It never occured to me, growing up, that I had anything more than a lack of motivation. That putting pen to paper time and again and never finishing the 18 pages of my premier novel (at nine years of age) meant anything. That all of these plans I made, and didn’t follow through with because I got bored once they got much past the planning stages, were a signal. Or even how that I could be a foot away from someone and not understand the words coming out of their mouth, saying, “what? sorry? pardon?” ten times in a conversation, was anything more than a character flaw.
I just didn’t care enough, I thought. I was selfish and self-absorbed and flakey.
I can remember scoffing at my mother when I was 15 or so, about her having my brother assessed, I thought she was looking for a magical pill to cure the parenting she wouldn’t do. How wrong. How different we are, those who share the same blood as me. We are inherantly distractable.
I’ve started over 10 novels, I know that. One for most years of my childhood, before puberty really kicked in and waned. I’ve dropped out of three different schools, four times. I’ve had every career under the sun it seems, ranging from easy, reliably short-willed retail, to fast-paced, authoritatively grandiose with projects executive assistantry. I’ve done everything but I’ve finished nothing.
I have excelled at everything I’ve tried to do. That is not me patting myself on the back or anywhere else. Things have just come easy for me, and in retrospect, it’s likely because everything else was so hard. Everything is always in balance, right? Even if it’s a cumulative balance, it still counts. So, I have excelled at everything I’ve tried to do, everything that I’ve gone, okay, I’m doing this. And then I’d get, what I thought, and still call, bored.
Even with the obsessions, things didn’t stick to me the same way as they do with others. I have not always been crafty or a potential fashion designer, but when I’ve sat down, and the moon is aligned with whatever planet it is that I need and I’m running on all eight cylinders, I can design an entire spring bridal collection. Completel with styling notes. I can map out crocheting for months when inventorying the yardage of yarn at my hook’s mercy. I can write and write and the story will write itself.
Until it doesn’t anymore.
Then, I will traipse into something different, in general, in the exact opposite direction. I have gone from homey creative chef to bar star, living on vodka, cigarettes, cocaine and professed love of the people I’ve bedded. Balance, right?
It wasn’t until I had the first conversation ever with my oldest baby sister that the question occured to me. It wasn’t until she told me about how she did in high school, which she was in at the time, and what her shits and giggles were comprised of, that a very dim lightbulb went off. And through our occasional biyearly talks, it got a little brighter as she moved from her home to study dance, then dropped out, then took automechanics, then didn’t make a career of it, then went to the same school as I did, but in a different province, and took the same program as I did and finished – which I had not, and she hadn’t know me to attend.
When I was around 22, it got real bad. It got so that I couldn’t understand words from someone else’s lips while they were speaking to me face to face. Because of the fucking television being on. Annoyed, my father would turn it down, not understanding why the background noise that helped him be clear at mind made mine too cluttered for comprehension. But then it got worse, still, so that the tv would have to be off, because the flickering would hypnotize me.
That the light bulb started to blinded me and my oldest baby sister and I had another talk. She said she was on some medication. She told me what her symptoms were and that the diagnoses were – because with us, this blood, there is always more than one – and she finished my thoughts (like she nearly always did when we had those rare talks, since she and I seem to be cut from the same cloth almost exactly). Attention deficit disorder.
Holy fuck, did it all make sense, then. Why I couldn’t stand to do anything other than the moment’s project and even sometimes not that. Why I would itch to be doing something else, always, it seemed. I couldn’t sleep because everything was a potential thing to do, plan and think. Lists and lists and itineraries, courses mapped out to earn a bachelors, a thesis outline formed, no driver’s license and barely started afghans piled up around me as proof. I couldn’t focus on anything for long, but when it was a magical thing, the hours would stretch longer and longer and I knew that sleep was not a possibility, or else I’d never return to it.
The novel. I stopped writing it a few days after starting. Not because I was challenged. Because, honestly, of two reasons: everyone who read it said it was gorgeous (and that made no sense to me, since it was just words I’d typed, without a skeleton formed, even), which appealed to my ego both positively and negatively and effectively created an identity crisis in me; and because I got bored.
It wasn’t too much work to write, it was something that I could do if I had a mini-tape recorder. Except no, I couldn’t because words are not real to me until I see them on paper. Or a white screen representative of paper, I supppose. I guess, if I could type as fast as I could think it, I’d be done, now.
So, I changed it.
I was bored of the character, her story was too involving for the amount of span I lacked. So, now she’s done and a new character is the focus. There will be more characters and more of their own stories, and I’ve half got myself convinced that I will finish this thing, because the newness of each situation and person will be inspiring. Short stories. Why have I never considered that?
And yet, I know me, and how I will likely get bored with trying to find ways to not be bored, leaving myself with another unfinished work in progress.
This is in my blood.
You know, medication has been spoken about. But it was quickly deferred because of my history of torrid love with cocaine and other speedy powders. Ritalin, well, it’s basically speed, right? You must know that, if only because of Desperate Housewives, and how Lynette was off her rocker, attached to the stuff. That could be me. Except, normal.
That was me when I had an (at least but not limited solely to) eight-ball a weekend habit. When three days’ worth of crystal could be snorted in 24 hours. Sadly, and obviously, not so, I never became addicted to anything that made me feel like they did: Normal. Present and clear.
But I could. And I won’t find out the hard way. So, instead, I will flit and flake and forget. And some times I will write a novella on a manic, sleepless night; others I will forget to make my coffee or finish saying hello to a friend on IM because it’s occured that I should wash dishes and bleach a countertop. I don’t know what will or won’t happen because of this lack of lymbic regulation, but I do know this, I will likely be damned entertaining, if only for ten minutes at a time, because of it.
