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2012-08-18
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2012-08-22
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The Things You Say

Summary:

So here is the thing: People are writing Stiles, who is a person with ADHD. People are not, and I want you to pay attention, because this is important, people are not spending the time to research basic things like how his medication works or how his life is affected by his disorder.

Notes:

Thanks to everybody on Tumblr, LJ and DW who encouraged this and shared their own experiences. Once AO3 stops being a butthole it will be posted and updated there, since we both have AO3 accounts.

I feel like I'm gonna have epilepsy thoughts when I watch season 2, but I'm not going to bother with them yet. Most of you know my twin sister has had epilepsy since we were eleven months old. Her epilepsy, our older sister's epilepsy, and our first cousin's epilepsy were all triggered by infantile febrile seizures, so I uhhh kind of dodged a bullet there.

Chapter 1: You've Got to Pay Attention by Meg

Chapter Text

This is not: a medical paper, anything to rely on in lieu of actual research and talking to people who know what the hell they are talking about, a diagnosis or in fact anything that makes sense at all.

This is: an extended rant about how the internet is wrong, a personal essay about being a person with mental health issues, and a how-to guide on the minimum research standard when you're writing a person with mental health issues, or, come to think of it, any experience you have not had yourself. Mostly it is about mental health privilege, let's be fair.

We're going to be focusing on the Teen Wolf fandom, since that has a character that is canonically ADHD and has anxiety issues, and the amount of writers who dump out a box of cliches about Crazy People and stir them around is actively making me want to punch people in the face.

I (Meg) have never been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, although going by family history I could probably argue my way into getting tested. I have been diagnosed with chronic depression and generalized panic disorder with a side order of panic attacks, although that last one has calmed down quite a bit.

Sami has been diagnosed with ADHD and will be focusing on the Actual User Experience. Meg's going to talk about how to research things like this, and how this, respectfully dealt with, could make a better story.

So here is the thing: People are writing Stiles, who is a person with ADHD. People are not, and I want you to pay attention, because this is important, people are not spending the time to research basic things like how his medication works or how his life is affected by his disorder.

Guys. Guys. You can't do that. It is not okay. I literally cannot express how not okay this is. Like, all right.

Let's say someone wrote a fic about the Hale pack actually being Native American. This a pretty amazing idea, and sometimes I stop and admire it for a while, although I don't have the time or energy to write it myself, and also I'm afraid of accidentally being an asshole, or more than I usually am at least.

The thing is, if you wrote the Hale pack being Native without researching Native culture and experiences, it would be a pretty asshole thing to do, right? Writing about a person with mental health issues, without taking five fucking minutes on Google to fact check, is also an asshole thing to do.

When you write about something you don't know about, without talking to someone who knows what they're talking about, you are going just rely on your cultural and personal impressions of what that group is like. You are going to write based on stereotypes and prejudices. You can't fucking help doing it, and it is absolutely not okay. I don't really have words to express how not okay that is. You have a responsibility to not hand out disinformation. You have a responsibility to think about what you're writing. This is not a cheap vehicle for angst, or humor, or plot points. This is someone's experience. You have a responsibility to respect that.

Now granted, speaking as a person with mental health issues, sometimes it is kind of funny, in a terrible way. Sometimes you hit the point where you laugh instead of crying. Sometimes you laugh because if you take this seriously the disease, the disorder, is going to win and by God it's not gonna do that to you. The distinction I am trying to make that it is one thing for me, the person most involved with my disorder, to make jokes about the brain weasels singing the You're Wasting Oxygen song. It would be a dick move, a terribly hurtful one at that, for some stranger off the internet to make that same joke when I'm already barely hanging on as it is.

I'm not trying to say, Oh my God, you guys, being an asshole about people with depression or ADHD or bipolar is just as terrible as being an asshole to a person of color! For one thing, there's different degrees of functioning within the spectrum of mental health issues, and for another, my experience with mental health issues as a white woman with a supportive family and relatively good access to medication and therapy is going to be light centuries better than a person of color with no support system and hideous access to medication and therapy. I am trying to say that a person without mental health issues is in a position of privilege over someone with them, and needs to think about that really hard before writing or talking about it.

I've been pretty open about my struggle with mental health, because, let's be fair, things are improving a lot but even fifteen or twenty years ago, depression wasn't a thing that people really talked about. Panic attacks weren't really a thing people discussed. And it would have helped me a lot if someone had stepped up in my social circle and said, This is not your fault. There is a way to manage this. You can get through this. And I don't know if things happen for a purpose or not, but I like to think they do, at least. And by God if the purpose of me going through that was to be a warning to others, I am gonna stand on that mountain with a bullhorn, warning the fuck out of everybody I see.

This is what we're going to talk about:

1. Minimum research standards when writing about a character with a brain disorder, and how to do that research so you're not losing readers because they're staring blankly at the screen wondering how the hell anybody doesn't know that Adderall is a restricted drug. (Pro tip: You cannot go to the pharmacy and get a new bottle unless it is time for your refill. Period. End. Full stop.)
2. The difference between how brain drugs work, and how people apparently think they work, which is vaguely hilarious and definitely horrifying. (Another free tip: Sami tells me that one of the actual tests they use to diagnose ADHD, since you unfortunately cannot open someone's skull and dig around to find out what is going wrong with them, is the reaction to the drug. If it affects you like an upper, you don't have ADHD weasels. Which, hurray, but back to the drawing board. If you actually calm down, you have ADHD.)
3. The actual day-to-day grind of living with a brain disorder, which, in summary, sucks Satan's hairy balls, and specifically how this would affect a character like Stiles and the people around him.
4. Sami describes the actual ADHD experience.
5. Why you should care about this, besides not being a dick. There are some legitimately good stories waiting to be told about this, guys. Let's tell them.

Chapter 2: So Your Character Has ADHD: What Does That Mean?

Summary:

What ADHD is, why it is, how it's diagnosed.

Chapter Text

Since lazulisong is taking on the issues regarding why it's so important to know something about ADHD if you're planning to write a character who has it, I get to focus on what that actually means.

Now, my experience is going to be different from other people's experiences of ADHD - I'll explain more about that in a moment - but, happily for relevance to Teen Wolf fandom, at least, Stiles appears to manifest it more-or-less exactly like I do, so I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what's going on with his.

So, let's start with the condition itself, in the helpful format of a Q&A.

What is ADHD?

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.  You may also hear people talk about ADD, which simply stands for Attention Deficit Disorder, but that's sort of a sign that they might not really know what they're talking about, because ADD is an out-of-date term, really.  ADD is kind of a subset of ADHD; it's generally used for people who don't strongly manifest hyperactivity or impulsivity.  It's still the same disorder, because it has the same physical cause.

Wait, what?  Isn't ADHD a behavioural problem?

The short answer is: "No."

The slightly longer answer is: "No, and bite me."

The longer, and more helpful, answer, is quite a bit longer.  However, ADHD is in fact a medical condition with physical causes, and is not caused by bad parenting or too much sugar or anything like that.  (Although those things can cause misdiagnosis by lazy or incompetent medical personnel.)

Okay, so what does cause it?

I'm going to go with the massively simplified version of the neuroscience behind it, because brains are weird and unsimplified discussion of them gets very complicated indeed.

Brains are made up of neurons.  Neurons connect with each other to transmit electrical impulses, and these convey all the vast, vast quantities of data your brain is processing at any one instant.

The outside of a neuron is a protein sheath (like a protective coating) which limits the electrical impulses so that the transmissions are controlled.

If the sheath isn't thick enough, it's like the neurons short-circuit.  The electrical impulses hit too many neurons, aren't very controlled, and your brain becomes a sparking, chaotic mess.

The term for this is ADHD.

The reason why ADHD is mostly associated with children is that something like 70% of children grow out of it in their teens, and many more find the symptoms reduce.  According to my psychiatrist, the reasons for this aren't completely known, but the popular theory is that the hormone surge at puberty somehow prompts the protein sheath to thicken.  This causes the brain to stop sparking and behave more normally.

This did not happen for me.  (Nor, it seems, has it happened for Stiles Stilinsky.)

ADHD has a genetic component, and is more prevalent in nomadic societies; there's some evidence in support of the Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis.  Essentially, it suggests that ADHD is an adaptive mechanism that is advantageous to hunters in hunter-gatherer societies.  (But unhelpful in geometry class.)

What was that you were saying about impulsivity and hyperactivity?

There are three primary... categories, let's say, of ADHD symptom manifestation.  Any given person will manifest their own combination of the three.  They are:

- inattention (the inability to stick with a task that isn't sufficiently interesting)
- hyperactivity (the inability to sit still)
- impulsivity (some of us have a tendency to make decisions on the spur of the moment rather a lot)

These turn up pretty independently.  Each individual will have a different degree of each, or may not have one or two symptoms at all, but if you have even one at disorder levels, it's ADHD.

How do they tell? How does diagnosis work?

Diagnosis for ADHD has stages.  It starts with, essentially, a questionnaire, often levelled at your parents if you're a child.  (I was an adult, but the diagnosis appointment still required I bring someone else who knew me well, so the psychiatrist could ask someone else about how I seemed, too.)

If your psychiatrist reckons you have ADHD, you then get the fabled prescription: commonly for amphetamine salts, which is what Adderall is and also what I take, so that's what I'll talk about.  I was given a trial month.  (It allows time to adjust, etc.)  After that point there may be adjustments to get you on the right dosage, but the first few weeks are enough for the final diagnostic test, which is the drugs themselves.

If the drugs work like speed is supposed to, if it amps you up and gets you buzzing... you don't have ADHD.  ADHD drugs, for ADHD people, provide calmness and focus but not wakefulness.  (When I'm short on sleep, I struggle to stay awake when my meds kick in.  When, a few months ago, I spent a week in hospital because of a broken leg, that was the only time of day when I could sleep.)

A psychologist I know told me about a patient of his who had serious attention problems.  He asked the guy if he'd ever taken speed.  Yes, once.  What happened then?

Well, he sat down and watched the cricket.

For hours.

He hated cricket - he thinks it's so boring.

That, folks, is ADHD.

Next, I'll cover what it's like from the inside; how it feels, what it's like to live with, what we do (and don't) do in the course of living as hunters in a world built for farmers.

 

If you have any questions, post them in comments; I'll try to answer them, and edit this where necessary.

Chapter 3: Minimum Research Standards by Meg

Summary:

Research is like an iceberg: You should see about ten percent of it in the actual story and the other ninety-odd percent should float invisibly beneath the surface. Waiiiittttiiiiing.

Chapter Text

Just a note, this section has a GIANT ILLUSTRATION so if you plan to download to ereader uhhhh AO3's *.epub files don't grab the images, even though the *.pdf versions do. It's one of the many, many mysteries of AO3. If you're addicted to *.epub like me, I guess download the PDF, convert in Calibre?

Also I have enough action points left to either write this or respond to comments individually, so I'm going to make some general comment replies here. Sorry guys! WE ARE READING THEM ALL AND SAMI IS RESPONDING LIKE A BOSS. I used up most of my action points at work today repeating "We can't call your daughter right now, darling, it's too early." like fifteen hundred times in the same tone of cheerful firmness instead of shrieking like a harpy, clawing my face, and running away.

(Action … points …? you say.

SEE, I reply, everybody starts out the day with a set number of actions they can do! But if you're having problems with your health you a) have less to begin with and b) use up a lot dealing with the shit going on, so after a while you learn to budget them. I will explain at great length to anybody who really wants to hear me talk about it, but that's not really the point here.)

A couple of people asked if I had / was planning to do rec lists with Stiles and ADHD. Well, from now on I might try to tag for it on pinboard (https://pinboard.in/u:lazulisong), but I haven't so far. The sad truth of the matter is that Sami mentioned the inaccuracies and then I couldn't unsee them, everywhere, and it was like when you notice one pattern a little off in a fabric or something.

Also -- and I seem to have a lot of people agreeing with this -- if a fic doesn't have Stiles dealing with his ADHD and stuff we kind of assume it's AU Stiles and derp on regardless. Or, honestly, we're so used to it never being a thing that we just kind of assume it's there but invisible. Oh, privilege, in how many ways do you suck.

And I hate, I despise, I abhor, I loathe with the flaming despair of a thousand thousand dying suns, fics that are about an issue just to be about the issue. If you're gonna talk about something, talk about it. Those of you on Tumblr and LJ/DW may remember the fiasco that was that fic I found about how Asexuality Is Okay and Also a Thing. My roommate almost took the internet away from me.

So, uh, probably not. It would probably make me kill people with my mind and I'm not supposed to do that anymore. Apparently it makes me too much like a supervillain and since I already have a basement lair and like cats a lot, it freaks people out.

Thank you so much to everybody who commented on the last sections! WE ARE SO EXCITED ABOUT IT WE CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT. At the risk of sounding like a business team building leader, there has been a lot of excellent discussion and I hope it continues. I'm actually going to address some of the points in a later chapter, and so is Sami.

And finally the disclaimer you've all been waiting for: Neither of us are medical professionals and none of this is meant for medical advice; if you recognize yourself in any of these things, hie yourself to your medical professional and prepare to spend the next six months repeating "I want to get tested for ADHD/depression/anxiety disorders", and good luck and we'll be thinking good thoughts.

MINIMUM RESEARCH STANDARDS AND YOU

The absolute minimum research standard is five minutes on Wikipedia. If you only do that, you will still be judged but you probably won't be flinging absolute lies around. Probably. There's a reason why you aren't actually supposed to use Wikipedia on real research papers.

But I don't want to be judged, you say. It burns me in my soul and also I don't want to be an asshole!

Well, then.

So obviously you aren't doing this for a living (man, if someone knows how to get paid to write Teen Wolf fanfiction about Stiles, sign me the fuck up) and obviously the only grading you're going to get is the judging, anonymous stares of the internet if you get something wrong, but in the interests of a) not being an asshole b) not willfully passing along false information and c) writing a better story, some research for anything you don't know about personally is gonna be required.

If you were in Star Trek fandom and you remember Graduate Vulcan for Fun and Profit, I researched a lot for that, and I am actually one of the lazier researchers I know. For that particular story I spent a lot of time on Star Trek wikis, reading official fanworks about Vulcan, and also some extremely horrible and utterly depressing books about famine and genocide. Then I didn't actually use the famine research much at all, which was almost worse.

I should mention right now that in research I am also including 'just reading a hell of a lot about everything, all the of the time' because that actually helps. Like, I could, right now, sit down and lie about the First World War and most people wouldn't notice the difference, because I have read a hilarious and useless amount about it. (The ones who did would judge me loudly and forever, and I would deserve it.) Reading a lot, and thinking about it, is important to anybody who wants to be a good writer. It's the background color that simmers through and makes things believable.

I think everybody who wants to write well should read a lot. I'm pretty loud about this opinion, because I believe and maintain that reading good writing improves your own writing. Well, once you get past the stage where you read a book and for the next week everything you write sounds like that author. Which is also valuable, like an artist copying pictures or doing still lifes, but genuinely annoying six months later when you go to look at the thing you wrote.

Research is like an iceberg: You should see about ten percent of it in the actual story and the other ninety-odd percent should float invisibly beneath the surface. Waiiiittttiiiiing.

Plus, it's not like you're never gonna use your notes ever again. Considering the amount of fic some writers in this fandom are pushing out, one good research binge should save them about three months of work overall, and as a shockingly lazy person that is a benefit I approve of.

And I'm not saying you need to be the world's leading expert on the thing you're writing about! It's just, and I will hammer this in every time I have a chance, you need to know enough to at least avoid making factual errors. This is not like werewolves, where if you keep within the canon nobody can be hurt by you claiming that Alpha wolves can get pregnant every August that there's a blue moon, or that wolfsbane causes Beta wolves to go into embarrassingly kinky pon farr. This is an actual thing with actual facts you need to be aware of.

I don't think anybody is going to care if you gloss over Stiles' ADHD with a line or two like,

Stiles heard his phone beep, and flailed over Derek -- who only snuffled as Stiles fell over his back and to the edge of the bed -- and over to it. "TAKE YOUR MEDS DUMBASS" flashed on the screen. Stiles groaned and half fell from the warm bed the floor, and half stumbled, half walked to his backpack for his pill box.

"Do you have any water in this pit?" said Stiles. Derek snored. Stiles sighed, dry swallowed the pill, and went back to bed before Derek took over all of it.

"You're like a cat," he said into Derek's warm shoulder.

"Take that back," said Derek, but he didn't move away.

What is going to drive us up the wall and make us judge you silently but no less hatefully from the glow of our computer screens is when you say things like "Stiles was super maniac from his medication. He'd taken a week's worth of pills, but that was all right, he'd just pick up more tomorrow."

(As an aside: I actually don't think Stiles would even try to get extra pills, since he's responsible to a fault and not making people worry is an obsession with him. Like, he might save up some pills by not taking them on the weekend so he could have an extra if he really needed it, but anything that would make his dad think he was abusing the pills would be right out. YMMV! This has been Meg's Opinions On Stiles.)

So how do you research this?

ONE GIANT ASS COLLAGE

[IMG: a collage in six parts: 1. The first page of results for 'adhd' in Google. 2. The first page of results for 'adderall' in Google. 3. The search results page for 'adhd' on the Multnomah County Public Library page (Portland, Oregon). 4. A bookshelf at Powell's on Burnside, Portland, Oregon, showing a lot of books about ADHD. 5. A shot taken at Powell's on Burnside showing two books: The Pill Book and the PDR: Pocket Guide to Prescription Drugs, 9th Edition 6. A shot taken at Powell's on Burnside showing a closeup of a shelf holding a DSM-IV and assorted reference materials.]

Your first resource is Google, and the first link there is the National Institute of Health pages about these subjects. NIH pages are designed to offer clear information about health issues with further references for more information, and uhhh are in my experience less likely to be changed by trolls than Wikipedia, which is the second link and also a pretty valuable resource. USE CAUTION when going through pages. I did a lot of googling over medications when I was trying to get away from Lexapro's primary side effect of being like half my actual income after rent, and it was pretty hairy.

(another aside: I was going to recommend crazymeds.us but it looks like they don't do ADHD spectrum pills. However if you feel the need to put Stiles on an anxiety pill -- like he's having a panic attack and he needs a Xanax or whatever, I found them pretty helpful when it came to that sort of thing. It's run by people who take the drugs and probably not actual medical professionals, so again, be careful.)

Also hey, someone wrote a guide to ADHD and Adderall that wasn't us! It's awesome! It makes at least five hundred percent more sense than Meg does!

There are approximately fifteen quintillion forums, message boards and mailing lists for any brain disorder. Venture at your own risk.

Your second, or your first depending on how you like to do your research, is of course your local library, assuming you still have one. Multnomah County is a pretty big system, so I probably have more books readily available than the average bear. However! Even when I lived outside of a metro area, our town library was able to do interlibrary loan for books they didn't have in stock. I can search and place holds on books from my home computer and Multnomah County Library will send a book to be picked up at my nearest library, so instead of womanfully hauling out to Sellwood via bus, I just have to walk about half a mile to Belmont and schlep the books back home from there. It's pretty fucking magical. They do home delivery too but I'm too cheap to pay for shipping.

Your third resource is of course BOOKSTORES. These shots were taken at Powell's on Burnside, because I like to rub it in that I can go there and Sami can't, but even chain bookstores have a pretty good selection on hand. You can always flip through and then request the interesting ones from the library. (Or used from Amazon or Powell's.) NOTE: I looked for stuff about teenagers with ADHD specifically and had to go to Childcare in a different section, away from the main Psychology section.

The last two photos are specific resource books that you should be able to look at or use at a library. I'm pretty sure Multnomah County Library keeps their DSM-IV in the reference section, so you'd probably have to go to the actual library for it. (It is a very expensive book.)

(Most medium to large cities will also have dedicated medical libraries where you can read and print out journal articles and such. We're again lucky to have the Oregon Health Sciences University here in Portland, and my sister has printed out reams of information on stuff about epilepsy and her diet for the cost of the paper.)

The reference books on pills are VERY VERY USEFUL. They describe how the pill looks, what it does, what it's designed to do, and, pay attention please! the side effects and interactions of the medication. F'instance, and I'm gonna give Stiles a pass on this because he's a sixteen year old boy and I was terrible about taking pills when I was sixteen, but alcohol is contraindicated for just about every psychoactive drug ever made. (Mostly they make you a really easy drunk, since your liver is already shrieking FUCK YOU at processing the drugs in your system as it is. But weird, weird shit can happen when you mix alcohol and pills.)

 

There's I think fifty books that I am aware of about non-medication management of ADHD, ranging from organizational tactics to OMG YOU GUYS RITALIN WILL KILL YOUR CHILD, GO GLUTEN FREE INSTEAD (...diet therapy is a valid treatment, she says hastily, as her twin managing her epilepsy with extreme low carb looms ominously behind her). I'm sure there's more, but the ratio of sensible and realistic to underpants-on-head is depressing.

And of course, your final and best resource is people you know with ADHD! I think the first thing I thought when I heard Sami was into Teen Wolf was, MWAHAHAHA A PERSON TO FACTCHECK FOR ME. People like to talk to a sympathetic audience, and it's easy to ask someone -- politely, children -- if they mind terribly did you use them as a ADHD-picker. Get a beta, cultivate that beta, feed that beta ice cream, chocolate and beer.

NEXT UP: Sami's thing about living with ADHD probably, after that probably me and general Living With Brain Weasels. I had a giant revelation about Derek and also Stilinski-papa, so be scared.

Chapter 4: ADHD: The Subjective Experience

Summary:

In which Sami tries to convey the essence of a state of being, without the use of telepathy. For the aspiring writer of an ADHD character, this hopes to be a way for you to be able to imagine the way that filters their perceptions of the world.

Notes:

Please, seriously, remember that my experience is not The Universal ADHD. While I think it should be a reasonable guide to writing a character like Stiles, do not assume that any other person with ADHD experiences it just like this. Questions in the comments are welcome.

Chapter Text

Let's start with the most difficult, and yet one of the most important, questions about ADHD from the perspective of someone wanting to write fiction about it.

What does it feel like?

This answer will be heavily dependent on metaphor and analogy, and not everything I say will have universal applicability. As I've said, Stiles manifests his ADHD outwardly a lot like I do, so my experience is probably pretty solid for this context, but I am not, not, not laying down The Gospel of ADHD. I welcome other people's experiences as have already shown up somewhat in the comments.

So. I'm going to throw down some metaphors and analogies, and hopefully at least one of them will make sense to the hypothetical non-ADHD-having person reading this who wants to write better fiction.

--

Imagine that the human brain is a computer, with rather limited RAM. Now, a normal brain works by loading one program to work on at a time, so the computer runs well, but if they need to change programs, they have a bit of lag time because they need to close that program an open the new one.

This is why context-switching and too much multitasking hurts productivity and focus for normal people.

Now, the ADHD system loads every program at once, simultaneously. You can't close any of them, but the extra system load clogs the RAM so that the computer is lagging constantly. Add to that, from time to time the computer will switch between programs seemingly at random, and you can't control it.

If you have ADHD medication, then it lets you close at least some of the programs you aren't needing right now, which frees up some RAM, and it gives you control of the magical Alt-Tab that lets *you* decide which program is going to be active right now. You can finally get some work done.

--

The world surrounds you with input. Sounds, smells, sights, all around you. Things move. People move. Birds call, dogs bark. Apparently, normal people ignore most of that.

ADHD people, sometimes, can't.

If something moves, you notice it. You hear every sound, track the movements of the people in your vicinity, you can't just ignore anything, ever, at all. You can't turn your attention to one thing because your attention is always on everything.

Medication lets you apply filters. For me, that stuff is still there, but it becomes peripheral, ignorable.

But sometimes, it's not that you attend to everything. Sometimes, something can catch your attention so completely that you stop noticing anything else at all. You don't notice that you're hungry, or thirsty, or that you've been needing to pee for the last four hours. (Many ADHD people, I've noticed, seem to develop extremely good bladder control.) There is only this thing, and it is the universe.

The evolutionary adaptation to hunting theory provides a good way to look at this, I think: in general, the ADHD brain is scanning every input channel for signs of threat or prey. If something engages the mind sufficiently to trigger the impulse that this, this is what we are hunting, then nothing matters but the hunt.

In Teen Wolf terms, that's how I read what's going on when Stiles does things like go on an all-night research bender. Because I have pretty much totally done that.

And it does have advantages. For research like Stiles tends to do and some topics I've covered myself, in the past - the multi-stream focus thing is very useful. Because it lets you look at half a dozen sources at once, flicking between them, keeping them all in mind at once so you can cross-reference and correlate and sort through for the useful points, eliminating the questionable and the not-useful-at-all.

--

If Stiles were a werewolf, he could be terrifying, because he would miss nothing, ever, at all.

--

Taking the medication can be an odd feeling. Normally I take my first dose not long after I wake up, so I don't really have time to get truly head-buzzy, but if I don't take it until later, for some reason, I often find I can feel my meds kicking in, and that feeling is very, very weird.

It's like the world simultaneously slows down (even though it didn't, before, feel like it was moving) and comes into focus. The best analogy I've yet worked out is when ships drop out of warp in Star Trek.

At warp, everything looks pretty static, for the most part, except that outside the windows the stars are streaking past. When they drop out of warp, there's no visible signs of deceleration inside the ship, but the stars slow down and stop and are suddenly each clearly visible, in focus.

Deceleration without motion. Things in sharp focus that weren't exactly out of it. That's meds kicking in.

--

It's hard to explain - after a lifetime of people telling me, "Just concentrate!" - what it feels like when I try to concentrate, to focus, and can't. Because to people who don't have ADHD, forcing yourself to do something tedious is... possible.

I will give a concrete example.

The first time I had a post-diagnosis exam, I took it in Special Conditions, because I had a fresh diagnosis for a learning disability, and my university takes that kind of thing seriously. Because distractions would be problematic for me, I took the exam in a classroom, alone, with only the invigilator (one of the department secretaries and a lovely, lovely person).

I'd taken my medication, of course, but it only does so much.

An hour or so into the exam, I found myself looking at the next question, and thinking: "I can't do this. I can't even understand this question, let alone answer it."

Because looking at the question booklet, running my eyes over the questions ahead, I couldn't understand them at all. I could look at any individual word and know what the word meant, but strung together, they were incomprehensible.

So I took a break. I was alone in the room and the limitations were on things that counted as cheating, so I stood up from my chair, walked around the room a little bit, talked a tiny bit to the invigilator, drank some water. I might have looked out the window for a minute, watched the sun sparkle on the river, I'm not sure.

Then I sat down and read the questions again, and this time, I thought: "Oh, I know this. This is easy."

Because my brain was ready to focus again, at least for a while. I'd cycled through other things and rebooted a bit, and I could do it. Whereas before, when my concentration span burned out, it didn't matter how hard I tried to force myself to focus on something, I was not capable of actually doing it. I couldn't parse a single sentence, let alone understand and answer complex questions.

ADHD produces hard limits on how long you can "just concentrate".

--

I can't sit still for very long. It used to be a sort of running joke in my family - I'd fidget, guaranteed. Even if most of me was still, my feet would be shifting, moving, constantly, usually without my being aware of it.

A friend and I played a game for a while, not long before I got my diagnosis (it was part of what led to us getting me tested). The game was simple: we'd be on the couch, and I'd lie down with my head in her lap, and she'd time how long I could hold still.

Now, this was a challenge, and normally, I'm kinda competitive, and I will go to great lengths to win. Five minutes would have been victory.

I never once made it to a full one minute. Sixty seconds is longer than I am capable of keeping still.

It's hard to describe the feeling of needing to move without making vibraty, wavey gestures - it's not pain, exactly, but it's sort of similar. The feeling you get when you touch something hot, or something pokes you, and you reflexively move away - it's like that. The bone-deep compulsion to move is there, in the absence of triggering pain.

There are all sorts of ways you could experiment with experiencing this, I suppose, involving too-hot taps or holding a handful of ice cubes, but I'm a bit concerned about someone injuring themselves in the process, so I'm going to encourage you all to just imagine it, instead.

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Next time I post: ADHD Lifestyle, or: Learn To Love Your Pill Box.