tl;ADD
You may have already heard of the disorder AD(H)D, but regardless, let me offer this brief explanation. AD(H)D stands for Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder and it means that a person processes information, impressions and emotions at a slower pace than others, resulting in very poor working/short term memory skills. The lag in pacing is generally too small to be noticed to others, aside from concentration difficulties and, seemingly, a state of perpetual day-dreaming. The long term memory of a person with AD(H)D works fine but their capacity to study, work and accomplish things in the moment is precarious at best. Planning, organizing and being tidy tasks are often extremely challenging because they don’t have the processing insight needed regarding situations at hand. They have trouble deciding what needs to be done immediately, what should be done soon and what can be left for later or ignored altogether. People with AD(H)D are deficient in the brain chemical dopamine, which serves as a neurotransmitter for mental tasks related to attention, mood, learning and sleep. It affects the daily life of approximately 129 million people around the world. When I was in primary school, I was diagnosed with several mental disorders, ADD among them. The symptoms that AD(H)D brings are unique for each individual but, for me, they mostly affect reading, having conversations, listening/watching one thing at a time, attending class, studying and getting work done. Even sleeping can be difficult because multiple thoughts tend to run through my mind at the same time. Though they might not necessarily be worries, these racing thoughts have a way of literally keeping me awake.
I can already hear some of you saying, “Wait a second, that sounds familiar. Does that mean I have AD(H)D?” and that is understandable. On the rare occasions that I have opened up to others about my disorder, I have gotten similar responses. Most non- (or self-) diagnosed people are quick to recognize their own behavior and concentration difficulties from the details of what I experience every day. This isn’t surprising. But what makes having an attention deficit disorder different from simply being distracted, unorganized or having trouble reading a boring book is that the AD(H)D brain is in a constant state of coping with its own deficit. It can be so all-encompassing that it takes a hold of someone’s functionality and can end up controlling their lives. What might be an annoying lapse of attention for you, is the norm for me.
People with ADD are constantly being distracted by even the smallest thoughts (internal stimulus) and events in their environment (external stimulus). While others might get the impression that a person with AD(H)D is a slow or poor reader, because we take so long to read even a short page or paragraph and often show an incomplete understanding of what we have read, the reality is that we are not consistently reading but instead are repeatedly being distracted, and therefore having to re-read, our minds and thoughts relentlessly wandering from the text at hand. As a consequence, we must necessarily put a lot of time and energy into keeping our brains on a leash. This is so demanding and time-intensive that our heads can literally hurt and realizing how much time we’ve wasted is terribly frustrating. Not managing to read what we want, need or intend to often makes us seem as if we’re lazy or just plain incompetent, which contributes to the ongoing insecurities and low self-esteem of people with AD(H)D.
In the arena of cognitive science, AD(H)D is considered a complex subject with a slowly growing consensus. Much has been speculated about AD(H)D, with some things proven and other beliefs debunked regarding the role of age, ultimate causation, prevailing myths and etc. I would like to touch upon a more specific and current topic, admittedly one that I haven’t studied scientifically but is instead drawn anecdotally from my perspective as a young adult who spends a lot of time online and who also happens to have ADD. Over the last decade, society has been increasingly exposed to information through multiple kinds of online media, consumed both actively and passively. The high rate at which this (un)useful information is distributed can lead to anyone feeling overwhelmed. Processing this volume of new information in so little time clogs our ‘filters’ and for people with ADD, who are already tormented by distraction, the quantity of information available is simply too large. By trying to balance an unlimited number of things at once, we ultimately fail to keep track of what we do at all and finishing just one thing, after having started countless others, becomes a discouraging challenge at best.
It should be clear that what I’m talking about right now isn’t books, newspapers, comics or magazines, although most people with AD(H)D have long had a complicated relationship with traditional media. I mean information found on the internet, where a high-rate of articles are being published non-stop. There are of course traditional news articles from well established news sources online, as well as other informative in-depth pieces, interviews, long reads, reviews, the list goes on. Then there are the (often long) emails, direct and public messages, and the notifications about blog posts that we receive. Especially for those of us who have a broad range of interests, this means that there is endless, accumulating content waiting to be read. Being someone who is genuinely interested in and concerned about a variety of topics, I want to stay up-to-date with the things I deem important. The biggest challenge here, of course, is actually going through everything, reading each piece and comprehending it without getting too distracted. Losing focus means losing time and in the time that my focus is lost, a considerable number of new and interesting pieces have been published. As someone who rarely gives up on something but who also has trouble prioritizing, I developed the bad habit of leaving tabs open in my phone and computer browsers. Because I use my laptop intensively throughout the day, it takes only a day or two before my internal messiness, my untamable fascination and my determined (yet failing) intention to finish things becomes visualized on the screen. “I’ll finish it another time,” I tell myself, while simultaneously opening three new browser tabs. In other cases, when I feel something is too long, I don’t even attempt to start reading it, instead emailing myself the link or saving it as a PDF file on my desktop. My overflowing desktop. The big question being, When will I begin to read this growing archive? or even more unsettling: Will I ever get through it?
In internet lingo, something that is considered too long (or for someone with AD(H)D too hard) to read in a given period of time is coined tl;dr — too long; didn’t read. While it originated as an editorial notation for pointing out passages too long for a reader to likely invest time in, the internet quickly adopted it and now applies it to multiple situations. The fact is, some things just demand too much of our time. Time, the ultimate and most valuable of assets, forces us to prioritize and organize our lives, both online and off but when an attention deficit disorder underscores your life and limits your ability to be as organized as your peers, it’s even harder to decide what is or what is not worth investing your time in. From experience I can attest that being a social, interactive individual on the internet while also having ADD regularly gets me into situations where almost everything feels tl;dr.
So what do I do? How do I try to stay informed and socially aware while managing my ADD? I find that shorter articles and summaries, where the author doesn’t go too much into detail, very useful. Another way is by watching short videos where various topics are discussed, explained and summed up. The short nature of these videos can help people like me, with a sorry excuse of an attention span, digest a volume of information that would otherwise be too difficulty to gain. For many, having ADD means that even reading a single sentence from beginning to end can be hard in a single attempt. With so much to keep up with these days, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to finish reading every email, assignment, text message or recommended article that I receive on a day-to-day basis without falling too far behind. When I do manage it, I sometimes feel so proud for getting through something (after dividing it up into three or four sessions) that I want to let others know with a short message, such as, “Hey, I read that piece you sent me!” or “Hey, I read that article you wrote and I really like it!” even though it might have already lost its relevance to the original sender. Because what can feel like a significant accomplishment to me is just a daily activity for most of my peers.
