Introducing: I Am Chaos
Writing about the weird, wild symptoms of ADHD. With a little humor and a lot of compassion.
I do my best thinking right before I’m about to fall asleep, which isn’t great. It would be a lot more productive to have sudden epiphanies as I sit down at my desk in the morning, for example, when the whole day stretched out before me, vast with possibility. Instead, my aha moments occur in the dark, as my muscles relax into my mattress and my breathing becomes regular.
Over the years, I’ve learned my mind is strangest in those almost-asleep moments. Taffy-like and flexible. It’s a trickster mind. Bright lights flash behind my eyelids — pop, bam, whiz — as I wait for the energy to unwind. I call this time my unspooling.
Inevitably, my most interesting ideas poke out of their hidey-holes during my unspooling. These ideas are timid, and I now know I should be patient as they creep out, let themselves be known. I don’t want to scare them off. It’s a delicate business — I have to stay awake long enough to grab them and write them down but lay still long enough for the ideas to be formed enough to mean anything. Otherwise, I end up with cryptic notes to decipher in the morning. Squirrels were dancing around the bus stop, or What else can you waffle? I have no idea what any of that means.
A few weeks ago, I felt the familiar creeping of an idea during my unspooling. My heart-rate got faster instead of slowing. My mind began to race with words instead of colors. And this list came into focus in my mind:
See, I’ve wanted to write about the many weird symptoms of ADHD that crop up for folks like myself. We are, as a community, way more than just that stereotypical kid with ants in his pants. To varying degrees, depending on the person, we may deal with co-morbidities things like sensory overstimulation, facial tics, short-term memory loss, and time blindness.1 Diagnoses of ADHD overlap a ton with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and gender dysphoria. We have overactive emotional systems. We are overly impulsive, and tend to find ourselves struggling with addictive or dangerous behaviors.
As I lay in my bed, unraveling (in a good way), I realized that the best entry point for these phenomena is through me. So, for the next few months, I’ll be writing about all of the above. These pieces will be part personal essay and part reported journalism. For the bits I don’t experience myself, well, I’ll interview some other folks I know, love, and trust. I hope that, by sharing my own experiences and those of people who also live with the weirdness that is ADHD, I can bring us all closer to understanding the rich beauty of a neurodivergent mind. And how, despite common perceptions of neurodiversity, us weirdos can actually make the world a whole lot more interesting.
So, stay tuned. First up — I Am a Ticking Time-Bomb.
Love ya,
Mikhal
Don’t fight me on this. It’s real.
The list tells me you are a highly creative and sensitive person with a rich, complex inner world that doesn't necessarily align with the prism of the outer world, whose controlling ways may have made you believe you're too much, too this and that. In my view, we can never be too much! (I've been told I'm too sensitive and too emotional, without realizing those are my gifts!) We're just... different and unique! I look forward to reading your essays.