The ADHD Carpentress

Diagnosis. Is. Huge.

I thought I had early onset dementia.

Which was fucking terrifying.

I would have something in my hand. A hammer. A pencil. A computer. A really important piece of paper. And then, it was just gone.

My dad used to do this magic trick. He’d make a fist, and then he’d start stuffing a handkerchief down into his clenched palm. My sister and I would watch in fascination as he proceeded to stuff the whole handkerchief away, pause for dramatic effect, then suddenly open his fingers showing a completely empty hand. Handkerchief–gone.

I begged him to tell me where it went, and he’d point to the center of his palm. “It’s in there,” he’d say. “I stuffed it right in there.”

I didn’t matter that I found out later he had gotten this fake thumb at some gag gift shop, and was stuffing the bandana into it. I was a gullible fucking kid I just never noticed this ridiculous giant thumb at any point. What mattered is that it seemed like somehow he had a magical fist that could make things dissapear.

And now, as a grown-ass adult, also I had a magical fist of disappearing things. My palm just seemed to swallow up everything in it and transport it to an alternate universe. Just gone. It was a horrible fucking magic trick. Besides being a huge waste of time looking for things all over the jobsite, it was causing me a lot of anxiety, because the most obvious explanation–besides magic—was that I was experiencing early dementia.

What I didn’t understand, though, was that I could always find OTHER people’s things. Ask me where you put YOUR hammer, I can tell you. Ask if I’ve seen your measuring tape, I will know, even if you put it in the weirdest place imaginable. What type of dementia does that mean?

I generally believe if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But I was starting to feel broken. So I called and got a referral to a psychiatrist. This was still during Covid times, so it was a video call while I sat in my truck at lunch. It was hard to sit still while he asked me questions, because I’m used to being able to play on my phone but now HE IS my phone goddamnit, so I busied myself by seeing how many sunglasses I could balance off a carpenter pencil I had stuck in my visor.

“What are you doing?” he asked. My usual answer: “sorry, I’m actually listening. I know it doesn’t look like it, but this is actually me focusing on listening to what you’re asking me.”

“I don’t think it’s dementia,” he said. He then read off the questions for ADHD diagnosis. I know he wasn’t supposed to be laughing, but he was kind of laughing. I had almost every single trait.

Losing my own things is a huge part of ADD. The joke that carpenters are always misplacing their shit is probably because a LOT of us are ADHD. The fact that I can almost always find OTHER people’s things is also a big part of ADHD.

Here’s why. My brain is like a security camera that is on constant record-mode of its surroundings, but it can’t record the wall it’s mounted on. Pretty big blind spot. But anything else in my line of vision and I might as well walk around with a sign on me that says “Smile! You’re on camera!”

So that’s why it’s important to get diagnoses. Because you might not be the kind of crazy you think you are. You might be believing the magic instead of understanding the trick.