My parents should have known when I came home with my first grade report card that read, "Amy is a really smart girl, but she just can't sit still" and later, "Is everything all right at home? Amy seems really distracted." I remember getting put in the corner in kindergarten because I thought that it was more fun to spin in circles on the shiny linoleum floor (tan with brown specks) than it was to "participate" in story time. My 10th grade chemistry teacher would squirt me and my fellow ADD comrades with a water bottle when we got out of hand. Mind you, I wasn't a troublemaker or rebellious in any way (well, maybe only a little). (By the way, Shriekback just came on Sirius - I totally forgot about them!) To this day, my parents still deny that I have ADD.
Never mind that...
- I am always reading 3 or 4 books at any given time and can tell you exactly what's going on where I left off...
OR
- My right leg starts shaking uncontrollably when I'm majorly bored and stuck somewhere I can't leave (like when I'm summarizing deposition testimony of a traffic light engineer in my cubicle at work)...
OR
- I can't focus on anything boring like math or physics, but can spend hours absorbed in a good book or writing project...
OR
-If you take too long to tell me a story, I'll stop listening after 30 seconds (but you'll never know it).
Nah, I don't have ADD. The silver lining is that studies have shown that creative and intelligent people are most frequently plagued by this affliction (I prefer to call it multi-tasking).
Yeah, that's what I'll keep telling myself.
When I was in my 3rd day of Kindergarten the teacher switched my seat to the furthest row from the windows. I wasn't restless or disruptive, actually I was as quiet as a mouse. I was simply a blond haired, green eyed kid who loved to watch the clouds. My parents told me that the teacher diagnosed me as a child who was easily distracted. Now I'm a 43 year old man who likes to stare into space while thinking of nothing, but today it's called meditation and it's suppose to be good for you. Just think, if that teacher was a little more intuitive, I could have been the next Dalai Lama!
ReplyDeleteYou would have had a lot of followers, I'm sure! Sometimes our little world of daydreaming is a heck of a lot more interesting than what's going in in the real world - maybe that's why ADD is so prevalent among creative people. Dream on!
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