Squirrel Part II
If my brain were a vinyl record and you laid the needle down on the basal ganglia, you’d hear something that resembles The Flight Of The Bumblebee, only not so tidy. Or maybe the Frontal Cortex? I majored in make-believe in college. Whichever part of the wrinkly squishy thing between my ears that is responsible for my existence as the weird kid, that’s the part I’m talking about. It has always been a loud symphony. Allegro. Fortississimo. Staccato. Dissonance. Loud obnoxious cymbals played by the most awkward, pimply kid in the band whose pants are too short. A weird white guy in his 60s with long white hair and one of those long skinny beards playing those calming bowls singing Phrygian vowels in criss-cross-applesauce, but also maybe one of those sexy ladies in the Robert Palmer Addicted to Love music video, stoic and not plugged into any amps, playing the keytar. Was there a Keytar in that video? It seems appropriate. I am one of the stoic sexy ladies playing the Keytar. It’s preschool music class with maracas and off beat bouncing and babies shouting with full diapers, Jesus Loves Me This I Know. It’s Aretha, “Freedom Freedom Freedom ohhh Freedom! ” It’s Brahms. Shit. Brahms. I’m sure there was a woman more talented in that time than Brahms, who wasn’t allowed to do what Brahms did, but, still, what music. It’s always Romanticism, even in the chaos. It’s Willie Nelson’s phrasing.
Good one, Marion. You’re really painting a picture here for people. You’re the oooooooonly one like you, so special!
It all hit a massive crescendo in the last 2 years. I am a run-on sentence, and my thoughts leave me out of breath at the end of every single day. Motherhood compounds this, and the sensitivities to sounds are inescapable with the loud blinking toys and children who CAN’T inside voice. It turns out it’s been ADHD for 37 years that took 36 years to figure out. Cool. I love that for me.
Better late than never.
The unknown ADHD was charming before motherhood. In my low-stakes years, it was floating around Nashville playing music, writing songs, good vibes, butterflying around 3rd and Lindsley with bouncy blonde hair and wide eyes in a dress someone wore in the 70s. Or showing up to Bonnaroo all by my damn self. By the time I was touring, my biggest responsibilities were being early to bus call, soundcheck, and shows. I ate nothing but scrambled eggs, spinach salads, couscous and chocolate for almost my entire 20s and couldn’t remember to drink water until about age 27. I was a hotmess, but a nice one. Miraculously, I managed to get my rent paid on time and maintained a positive reputation. I often miss the floaty days. Nobody depended on me for their survival and I had a fraction of the chores. I sat in the corners of all my favorite coffee shops drinking giant coffees, receiving no buzz from the caffeine, writing in my journal about becoming a woman and romantically reading books written by toxic men.
Something happened when we moved to Mississippi. The real world hit me hard. It’s just work and kids and sometimes cheese dip at a Mexican restaurant. It’s suburbs, and everyone having the same clothes and feeling more of a misfit than ever before. It’s been the biggest feelings while my world gets smaller. The small talk and the shit talking has me feeling like Capote with his Swans. A fucking freak with the beautiful people trapped in the cage of day-to-day frivolity. Thank goodness for a husband who reminds me of what’s outside of here. I’m back to being 11, dreaming of getting out. It’s been really hard. Really beautiful. Wonderful experiences, and concentrated time with this precious family we’ve built. And they are thriving. We’ve carved the greatest acre and a half out of this town, the sweetest home with the most beautiful birds to listen to on a porch we never sit on, but we’re working on that.
My mental health over the last two years has had me crying for Sylvia Plath. Sylvia felt present in this place. Sylvia parts her hair the same way I do. Sylvia doesn’t look writery and neither do I. I feel gratitude for the time in which I was born, for I’d, too, be the recipient of electric shock therapy. And I’m not trying to compare myself to Sylvia Plath, and I’m certainly not claiming to be any kind of writer. I don’t know the first thing about writing. I’ve spent 20 years trying to contain my feelings into 3 minute songs and couldn’t do it well enough, so I spew all the feelings onto my Pages app on a MacBook and copy and paste it all here. I’ve never written fiction, I’ve never properly written anything. I just know that when it got hard, I remembered the impact of Sylvia Plath in my youth, when the stakes were low. She didn’t hit me the same way Sallinger, Jack Kerouac, and Hemingway did then. That stuff is for little girls with romantic feelings for problematic sensitive men. Sylvia was for a woman, and I’m here experiencing it differently. Understanding.
About a year ago I suspected I had ADHD and wanted to go through the process of finding out if it was true. Social media had people in my orbit sending me stuff, lovingly, and that became my algorithm. It was so obvious it was embarrassing. Science can only move so fast, but it’s always moved faster for boys. I’m writing this on my period. I’m always a freaking braless whiny protesting feminist on my period, and I don’t admonish myself for that as I do with many of my other annoying characteristics…I think we’ve earned the right to be this way for at least a quarter of our months. Perhaps it’s more frustrating that I’ve been with the prototypical ADHD 90s kid for over a decade of my life and neither of us saw it right in front of our faces the entire time. But I’m sure it’s annoying to have been knowing you’ve had ADHD your whole life and then suddenly half the world is finding out they, too, have ADHD and you can’t get your medication anymore. Anyway what am I doing here? I guess I did a “Squirrel Part I” and that implied that there’d be a “Squirrel Part II” so I’m doing my due diligence, but I must ask:
WHEN IS IT NOT SQUIRREL?
Well, funny you asked, Marion. It has actually been less Squirrel lately since medicine. Here’s how we got to medicine:
It was about a year ago. Helena, my littlest one, was 4 months old and I was breastfeeding AF, hormones AF, Sylvia Plath level stay-at-home-mom life, wondering why antidepressants weren’t fixing whatever this was, and Instagram screaming at me that I am a squirrel person. The amount of sounds in my life made me cry daily. I called the lil mental health spot and they said it’d be a bit of paperwork to start the process of finding out about, OR ruling out, ADHD. I fixed my hair, put on my good nursing bra, and paid them a visit. They gave me the papers, and I went home to fill ‘em out. It was a series of questions, and, frankly, I was delighted to answer them.
Remember the early internet days as preteens, Elder Millennials? Remember the email surveys we’d fill out and send to our friends for them to copy, paste and replace your answers with theirs? We’ve been loving filling out forms with questions about ourselves for a long time.
Anyway, Alex also had to fill one out about me, and the suspense was killing me. Is this ADHD or narcisism? I then took the papers back to the lil place and was disappointed to learn that, since it’s maybe one of two lil places with the maybe two people in town who benevolently went to medical school so they could learn to help the people like me, who took a dangerous, new interest in Sylvia Plath, figure out their neurotransmitter deficiency, that it’d be a long ass time before I could see one of these angels who care about your brain and will not electroshock therapy you. So while they were processing my preteen late 90s internet surveys Alex and I filled out, I was waiting my turn to talk with the doctor who specializes in this stuff for adults.
The day came. It was June, I think. I had lost most of the baby weight, and I was starting to feel like myself again. Still breastfeeding AF, still hormonal AF, but able to put on the shiny face better; a little razzle dazzle for the doctor that I forgot could see right through that. I arrive, there’s a computer test with 200 questions or something. A lot a lot a lot of questions. That’s too much, but apparently it is the test that determines whether you answer honestly and consistently. It was so overwhelming and isolating that I cried in the room alone. But I guess I was honest and consistent. Then another paper test. Then it’s time to have my interview with the doctor. Shit. This isn’t charming, funny girl codependent time, this got real. Crying BIG. An hour goes by answering questions. Heavy- even for someone who’s been in a lot of therapy. I cried the biggest tears over the auditory sensitivity, it was so surprising, I thought I knew myself better.
There’s a notepad on the lap of a man looking at me with such empathy and all I want is to make him feel better for what he just had to receive. “There are 6 components to ADHD when we are making a clinical diagnosis. To confidently say ‘you have ADHD’ you need 4 out of 6.”
Ok, I guess this is the part where he tells me I don’t have ADHD?
“You have 6 out of 6. This has been really hard for you.” It wasn’t like a dad comforting you, or a friend, it was someone who understands how someone with these complex inner worlds put on so many masks every day just to get around. It was the most generous form of empathy extended to me from someone outside of my close family.
As someone who is allergic to trend, this is enormously embarrassing. This is the disorder everyone sees annoying people on TikTok talk about ad nauseam, then diagnose themselves if they lose their keys.
I never lose my keys. Well, maybe ‘never’ is an exaggeration, but it’s extremely uncommon.
However, I mostly enjoy getting to be me when I’m doing things like this; being creative, having deep conversations in dark rooms with people who are so interesting it makes your head feel like it’ll blow up; when there’s time for curiosity and time for eavesdropping and time for daydreaming and…well…just time. But time is what I don’t have anymore. Any time that I have to myself, like right in this moment, is time for which I’ve sacrificed precious sleep, and I pay for that with other mental drama. I’ve lived the best parts of being someone with ADHD. I went out on the edge, I moved to places where I knew no souls and made a life, I pursued my dreams and sang in microphones all over the world and I loved it so much. And then kids and jobs. This life, it’s incongruent with ADHD. It plain is.
The wonderful thing is that I waited for those appointments last summer so I could have the big dogs involved; those who specialize in adults with ADHD. Adult women with ADHD. I have built a little team around me that cares to help, that is exhausting all resources, all tests, every possible scenario to make sure that we’re on the right path for where the science is at its most current. That’s what makes me feel safe and confident. Just having the diagnosis helped me understand so much of my life and has been a source of comfort, even though I couldn’t treat it with medication while I was breastfeeding. But, I stopped breastfeeding in December, and now it’s been about two months since I began taking a medication for the root of my drama. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how you give a stimulant to someone with the internal energy of an 8 month old chihuahua on crack, but a physician who went to medical school said this is one of the things they teach you when you go to medical school, and I majored in music, so I said yes, sir, and I’m glad I did, because the first thing I noticed when I took a baby dosage of my ADHD medication was that I wasn’t RADIATING ENERGY FROM WITHIN EVERY SINGLE CELL. “Radiating” is the word that came to mind, something I wasn’t anymore. It was a very emotional sensation; this lack of sensation. I wondered if I had taken a sedative for a moment, so used to constant motion, but now I can think before I move? If you don’t have ADHD, just imagine that for a second.
I cry a lot less. This is a really big deal. I’m a better mom when my head isn’t mashed potatoes from sounds around me. I enjoy my children more. Sorry to admit that. Hang on though, Judge Judy, I always enjoyed my children, motherhood was my greatest dream come true, if America were different, I’d have 5 kids. But everything is so loud and I just couldn’t cope. How interesting for someone SO deeply sensitive to sounds- closing doors, loud walking on floors, multiple people talking in one room, the AC turning on and off, too many questions in high pitched voices. How did I ever become a musician? How was it manageable to wear in-ear monitors next to speakers taller than houses and thousands of drunk country fans at festivals shouting? Why was that manageable for me, but parties aren’t? I don’t know, I’m sure someone’s made a TikTok about it.
So here is this long thing I wrote about ADHD so that I could finally stop talking about ADHD. And from my heart, I’m so fucking tired of hearing about ADHD, so I’m not doing this anymore. Figuring this struggle out, getting down to what is possibly the root cause of my shit kind of became my personality this year. And while it is nice to have an understanding of:
why I was SO weird at sleepovers and why I feel like I could leave this earth every time I have to attend a child’s birthday party, and why I couldn’t handle having to ever eat at a buffet with the millions of options, or literally anything in life that is too many options, and why I never finished a record and why I couldn’t follow through with anything in my life and why I’ve made up words and let sentences run-on and couldn’t pay attention in a single class I ever took but somehow managed to graduate college and why everything is always so embarrassing and why I feel every single thing from every single person that’s ever near me and why I trace the grooves in my finger tips day in and day out and twist my hair and apparently also why I twist my ankles frequently and why I’m clumsy and why I’m always consumed with dread that anyone ever has to look at me, much less listen to the overwhelming amount of words that can sometimes escape my mouth at them, and why I’ve never had groups of friends, just picked flowers from different groups, who all, this makes me giggle, also found out they have ADHD, so for my whole life I actually was just looking for the ADHD girl in every social situation and latched on
I AM OVER IT. I understand why we’re all freaking out, finally understanding ourselves too late, and the relief is great. But I’m done. Change my algorithm back to before people became famous talking about this very annoying thing, let’s all get the help we need and fuccckkkiinnnngg moooooooooooove on.
If there is a purpose to sharing this, perhaps you’ve thought “I really connect with her, we get along really well”, you might have ADHD and now you can be the annoying “ADHD is my personality” person in my stead. I have decided I’m just rolling with this now. Acceptance is freeing. Ok, have a great day!
