The World’s Most Chaotic TV Show: ADHD in 2020
The chaos of the pandemic has come close to mirroring the way my brain prioritizes information. Rather than just my ADHD, it’s the whole world telling me that everything is earth-shatteringly important, from school to election cycles to hand sanitizer.
Some of the worst (and funniest) TV shows are the ones where every plot point, however wild or mundane, is treated with equal importance. The CW’s Riverdale, based on the Archie comics, is one example: any given episode exemplifies this trope, but especially the episode in season three where Archie Andrews returns to school after being framed for murder, breaking out of jail, and getting attacked by a bear, only to find that the SATs are in three days and he hasn’t studied. (It’s season three, episode ten, if you want to experience this accidental comedy yourself). Every plot point is dramatic and is given the same life-or-death weight. We’re asked to care about Archie’s bleak 600 SAT score as much as the fact that he spent months in jail, being coerced into an underground fight club and teaching his cellmates to play football.
This perplexing plot structure — where everything is equally important, all the time– is kind of like the way my brain works. I have ADHD, which is often stereotyped as a mainly hyperactive disorder. Hyperactivity is a factor for many people with ADHD, but for me, it usually just means that my brain’s executive function (the “complete task” button) is next to useless until I get a burst of energy, or, more often, the stress of a deadline.
Over spring quarter of 2020, as COVID-19 cases multiplied and my teachers adjusted to teaching over Zoom, Canvas, and email, I struggled to keep up with virtual homework and class meetings throughout my last term of high school. The consequences for missing deadlines or not understanding the material felt insignificant, and I couldn’t create a mental barrier to keep myself from getting distracted on social media or my own personal projects. I spent hours on assignments that should have taken twenty minutes, jumping back and forth between Canvas, text conversations, YouTube, and every random Google search that popped into my head (“map of appalachia”, “fka twigs live”, “how smart are crows”). Everything was equally important as far as my executive function was concerned. Sitting on my bed all day without moving between physical classrooms, I found it difficult to stick to a regular schedule, and only seeing my teachers in their distant Zoom squares made it harder to hold myself accountable and meet their expectations. I found myself missing my hour-plus commute to school on public transit, wishing for any way to trick myself into a working schedule again.
I managed to drag myself through virtual finals week in June, only to find out that the university I’d committed to had decided to cancel their in-person classes for fall quarter. Rather than repeat my spring experience with online courses, I chose to defer enrollment for a year. Many 2020 graduates did the same — in August, up to 40% of incoming college freshmen around the country were considering a gap year. Of the students who did choose to attend school, many have dropped out or decided not to re-enroll for their next quarter or semester — this fall, enrollment was down 1.4% at public universities and 9.4% at community colleges. Job-searching during a pandemic doesn’t always work out, thanks to a diving economy and revoked job offers, but many students are taking their chances with a gap year anyway.
Students’ concerns about returning to college are legitimate, and stem from every facet of the COVID-19 crisis: they can’t justify paying full tuition for online school, their campuses don’t adequately follow safety guidelines, or they just don’t want to spend their year watching Zoom lectures and typing discussion posts instead of having face-to-face classes where they can interact with classmates and professors. For students with ADHD and other learning difficulties, online classes compound the elements of classroom learning that are already hardest to manage, such as attention regulation, time management, and distraction. Online school also presents new challenges: reduced structure in school days, unclear expectations from teachers, lack of physical activity, and new environmental distractions like roommates, family, or pets.
Even outside of getting used to new academic norms, it’s been an overwhelming year. America’s 300,000 COVID deaths since March and the other drastic life changes that came with the pandemic have caused stress and grief on a worldwide scale. The political and economic state of the U.S. can feel paralyzingly important; unemployment rates peaked at 14.7% in April, and COVID has compounded the effects of poverty, racism, and other socioeconomic disadvantages for millions of Americans. Protests for Black lives defined this summer around the world and have continued through the fall with little media coverage.
There’s so much going on that reading the news can feel like watching an especially chaotic season of TV, and in some ways it feels like the whole world is adhering to the equal-importance plot structure. Almost every facet of “normal life” has been overturned by COVID, but the pieces of normalcy that have continued, like school, are treated with the same importance that they had in a pre-COVID world. That’s not a bad thing — school is important! But when students are struggling with a myriad of financial, mental, and health problems caused by a pandemic, it’s extremely difficult to give the same amount of energy to their education that they would in a normal year. Many schools have reverted from the more forgiving grading standards that gave students room for error in the spring, and fall semester grade averages have dropped, putting even more pressure on students.
When people ask why I deferred college, it can be hard to explain how ADHD affects my ability to succeed in online school, or in my life in general. But if you want to try to imagine that effect, the chaos of the pandemic has come close to mirroring the way my brain prioritizes information. Rather than just my ADHD, it’s the whole world telling me that everything is earth-shatteringly important, from school to election cycles to hand sanitizer. COVID has basically simulated a large part of the ADHD experience in real life. So if you ever wanted to understand living with ADHD, I guess now’s the right time — or you can always watch an episode of Riverdale.
Taylar Christianson is a 2020 high school graduate and foundry10 intern. She’s loved writing and art since she was little, and has been fortunate to work in the arts throughout her school career. In her free time, she writes, spends time with her sibling and her cats, and analyzes TV shows way more than they ever needed to be analyzed.
To learn more about foundry10, follow us on social and subscribe to our monthly Newsletter.
Twitter: @foundry10Ed
Facebook: @foundry10
Instagram: @foundry10
Linkedin: foundry10
