Inside My Natural Brain

He asked if I’d ever been evaluated for ADHD. I think I literally laughed at him. It was absurd. I’d been an exceedingly good student. I could focus so tightly on things it was hard to get my attention away. There were never any discipline problems or anything like that. I was in my mid-thirties and overwhelmed with all the usual family, work, and so forth, that’s all.

Some background: I’d struggled for years drifting in and out of therapy with one therapist after another commenting on how – all things considered – I was so strong and doing remarkably well. Which bugged the heck out of me because I didn’t see anything that was that big a deal in my past, at least not that I hadn't already dealt with.

Yet they all found one or more traumas they knew were the problem. One unsuccessful drug after another for PTSD or depression or whatever other labels they chose, though nothing seemed to fit right. For a time Wellbutrin had helped a bit, but eventually increasing doses failed to keep up.

I took a break from medications and tried to keep myself together naturally – AKA sheer willpower and ignoring it all. A daughter, a career shift, and a multi-state move later I was back in a therapist’s office on the edge of meltdown.

This doctor though shooed away all the prior therapists' focus on trauma, zeroing in on that one drug that had helped a little. Apparently, Wellbutrin worked on the same receptors as ADHD medications, just to a much lesser degree. He pushed me to go through a battery of tests and issued surveys for various people in my current and past life.

Results were in and he was adamant that yes, ADHD was my issue, it had just become problematic later in life than most, but all the signs were there. I was ready to look for a different therapist but he dared me to try medication again. The worst that could happen is it didn’t help right?

I took my first dose of Vyvanse and a short time later had a moment of total panic. I thought briefly I’d gone deaf. Then I about jumped out of my skin at a sound. It was just a bird. Then a cricket had me jumping. Overall though, where was all the sound? Where was everything else? Why couldn’t I hear it all anymore?

If you’re confused, let me tell you, so was I. I understand now that for most people there is just what is going on at that moment, maybe a stray thought here or there. Of course, we should all have that basic situational awareness that pulls us back when we’re about to step off a curb in front of a bus but other than that it seems most people think in one instance. So what I was experiencing with the medication was normal thinking, just the here and now.

If that was so terrifying for me, so confusing, so odd that I thought I’d gone deaf, what had it been like for me before? I dare you to try to think about how you think, functionally, and explain it to anyone else, it's not easy. It took a while for me to come up with an analogy that while not entirely accurate can communicate the experience of living inside my natural brain pretty well.

Imagine floating in the center of a room, or personally, I see it more as a globe. Every surface is just a plethora of screens, like TV screens in all different sizes and they can shrink and grow in size as you focus on a particular one. Each one is always on, each on a different channel at full volume. The sound level is outrageous, like in a stadium full of screaming people with bullhorns.

The various channels are everything in my head. The 5th-grade-best-friend channel, the math channel, the college-boyfriend channel, the favorite-teddy-bear-when–I-was-three channel are all there. Every book I’ve ever read has its channel. So do movies, holidays, work projects, everything stays on and running in loops. My personal lifelong YouTube archive server. Something like this, magnified by a lifetime:

Most people at this point have a look of utter horror on their faces if we are talking live. They cannot imagine that being the experience of life. How does a person function in that chaos?

The trick to functioning is to focus really hard on the screen I want to interact with, usually the here & now channel, and tune out the others. Try listening to just one sound line in the above sample. It is exhausting. So. Very. Exhausting. Which is the only complaint for which I ever started therapy, mental exhaustion.

The more exhausted I got the more I ended up skipping from one channel to another. This meant I was frequently starting something then wandering off to do something else, maybe remembering later to come back and finish, maybe not. My husband had dubbed me “Distracted One” and was constantly herding me back to finish things.

In school and work, I had developed loose ways of keeping track and finishing things, but I had never put firm habits in place in my personal life to provide that structure and accountability. That lack of personal management skills is where things started to crumble and overwhelm me to the point I sought therapy.

The meds turned the extra channels off. Silence and peace were wonderful I guess. Not having to pour massive amounts of energy into every moment of every day just to get basic things done was great. I realized, however, the meds for me are to some extent only a band-aid. I researched new systems to stay on track and accountable, and eventually stopped the meds for a variety of reasons.

To my surprise, all the screens did not immediately pop back on. What was turned off by the meds seems for the most part to stay off unless I need something from that channel. Once on though, it’s back. There is also an ever-growing collection of new screens for each new experience in life.

While many of the systems I researched didn’t last long term, I’ve managed so far and have developed a better appreciation of the advantages to my natural thinking. Yes, to anyone asking why I wouldn't stay on the meds for simplicity, there are advantages to everything being always on – primarily, speed of retrieval and connectivity.

The single most valuable thing I appreciate about my natural thinking is connectivity. With "everything on" I often see connections, similarities, causalities, and other relationships that others do not immediately spot. That ability to tie something new or different to something I have experienced before makes me more empathetic to others and I learn new things faster and easier.

It was also my secret weapon for many years in an IT implementation role. I laughingly called myself the 'translator', that person stuck between the end-user and the tech who has to explain the other side to each of them. From the feedback I received, I was weirdly capable of coming up with crystal clear ways to explain how A to a user was like B to a tech, even when no one else could see common ground.

My favorite advantage is how fast I can retrieve information. Without the meds I kill at trivial pursuit, ask me anything and there is probably a channel running with the answer so all I have to do is look, no heavy thought required. Also, if stuff is never off it doesn’t get completely forgotten. I have a fabulous memory, it was mostly photographic as a kid and is still very strong.

I am trying to build stronger systems for managing life without meds. However, at some point I will seek out another medicinal vacation to turn off the screens and reset – it’s getting loud in here.

Credit for image in video: photo by That's Her Business on Unsplash