“Viewing ADHD as this neuro genetic or neuro biologic disorder of self regulation brings with it some very important insights that I would like you and the families I council to understand, not the least of which is this one: it’s always now. ADHD is, to summarize it in a single phrase, time blindness. People with ADHD cannot deal with time and that includes looking back to look ahead to get ready for what’s coming at you. So the individual with ADHD is kind of living in the now and wherever the now goes, they are being pulled along by the nose wherever it goes.” - Dr. Russell A. Barkley, PhD
Today (now) I am back on the meds and so my head is doing that laser attention thing that doesn’t actually mean I am more focused on any one task, but does seem to mean that I am more productive at performing the same multiple tasks simultaneously. Whatever productive means, I guess (look, I am writing a blog post. Look, I am finally answering important emails).
A while ago I shifted from beginning every email with sorry for my late response to thank you for your patience which feels somehow like a very small victory. I look back at the date of my last entry here and realize it was almost a month ago, even though I have thought about this task every day and been certain for one month that tomorrow (not now) I am going to write something.
“The ability to look ahead is called intention, so ADHD is actually IDD: Intention Deficit Disorder, because it doesn’t matter what your intentions are, you’re not going to do them…your intentions are not the problem, and it’s not insincerity, it’s the inability to organize around those intentions.”
Even though I have calendars of neatly lined rows and square boxes perpetually next to me on my desk, and an elaborate colour coding system for writing down tasks and events in those white boxes which is supposed to enable me to control (my?) time, the schedule that I actually work by is a rotating piece of scrap paper with only two headings: this week and next week. Somewhere in the process of writing this (now) I realize I don’t actually notice when one turns into the other maybe because in fact, this week and next week are both relative and so are also always now. I take tasks off the list as I complete them and am anxious only if they begin to pile up or approach someone else’s strict deadline, not when next week suddenly becomes next month.
(Thank you for your patience)
“Do you see what happens? It doesn’t matter what your plans were, what your goals were, the now is more compelling than the information you’re holding in mind and you will get pulled along by the now. You are time blind.”
Ok. But does this mean I am time blind, or does this mean that you’re assuming that time functions in the same rigid way for everyone?
(Thank you for your patience)
“If we had to summarize, in a single sentence ‘what is the purpose of the frontal lobe to humans?’, it is to organize your behaviour across time in anticipation of what is coming at you: the future. So ADHD creates a blindness to time, or technically, to be more accurate, a nearsightedness to the future. ADHD is at its heart, a blindness to time, or technically to be more exact, a nearsightedness to the future. Just as people who are nearsighted can only read things close at hand, people with ADHD can only deal with things near in time. The further out the event lies, the less they are capable of dealing with it. This is why everything is left to the last minute because they only deal with last minutes: that’s all they perceive, that’s all they deal with, that’s all they organize to. So their life is a series of one crisis after another, all of which were avoidable because people prepared and they didn’t. They weren’t ready on time, in time, over time, with what they needed at that time. So ADHD is destroying the timing and timeliness of human behaviour.”
This seems right and familiar, sort of. Recently I added a new column to the bottom of my working to do list: long term. Under long term is a number of things like investigating switching to better health insurance, finding a specialist psychologist, updating my language certificates or joining the local tenants union; tasks that exist in a perpetual twilit limbo, haunting me but never quite existing in a NOW urgent enough to do them. Still, exorcising them onto paper does seem to help quiet some part of my head that continually fills up with all the things I should be dealing with, but never quite do (until they become immanent crises). But sorry doctor, I can’t agree. What is “the timing and timeliness of human behaviour”, as though both time and whatever human behaviour is are universal constants? Have you considered that they are not?
“This ability to organize across time comes with a capacity to build pyramids of behaviour, from little behaviours to the bigger behaviours above them, to the bigger goals above that. All human behaviour can be organized into a hierarchy…people with ADHD cannot hierarchically organize behaviour. So they are accustomed to dealing with behaviours in little fits and starts, but they can’t glue those together as well as others to create the bigger goal to the bigger goal, all the way up, and that’s why you see a short attention span. It’s not really a short attention span, it’s the inability to organize behaviour across time into a hierarchy.”
Wait. Oh, I see. All human behaviour can be organized into a hierarchy. Wait, hang on: can it? People with ADHD cannot hierarchically organize behaviour. Wait, slow down. It’s not really a short attention span, it’s the inability to organize behaviour across time into a hierarchy. Wait.
I forgot I was writing this half way through and it’s now 12:53 pm three days later. No. That’s not right. I didn’t forget. I saw all the other connected things I might do, like a kaleidoscope of bright unfolding patterns, and did many of them first (in whole or in part), all while thinking about this text; small shards of coloured glass forming and re-forming connections while doing laundry, walking the dog, talking with friends, working on graphics contracts, researching new references, cooking dinner. I am certain this method of writing (living?) might be categorized as unhierarchical, unproductive, inefficient (should we pause to think about the assumed connections between these words, or do we skip over them?), but I don’t find it upsetting or disordered until I try to fit it into those square white calendar boxes.
(Thank you for your patience)
”I want you to understand something: your brain can be split into two pieces. The back part is where you acquire knowledge, the front part is where you use it. The back part is knowledge, the front part is performance. ADHD, like a meat cleaver, just split your brain in half, so it doesn’t matter what you know, you won’t use it. You have, what we call in psychology, a performance disorder.”
Given the long history of titled men who are confident dissection is the fastest route to understanding (most especially into two neatly divided pieces), respectfully, I must tell you I remain unconvinced.
Although a performance disorder does sound like the kind of thing I can get behind.
(Thank you for your patience)
“Time is often presented as a single flow, one that is accelerating based on the development of new technologies. It is still often considered to be neutral, objective and external to human practices, instead of socially shaped and produced. One consequence of this approach, as we saw in relation to time management, is that problematic experiences of time are viewed as an individual concern, something that needs to be coped with on an individual basis.”
In contrast to the medical model of disability, which says people are disabled by their difference and focuses on what is ‘wrong’, the social model of disability argues that people are disabled not by their impairment or difference, but by barriers in society.
(All human behaviour can be organized into a hierarchy)
“Rather than seeing time as a flow between past, present and future (whether this be linear or nonlinear), it becomes possible to ask how time operates as a system for social collaboration…how it legitimates some and ‘manages’ others…or how it works to support systems of exclusion.”
(All human behaviour can be organized into a hierarchy)
“[In Bruno Latour’s paper ‘Trains of Thought: The Fifth Dimension of Time and its Fabrication’], he claims that the traditional dichotomy between objective and subjective time fundamentally misrecognises the way that our experiences of time are a “consequence of the ways in which bodies relate to one another”…he suggests that our experience of time is not about the mind’s perception (subjective) or the universe’s form (objective), but a “question of the obedience and disobedience of humans or nonhumans”…time is multiple, conflicting and inherently requires compromise and adjustment…We are encouraged to ask not only how one might engage with the material world differently, but also how one’s own experience might be bound up with the experiences of others.”
All human behaviour can be organized into a hierarchy.
Thank you for your patience.
____
Quotes taken from:
Dr. Russell A. Barkley, PhD, Important ADHD Insights, CADDAC Conference, May 30, 2009, Toronto, Canada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmV8HQUuPEk
Pschetz, L., & Bastian, M., Temporal Design: Rethinking time in design, Design Studies (2017), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0142694X17300765?via%3Dihub
This post is part of a two month series exploring neurodivergent experiences of (non)linear time, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the risoprint zine, How to Build a Kaleidoscope.