As a child I used to search for the source of my thoughts, wondering from where in my head my consciousness began. It troubled me greatly that the things I knew, came not from an ordered library of facts and experiences, but from a jumble of tangled knowledge that didn’t really reside in my consciousness at all.
‘Where does consciousness come from’ I’d ask myself, and anyone else who chose to listen.
The questions made me sound clever, but the reality was that from within my disordered brain, I didn’t know where I started and whether consciousness was real.
When asked a question at school, I always assumed that I must be wrong, because I couldn’t explain why or how I knew what I knew. Which of course led to me becoming further disengaged and further tangled in questions of existence.
As an adult, if confronted with alternative information to what I believed to be true, I would always back down. After all, how could I be right when I couldn’t be confident of why I thought what I did.
I took myself to university to study philosophy to try to get closer to my conscious thoughts, to feel them as part of me. I studied Descartes and Kant, Nietzsche and Nagarjuna, seeking the link between the thoughts that I could verbalise, and the source of this consciousness.
Throughout all of it, i knew that I was not like other people.
I attended Buddhist meditation classes, seeking peace from not knowing. Instead of finding peace, my skin itched from trying to stay still and my thoughts rocketed around my head ricocheting into one another with ever increasing velocity.
And so I ran. I ran and I ran and I ran.
Until, my knees fell out with my brain and demanded a rest from the endless pounding of pavements.
And so I accepted that I was wasting my energy seeking understanding of consciousness and I got a job that took me instead into digital marketing. Where no-one cared why I knew what I knew, as long as I knew something, as long as I could listen and adapt and move fast on opportunities. I silenced my questions and quietened my brain by refusing to listen to it. And this might have continued forever, pretending I didn't itch in my skin, pretending that everything was absolutely fine.
Until one day, aged 41, a dear friend sat me down and told me she thought I had ADHD. I was shocked. Of course I didn’t.
Except that I do. And every path I have taken, every journey I have been on since I was very small, has been in part because my brain is wired differently, because I have masked and hidden my beautiful, muddled brain.
It took me a long time to realise that my ADHD is actually rather beautiful. And that every war I have had against myself, was because I was fighting an undiagnosed condition that I didn't understand.
I now know why my consciousness was so hidden from me. And the most remarkable thing of all is that by better understanding the workings of my mind, I have discovered the root of my consciousness once and for all.
