I don't like the drugs, but

In your most distant memories, you remember colouring in.

You remember being good at it, and being praised for being good.

But when you slip and colour outside the lines, you howl and hide like a beaten dog, and no-one can tell you why.

You learn to read, although "learn" is probably putting it too strongly. Reading happens to you the same way as breathing.

Reading is the best thing that is or ever will be. You can no longer hear the clamour of the confusing world, or feel the tension that seems to surge from your bones, that makes you sit bolt upright, vibrating, sensitive to the slightest touch or sound.

Reading makes it quiet. In books, things make sense. The world goes away.

The tics start when you're about eight. They are annoyingly literal, like the ticking of a clock; a sound you make in your throat over and over and can't stop.

They change form. Soon you are 11, and everything you say must be said again, like an echo. You do this sotto voce, lest people think you're weird.

The other kids do hear it sometimes. They thought you were weird already, and this doesn't help.

When you're older, you'll look this up on a whim, and find out it is called palilalia.

At the time, you thought it was merely demons.

You start finding it very hard to do things.

You are bright, everyone you talk to says so, and you've been moved up a year and are taking extra subjects in school.

But on certain tasks – mainly maths, but others too – genuine attempts to work fly dead into a towering, blank wall of mental impossibility.

Because you are so bright (everyone says so) it is assumed that this is a phase.

If so, it is a long one.

It continues until your late thirties, and then? It carries on, only worse.

Your childhood saviour, reading, has become a monster. Unfortunately, society has thought to gift you an infinitely long and perpetually interesting book. You wake up each day full of ideas, and a portion of the ability required to achieve at least some of your ambitions, only to have all this potential energy subsumed by reading bullshit on the internet. Every day. Every day!

It feels like one of those ironic curses, the kind bestowed by a malevolent genie, where the wish is thwarted even as it's granted.

Each missed opportunity, every failure, every slight imperfection compounds, compresses the shame you feel down into a savage knot of guilt that builds, layer on layer, like a pearl made of pure shit. It sits in your gut, causes nausea, sends you running blindly from even the implication of obligation.

It's not just hard to do the things you need to do; it's all but impossible to do the things you want to do.

Can you talk about this, lighten the burden? You can not. If anyone knew how useless you really were, how flighty, how distracted, how lazy, you'd never work again.

Complicating this obvious fact is the competing reality that you have had a number of jobs that people seemed to think you were good enough at to give you money.

This dissonance does not help. Every day, you endure the static screech of an endless primal scream, black noise, the cosmic background radiation of your brain.

You can't let it out. People would look at you funny.

You do overhear things sometimes. "Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery." Someone lets something slip. "Can't do the simplest thing." A backhanded compliment is reduced to a mere backhander. "You might be always late, but at least you're always there." These accumulate and fossilise in the tar-pit of your mind. They are who you are; an agglomeration of failures and frustrations so intense they surface when you're trying to vacuum the floor and this fucking piece of lint just won't fucking move.

The vacuum cleaner is noisy and makes it possible to yell without being overheard, so you do.

Of course you have ADHD. That's not special. According to the latest of many ADHD books you've read, anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of people may have ADHD. That's not a disorder, that's an overly-generous pie slice. For context, that would mean here are three times as many people with ADHD as there are Libras – and there are around 680 million Libras.

Horrible.

For many, finding out they have ADHD is hugely helpful. For you, it doesn't feel that way.

You get your diagnosis over Skype from an archetypical psychiatrist; an ineffable reduced-affect Martian giving the overwhelming impression that any given patient is just one of many items on a rapidly-growing list. He sighs his way through the checklist you filled in – ADHD is diagnosed from a checklist, and this is one of many reasons it is so easy to diagnose oneself with, as it is about as accessible and mentally taxing as a Facebook quiz – and gives you a $1000 verdict; combined-type ADHD, with elements of autism spectrum disorder.

You think: this does explain a lot.

The vicious anxiety. The constant distractability, unless you're reading. Also the fact you could read from age 3 – quite weird, in hindsight, although of course to you it was normal. The crippling perfectionism. The tics. The absurd procrastination. The way you learned, in school, how to perform social norms like you were learning from a script; and it explains too your puzzlement at how students reacted to your mistakes and line-flubs when you said the wrong thing at the wrong time (which was always very confusing, because often the thing you were laughed at for doing was something that someone else had been rewarded for just a week or so ago). The way people looked at you expectantly, like a malfunctioning robot; wondering what new runtime error you were about to throw.

Now, as an adult, with a series of masks so embedded you can't tell where they stop and flesh begins, you learn that some of this agony might have been optional.

You think: hooray, I guess?

Social media, which of course was the source of the first inkling you might have ADHD, is unhelpful. Once the algorithms learn that you are ADHD-curious, your feeds become wall-to-wall relatability. If 25 percent of the world's population has ADHD, about half of them seem to have taken up as ADHD influencers. There is an enormous industry dedicated to selling coaching and courses and one-weird-tricks and likes and subscribes, all through the lens of, at long last, being seen.

At first being seen feels great. But soon enough, it starts to feel more like being watched. According to influencers, ADHD is the ur-condition, the cause and effect of everything in your life. Overly talkative sometimes? ADHD. Feel strongly about genocide? ADHD. Forgotten to do the dishes? ADHD. The influencers, hungry for the next viral hit, have strip-mined the human condition down to bedrock. The relatable becomes hateful, because there are no solutions in sight: just an endless parade of half-working temporary life-hacks that link to purchasable courses.

Everything is ADHD.

And when everything is, nothing is. Maybe ADHD, despite mountains of evidence, doesn't exist at all. Or maybe you just don't have it. There's nothing different that explains you, apart from being a screw-up.

And even if you do have ADHD, this condition is permanent. You're stuck with it. If you want a picture of the future, imagine shooting yourself in the foot — forever. The solution is, or appears to be, accepting there is no solution.

Except for one thing.

You don't like the idea of taking amphetamines every day of the rest of your life, but it's got to be better than this.

The generic ADHD medication Rubifen, Medsafe says,

is a central nervous system stimulant. It is thought to work by regulating specific chemicals in the brain that affect behaviour. It helps to focus attention, shut out distraction and allows impulsive people to think before they act.

The first few days on medication are astonishing. Everything snaps into focus. The cloud of amorphous haze in your head coheres into a single bright beam. Tasks that once had impossible weight become somehow airy. Things that have lain undone for days, months, years, slowly accumulating the slow gravity of guilt, get done. You message a friend:

"Is this what being normal is like?"

In a follow-up telehealth appointment, you tell your Martian shrink that it's going great and you feel like you're cured, and his face flickers momentarily like the ghost of emotion past has walked over his grave. Or it's a video-call glitch.

After a time, you notice some things. Your jaw has a tendency to clench. Headaches set up evening and occasional matinee showings. Your mouth is dry. You find it hard to write, literally; your fingers freeze up on the keyboard and it is difficult to move them to the correct places. Sleep is erratic. You lose weight, without trying or particularly wanting to. Sometimes the anxiety is quelled; sometimes it seems to surge more than ever, like hot wires laid under the skin.

You notice, to your horror, that some of the tics seem to be trying to come back.

Slowly old habits manifest, like water released from a dam, determined to return to its old path. If you manage to wrestle the laser light of attention on to the right task, you might be all right. But if you should allow it to illuminate the endless well of shiny internet objects, God help you.

Eventually you are back where you started, but this time with side effects.

You don't like the drugs, but it would seem the drugs can't even give you the common courtesy of liking you back.

So you quit.

Some time later, in despair, hoping to plaster over the cracks in your facade that threaten to become structural, you start again.

The process repeats, and you quit once more.

Later again, when the weight of the big and small things you swore – and needless to say, failed – to do consistently seems ready to crush you, you start over.

You look at the capital letters on the box of Rubifen, the ones that say DO NOT STOP TAKING THIS MEDICATION.

This time, you decide, you'll make quitting part of the plan. One or two days on, some days off. Apparently some people with ADHD find this works for them.

You hope it works for you.

You are here ⬇️