When I was a young boy- I’m not sure if I was in primary school or secondary school, I read a book called When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
I want to write all my thoughts about it without first looking up the book on the Internet. The book was about a young girl and her family who were I think half-Jewish or less, and they ran away from Germany to run away from the Nazis. I still haven’t read Anne Frank. The girl had to leave her pink rabbit behind, which was the source of the title. Still memorable as heck. I’d love to see the book get republished with an elegantly designed cover of a man in a Nazi uniform with a pink rabbit in his hands.
This book has stuck in my mind for some reason even though I haven’t read it in years. I thought about how it was the story of a life. This little girl who had grown up and made something of herself. She had to relearn everything, learn a new language, cope with stress and difficulty. It wasn’t incredibly hostile if I remember, just sort of strange and tangential to all the serious, horrible tragedy that was happening in Nazi Germany itself. I find myself thinking about Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and about Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s Totto-Chan, and how in both cases we see the world through the eyes of a child as an adult remembers it.
We all grow old if we’re lucky, we all die.
We have this limited LifeGame of 80 years (again, if we’re lucky. It might always end tomorrow). And we have to make the most of it. We don’t HAVE to, but it’s pretty clear that we OUGHT to. I can’t sleep properly at night knowing that I’m wasting my days. A well-spent day brings well-deserved sleep, and a well-lived life brings well-deserved death. (Death is but another adventure, something something said Dumbledore.) I don’t want to die as anxious as I’ve sometimes gone to bed. Though of course I suspect that when you ARE about to die, you won’t care anymore. It’ll be like booking into camp. [1]
One of the things about ADHD is that it means being very blind to time. Autistic people have trouble making sense of metaphors and sarcasm, they have trouble seeing people as people. (Something like that, I don’t know the details.) I read something similar about schizophrenic people having difficulty recognising themselves. They get into their bed, and they smell themselves, but they don’t realise that it’s their own smell. So they feel like there’s been a stranger in their bed, and it makes them anxious and paranoid. They can’t get comfortable with themselves. And they’ll probably need some sort of prosthetic/tool to figure that out.
So just like how some people with memory problems don’t recognise somebody they just met 30 minutes ago, I don’t notice the passage of time. I really don’t. I’m sorry. I REALLY DON’T. And I don’t realise that deadlines have consequences. I don’t feel anything. Other people have told me that they feel weird when deadlines approach and things are not done. Alarm bells go off in their heads. For me, it’s more like a really slight buzz in the faraway distance. I don’t notice things that aren’t right in front of my face. I don’t notice things that I’m not paying attention to. It’s very hard to interrupt me when I’m really caught up in something.
I’m terribly short-sighted when it comes to time. I just don’t perceive it the way everybody else does. This is why I can spend countless hours doing things that other people get tired of. And this is why I’m always late for things. It’s not that I’m a selfish person who doesn’t care. I can’t “not-care” about something that doesn’t even enter my radar in the first place. You wouldn’t called an amnesiac selfish for forgetting your name, would you?
Reality doesn’t give a shit
But I understand that I live in a world where people take these things personally. And this means that I’ll sometimes not be able to build relationships with some people, because some people need others to be around them, to keep them in their thoughts, to do nice things for them, etc. I sometimes think that I’d like to do things like that, but I can’t keep things in my thoughts. My thoughts go wherever the hell they like. There’s a part of the brain that most people have that regulates these things, and mine is underdeveloped. ADHD is an inability to internally self-regulate. That’s why I think cigarettes were so awesome for me. They felt like some sort of stable pattern/structure/routine that I could contextualise things around.
In a broader, longer-term sense, it’s helpful for me to read these memoirs. I think I need to read more memoirs to get more context. I need to find more minds like my own. David Ogilvy was one. I need to read Voltaire, I need to read Benjamin Franklin, I need to read Ford. I need to go straight to the source and drink it up. This isn’t about impressing people. This is about survival. This is about strengthening myself so that I can help my Wolves. I used to approach this as a sort of indulgent exercise, or as a sort of… chore. I needed to read all these great things to be impressive. But I don’t even want to be impressive anymore. I just want to cope. I just want to do what is best for my Wolves while I have them. That’s all. The opinions of others, while interesting and amusing, are a lower priority.
I can’t put off my daily writing. I can’t write after some period of time, because what happens is that I just don’t write, and then I get anxious and cranky and it sucks for me, it sucks for my Wolves and it sucks for everybody around me. So I can’t do that. I need strong, daily structures that keep me running. I need to exercise every single day. Like, not for fun or pleasure or because I want to be fit and muscular and sexy or anything like that. I need to exercise so that I can hold on to my Wolves. I need to do it for them.
This is an ADHD mind, motherfuckers. I grew up in a world that told me it wasn’t good enough. I’m going to show you what it can do. I’m going to show you what my Wolves can do. They’re far greater than anything that I’ve seen out there, really. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But I’m going to find out.
Notes:
[1] When I used to be in NS, I used to agonise about how I was wasting my time on the weekends before I had to book into camp. I didn’t do enough, read enough, write enough, play enough, hang out with friends enough. Yet when I booked into camp, once I was on the bus towards the ferry, a strange calm would come over me. I’d done all that I could’ve done, nothing else could be done, I’d just relax and move on. I feel like death will probably be just like that. What an amazing privilege.