybe SC will invite me back next year? I had *so* much fun there.
PK, all appendages crossed for you on the work front. These are scary times.
Terri, I'm so with you on keeping a comprehensive weather-wardrobe in the car. Only way to live around here. And I probably left without my coat because Sophie's husband is very courtly and hung it up in a closet for me. At my house, it would've just been thrown across the sofa, so I would've seen it on the way out.
Rae, we must fight the doom of stress-pression together, starting with coffee this afternoon...
Alex, my mother and brother are exercise fiends, and it helps them hugely. I'm more of an "I know I SHOULD..." person, and then it just all seems to overwhelming and I read instead, or play Mah Jong, which is hugely self-sabotaging. And as JT said, I think OCD and ADD are sisters, under the skin.
Dusty, I'm in love back atcha.
Toni, oh sweetie--thank you so so much for fighting the good fight on behalf of your kid. That's such a huge thing, and I love you for it.
JT, I think you're absolutely right about these two things being related. I've often said I'm "anal-intentive," I MEAN to be fiercely organized, but I'm such a control freak that my lack of perfection devastates me into perpetual chaos, or something.
Allison, you guys SO sound like my household. My daughter is supposed to be getting tested for ADD, if she remembers to get to the appointment this weekend in New Hampshire (she's missed it four times now.) And getting school forms turned in over the years made me a monster of guilt and self-recrimination. I'm also nervous about them prescribing meds for her. God knows I couldn't have been trusted with speed at fourteen--but I'm hoping that a boarding school she might imprint on adults who are less chaotic than I am. But you're very good to be watching for signs of depression--I think the two things are chemically linked, but ADD also just wreaks such havoc on your self-esteem.
Gotta say you've got me beaten with the Monitor Flambe, though (now considering chunks of lizard on a skewer, drenched in cognac and set afire. JT, what's the right wine for this meal?).
Toni, I would have slugged that pseudoteacher into the next century. High on my list of the despicable are those teachers who take a 'civil servant' view of the most important profession there is.
Over the last ten years I've worked with the idea that my brain chemistry betrays me periodically, and that I can't take some of its messages seriously. Believe it or not, something this simple has helped a whole lot. But getting there was a bear, yes, of the gutshot variety.
Thank ghod you have courage, lady.
All that to add this: My heart goes out to those kids who genuinely need the ADD diagnosis. But many of the kids who get it will FLAT OUT TELL YOU that their parents have a Dr. who is a family friend, and they want their child to have every possible advantage (you know, 'cause they can't do it on their own...), so they get their buddy to write the diagnosis and the scrip. It's really frustrating for me, because I know that:A) the kids that don't need it are only getting a crutch that will actually HINDER their ability to cope when the real world hits after high school, andB) anyone that does that (you'd be shocked how many kids will admit to it) for their children is insulting the hell out of the parents of children who are legit ADD/ADHD.
Jake, I agree with you about meds being flung out willy-nilly. There are definitely people who have been over-medicated for various things, and I trust you on parents giving their non-ADD kids Ritalin etc. as a "leg up," but more often I've seen people who are in crying need of meds who either eschew them because they think it's an indication of weakness, or who have shrinks who don't believe in them, or who think all meds are "tranquilizers" and don't get why people might benefit from them. Sometimes I get people who say they just don't believe in drugs, because they're not natural. I ask them if they'd want a cast if they broke their leg, or insulin if their pancreas stopped working. Kind of stops them short.
Good for you for recognizing that you DIDN'T need those three medications, and weaning yourself off them. It's a very personal decision, and only you can know what's right for you. I feel lucky that we have some newer-generation things that don't have the heavy-duty side effects just about everything did in the fifties and sixties. The side effects of Thorazine are particularly hard to deal with--not least tardive dyskinesia.
As for me, I wish someone had diagnosed me in my teens, rather than my thirties, instead of telling me I just needed to "pull myself up by my bootstraps," etc., all the time. Forget bootstraps, I could never find the BOOTS.
Thank you.
But another thing that comes up a lot because boys are, on average, more rambunctious, is that girls tend to be underdiagnosed. The school librarian who founded my daughter's elementary school said she wanted to offer a single-sex education for that age of girl, because she'd seen so many of them fall through the cracks, especially with learning disabilities. She said that girls tend to be diagnosed with significant learning issues an average three years later than boys do. And I would imagine it's also harder to diagnose true ADD without the hyperactivity component, which I think is also more common in boys than girls.
Anyway, there's no blood or litmus test for any of this stuff, and it's all so subjective.
That's one of the things that was really frustrating for me about a lot of the therapy I've seen... it just strikes me as a really easily swayed discipline, as a whole, since most of it's not based on empiricism, but opinion--though that opinion can strike a chord with the zeitgeist and seem like unassailable truth for decades, at times, before being shown to be flawed and merely faddish (the clinical ideas about the basis of autism being bad mothers being a particular case in point, which of course really gets my back up.)
I knew you were a fantastic writer, but now I know I'll buy everything you write.
My youngest son has ADHD--thank goodness for the inventors of Focalin (he can't take Ritalin or Adderal)
He has the "hyper focus" sooooooo much. Sometimes, this can be channeled and he will practice music (piano or violin or drums or harmonic) for HOURS. That can be a problem when I'm trying to get him to school on time.
He, too, has had his share of evil teachers, and a couple of gems. Thank goodness for the gems.
One doctor described ADD as walking into a store with a thousand tvs on, all on different channels. I don't know how he, or anyone, deals with it every day.
Kay, thank you so much, and good for you for being such a great mom! The hyper-focus thing definitely messes with my punctuality, as well. I think it has something to do with difficulty making transitions, too, though it's hard to nail that down in an explainable way.
What you wrote about people who are artistic really hits home. I've have known a number of people who have so much going for them. They do and think things I have never thought or can do. The human mind is so complex, I would like to know more about the brain and how it works.
Being able to write is so amazing to me.
I can't *believe* you used that pic I took of your dorm room! :D
I'm very proud of you and everything you've managed to accomplish. I think sometimes you forget how far you've been able to travel... and how amazing you can really be.
Hugs, Bonney