Connective Cube

Self-diagnosing has a long and popular history that pre-dates having an eMedical doctor on hand to confirm whether ADHD causes OCD tendencies. The tendencies I reference, though, are not ones of extreme cleanliness or repeat routines that pepper popular narratives of OCD. Rather, they are the absence to attach deeply with object. Is this a lack of compulsion, or a desire so deep to create an anti-routine in a world deeply obsessed with time? Is perpetual uncleanliness an auto-unconscious defense to a time obsessed world?

My right foot though, used to cramp slightly when my left foot stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. I had to make sure the left foot also stepped on a crack. Both sides need to stay even, right? I can’t hurt my foot’s feelings.

A constant stream of self-diagnosing keeps me in check, ensures that I don’t post nihilistic rants on every social channel, views that I only believe in part, and in times of extreme darkness. Depression is like that, helping you believe that you are the only one who could ever possibly feel this way. It is easier to feel depressed and to stay away from humanity when your living space becomes a fort of all the objects that are half-finished, organically dead or useless.

Anyway.

Something about writing helps documents racing thoughts, gets me reading material to distract me from my loud mouthed inner critic, keeps me from falling into a complacency of self-obsession. It is also is a refuge from the space around me. Keeping words neat on a flat page beats picking up physical objects and distributing them in space. So long as my computer is open, there is another world out there, waiting to be created.

If you are like an iteration of me, you can relate to the normalcy of a peach pit in the bed, using your fingers to cut through butter rather than using any proper tool and leaving spilled coffee beans on the floor. Maria Yagoda outlines her embodiment of ADHD and her eventual treatment plan with an SSRI drug. Part of her article outlines an encounter with the fire safety patrol officer’s threat to fine her for the off the charts level of filth in the room.

ADHD does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”

I was that person who would leave keys in the theater, at the grocery store checkout, or buried under three layers of clothes in my bedroom. The good days were ones when I could find my keys within three minutes. Despite my utter slovenliness, I did have an obsession with being on time, so I would leave up to a half-hour to find my keys. Sometimes this motivated me to leave my keys on the clean edge of my dresser, or in my unlocked car out in the suburbs of Atlanta.

In my college years, I also did not believe in carrying a wallet. After losing my drivers license and debit card three times in six months, I finally purchased a wallet. The cards still floated outside the wallet, collecting link, chocolate and orange peels at the bottom of my bag. IDs are replaceable, and what if I could go around the world, free of showing my ID. That could be possible if I didn’t require a bar at least every other day.

My one saving grace is I avoid shopping and have a miserly bend when it comes to spending money. The thrift store is my  enemy. I watched Hoarders not because I wanted to gawk at people with mental illness. Rather, I was gawking at what could be a real iteration of me. Manage thyself by not repeating the psychosis of the other. Without my very neat partner, I may very well sit on a mattress surrounded by a heap of trash and two cats, only two cats. I could still write.

Could I write well? Now I am not so sure.

The funny thing is, writing surrounded by clutter makes transitions disjointed and awkward. Procrastination comes with spilling a half-filled soda onto your book, the brand new one that already has a thumbprint of chocolate on the cover. Deep meditation into a sentence, into a line of thought gets laced with that annoying, sharp pang pressing on my hip, a coat hanger that somehow made its way onto my bed. Fleeting meditations become the norm. Capturing those meditations require fits and starts, battling the physical with the imaginary world. I now find the starting and stopping exhausting. It is no longer a pleasure to run into my own mess constantly while I tap away at my grimy keyboard with a smudged, dusty screen.