#4dhd

To me, my ADHD is best described if you are to imagine the brain as a factory with two major sections: the front is a conference area where the few managers that handle the conscious thought processes and active memory of the brain hang out, where decisions are made and actions are taken. The back is a warehouse teaming with factory workers completing the many tasks your brain is in charge of that you are not consciously aware of- storing information, organizing memories and data, etc etc.

The front part is usually pretty quiet. Incoming information is observed and temporarily stored or immediately passed on to the warehouse. The managers sometimes call for further information to be delivered from the warehouse, and then they make a decision of current or future action based on the information they have and continue blithely on with their day. Sure things don’t always work that smoothly, but that’s the general blueprint for how the brain works normally.

However, in my brain the wall between the front and back parts of the factory is not made of a nice, sturdy, sound-proof material. It’s made of rice paper. So all the noise of the factory overwhelms my poor front-office managers. They’re doing their best to make decisions and sort information and keep things organized, but they can barely hear each other over the noise of the all the many factory workers talking to each other in the back. Not that this yelling is even intelligible, but it is CONSTANT noise.

My poor managers are quite overwhelmed, and being overwhelmed means they’ve learned some bad habits in trying to do their job. In a normal brain, important information (names, dates, events, details of what is happening in a conversation) are kept neatly organized in the front office where they can be easily accessed for an extended period of time before being sent to be archived in the warehouse. My managers, overwhelmed and overworked as they are, only keep the things they personally are interested in. Everything else is immediately and unceremoniously dumped into the warehouse no matter how intrinsically important it is.

Because my managers are already overworked, anything that seems even slightly difficult is avoided like the plague. Homework? Put it off forever if possible. Important but difficult things? All put on the back burner because my managers are extremely stressed out by the constant noise of the warehouse behind them.

And as if that weren’t enough, sometimes those random factory workers think they have a great idea and will just dash into the front office, make a decision, press some buttons, and then run back out again before any of the managers realize what is happening. These rash decisions are of course not appreciated by any of the managers, but (once again) they are tired and overworked. They just aren’t fast enough to catch the factory workers and shoo them back into the warehouse before they do any damage.

Now as overworked as my poor managers are, they are not overly sensitive to the INFORMATION they handle, just the stress associated with it. I think that is a distinct difference that sets my ADHD riddled brain apart from someone whose brain has more aspergers’-like symptoms. My managers are not overwhelmed by external stimuli because that’s honestly a lot less annoying and overwhelming than the noise contained within the brain itself. They just hand it all off to the warehouse and move on with their day.

BUT they are so good at just passing everything they don’t want to deal with to the back office, that they just don’t retain important information very well. They’re so used to just getting rid of all that excess information that they get rid of a lot of things they shouldn’t. Not because they intend to cause harm, but because they have gotten into the bad habit of retaining only those things that make them happy and less stressed and getting rid of absolutely everything else.

This overwhelming desire to minimize stress means my managers get way too excited about anything that results in happy, non-stressful feelings. (Things they are interested in, predominantly.) And so they will happily authorize any sort of behavior that makes them feel happy, even if that means other people in a conversation get ignored or talked over. Even if that means doing things outside of the social norms. And of course you also have factory workers aiding and abetting this pursuit of happiness (because managers being happy makes their work less stressful)  by jumping in and making decisions for the managers before the managers have even had time to discuss whether it’s a good idea to do the thing or not.

In fact, with overworked managers I tend to rely more heavily on my factory workers. Instead of consciously thinking things through and requiring my managers to reach a consensus on this or that topic, I’ll let the managers give the information to the factory workers and wait until the factory workers start yelling hints through the rice paper divider and then go from there.

Anyway, the short of it is that my brain is not uncaring, it is just noisy and stressed out.