My mom wrote about recent research on ADHD. This is of interest to me in part because I was the one who pointed her at the articles. But it’s also of interest to me because it’s such a very good description of what goes wrong with my brain. It also, I think, explains why fidgets work so well for helping me focus; if I’m fidgeting, the default mode network can busy itself fidgeting while I go pay attention to something else.
As I may or may not have commented while writing about autism recently, ADHD doesn’t feel like an identity thing to me. I’ve been on meds which made it go away (at the expense of hospital visits), and I wasn’t any less me, I was just me with the magical ability to pay attention for more than 5-10 seconds at a time. I wouldn’t object to being “cured”. Although… It seems to me that a brain like mine, “cured” of ADHD, would still probably be pretty different from a brain without ADHD. In some ways that maybe would be sorta useful. So maybe I’m wrong, and a real “cure” that made my brain not ADHD-like to begin with would make me into something or someone else. No idea.
But not remembering what I’m doing is frustrating enough that I’d be glad to yield the floor to Pays Attention Man, who was bitten by a radioactive day planner and knows why he came down to the kitchen.