The ADHD Carpentress

I don’t entirely know where the correlation between shouting “squirrel!” every time I mention that I’m ADHD came from. I’m not sure if it’s from the movie “Up”, in which the talking dog constantly interrupts himself mid-sentence because he thinks he sees a squirrel, or if it’s from the notorious habit of squirrels who busy themselves gathering nuts and then totally forgetting where they stored them. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Seems like an evolutionary fuck-up if it is, or something Beatrix Potter made up, but it’s a belief we have, so we’re rolling with it.

Either one works to describe ADHD, honestly. Actually, in a way they both beautifully describe different aspects of the ADHD spectrum.

The talking dog from “Up” perfectly captures the “attention deficit” part (AD)–which is a COMPLETE misnomer, by the way. It’s actually more of an “attention excess”. *EVERYTHING* is important. Everything is bright colors, bright noise, alive and critical and needing our immediate attention.

So when the dog stops mid-sentence to react to the possibility of squirrels, it’s because it’s equally as important as whatever he was just saying or doing. Our brains literally put everything at the same level of importance, excitement, and criticalness. There is no “huh, okay, I’ll deal with that later.” It’s “OMFGSQUIRRELIMUSTDEALWITHTHISRIGHTNOW!”

I get it: to the poor normie who is trying to have a normal conversation with us it looks like we have zero attention span. But actually, we have TOO MUCH attention span. Which is also saying they’re as important as an imaginary squirrel. Sorry about that. #truthhurts #loveyou #blamemybrain

And on the other spectrum we have our poor forgetful squirrel, who allegedly runs around in a hyperactive bustle all summer long gathering nuts, only to completely forget where she put them once winter comes. This would be the hyperactive element of ADHD. It’s a need for being in motion somehow, living in a body that is deeply electrified for movement.

But somehow, the wiring between the brain and the body is a little different. Sometimes the body moving is the only way to let our brain absorb information. This part was historically always the most defining feature of ADHD. Everyone immediately envisions the hyperactive little boy in class who is distracting everyone around him (and in my day, the teachers would give him black coffee to try to counteract the hyperactivity, which seems very much like a “fuck around and find out” scenario to me that could backfire pretty drastically).

The truth, though, is that hyperactivity is much more expansive than that. ESPECIALLY in girls and women, who have historically been massively underdiagnosed because they don’t present the same behaviors of hyperactivity as little boys. In my case, for example, I was always drawing in class (and still do). The movements were critical for me to be able to focus on what the teacher was saying, like keeping a toddler entertained with leg-bounces or a dog entertained with fetching a ball so that I can carry on a conversation with another adult. Unfortunately, this was usually perceived as “not paying attention” while in fact the exact opposite was true. This was HOW I pay attention.

On the other side of that mind-body connection though is the hyperfocus part of our system, in which I can lose myself in a physical task (usually woodworking or something) and suddenly it’s 10 hours later and I haven’t eaten, drank, peed, or talked to a human, and I’m practically sauvage. I have lost track of my nuts.

To continue the metaphor, it might looks like we were frantically busy gathering nuts and then inexplicably lost our nuts or forgot where they are, but part of that too is that ADHD folks don’t babysit our creations very much. It’s part of our lack of time conception (more on that some other time. Maybe. If I remember). It’s why we seem to start so many projects, work passionately at them for a while, and then seem to just drop them. We didn’t lose them, they just got lost to our time stumps and time tree nests. They don’t belong to us anymore. They can be someone else’s nuts. #enjoythosenutsmotherfucka #yourewelcome

Anyway, that’s squirrel brain. Welcome to squirrel brain.