You will find very little about ADHD on my blog, and this is for two reasons. The first is that I was diagnosed only two years ago, so while it has exerted psychic pressure on everything, it was an unknown quantity for most of my life. The second reason is that in spite of its penetrating influence, I’m not interested in having ADHD define my public persona. I do not want to be another ADHD blogger or podcaster, because frankly, I have “bigger” things to talk about. I do not say this to malign others who have chosen that path, or to minimize the impact of ADHD. I just have different priorities, and mostly regard neurodivergence as my own private struggle. However, I do need to talk about ADHD in this post, as I’m coming to understand how it reverberates through all of my work, and my relationships to people, especially in movement spaces.
First, a disclaimer. While I have done a good deal of research on ADHD, my story here is based mostly on my lived experience. It is specific to me, my own context and positionality, and I don’t claim to speak for anyone else. For that, I am also going to take out the “H” for this discussion, because I am not the hyperactive subtype.
There are four key “symptoms” — or perhaps “features” — of ADD that are pertinent. Let me start by saying that “ADD” itself is a misnomer. The first “D”, for deficit, is just plain wrong on its face. I do not lack any ability to pay attention or to sustain it. On the contrary, my ADD functions like an antenna, picking up on every little bit of sensory and semantic data from my surroundings, or bubbling up from my unconscious at any given moment. Most human beings naturally filter out all of this “excess” information, in order to focus on a particular task, and so as not to be overwhelmed. ADD makes this filtering difficult for me, and in fact, I pay too much attention.
This explains why, as a teacher, in spite of my vehement moral and ideological opposition to standardized testing, those days were always the most peaceful for me. Under the pretext of “talking means an automatic zero”, I was able to occupy the classroom without all of the usual “static” — the whispering, chattering, screaming, tapping pencils, knees hitting the undersides of desks, stomping — all the natural sounds of youthful humanity pushing back against enclosure.
Attention Overload Disorder (AOD) might be a more accurate name, except that I also reject the premise that there is anything wrong with me. Attention Overload Syndrome (AOS)? Better, but it is still missing something. A former therapist, in passing, shared with me some of the thinking about ADD, through the more equitable lens of “neurodiversity”. She said something about ADD being an evolutionary adaptation, that it would’ve been an asset for earlier humans, particularly the hunters among us. The hyper-attunement to her surroundings would’ve made the hunter great at tracking, due to the ability to notice and make meaning of small signs in the environment, to recognize and respond quickly to danger. So, maybe instead of “ADD” or “AOS”, we could call it “Hunter’s Mind”.
From this perspective, what I described earlier as the “intense psychic pressure” ADD exerts, is not quite right, either. What I experience is better understood as a tension between the “Hunter’s Mind” and life in an industrial capitalist society. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture to the industrial mode privileged those who were better at filtering. Furthermore, the cascading lattice of enclosure that structures capitalism forces and reinforces the need to “focus” and specialize for the benefit of production, and in the name of “efficiency”.
