Small Town Boy

Advance apologies for getting too personal here...

My goal for writing these posts was to “muse” on things like the music business, making music, and similar creative directions. Here I am, only a few in, and I’ve already veered off in a new direction, but I feel this is important enough (and tangentially related to why I’m in the field I’m in) that it needs expression. Plus, it’s weighing heavily on my mind lately.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m originally a southerner. Rural-ish southerner, to be more precise. I’m from one of those places that’s good to be from, if not in. I also grew up in a time that was less enlightened about the varieties of human experiences or, even, neurodivergence, to use the trendy word of these days. This is retrospectively plain for me to see, although back then I had less-than-charitable thoughts about myself and my place in the world. I was a disturbance, lazy, disconnected, and an occasional troublemaker with few prospects.

The other day, I happened across this old video on YouTube about ADHD, one that redefined it as more of an executive function problem and less of an attention or motivation problem. The video really struck me because of the plain-spoken talk that said: “You can know all the solutions, but not be able to act on them.” “You have a front part of the brain and a back part of the brain. The back part is where you learn; the front part is where you do… and ADHD splits them apart.” I don’t know why this video came up in my feed, since I rarely search for and ADHD-related things. My thinking has been: I’ve learned all I can about it, so doing is what I need now; why look up anything else?? This has been my modus for the past several years… stop accumulating knowledge and just finally act on it!

The video compelled me to watch. And I did.

It got me thinking about how a lifetime of trying to quiet the inner three-ring-circus in my head, trying to focus, trying to not be late, trying to follow up on commitments. Trying to convince people I do care and am not inconsiderate is freakin’ exhausting. This results in a lot of shame, depression, and anger. And those have mostly been papered over with sugar, caffeine, and zolpidem.

The shame part comes from people alternately thinking I’m the most brilliant person in the room and/or I'm the most useless person in the world. A specific example comes from when I was in middle school: In this one class, there was a nomination process going on for most handsome guy, funniest person, etc. (In retrospect, I see how terrible this activity was!), and for some reason, this one kid in class nominated me for “most intelligent”. The teacher’s incredulous, dumbfounded, shocked response was, “Him?!?!”

Sure, I present as pretty intelligent, but the teacher knew I didn’t get assignments done, failed tests, didn’t focus in class, and was a sure-fired loser. My mother used to say, flatly and unconvincingly, that I was very intelligent, but didn't “apply” myself (whatever the hell that means) or that I was so “beyond the class” I was bored with the material (ditto…). I knew she was either lying to me to make me feel better or lying to herself to feel less like a failed parent (which I don’t think my brain’s condition is her fault). And what’s the result of all this? Shame. And what does shame lead to? Depression and anger.

Over the years, I’ve had bouts of deep depression which I’ve worked on with a combination of somewhat useful to downright destructive medications (licit and illicit), very valuable Jungian analysis, truly awful therapy, and just pushing through and finding my own way. The last came about when I realized no one was going to help me and I was truly on my own. So I developed multiple coping strategies. Hey, we all gotta survive somehow, right?

The anger part comes partly from being angry at myself for not pulling it together. I’d focus and listen to the lecture, then 20 seconds later realize I hadn’t caught the previous 10 seconds and then I was lost, constantly trying to catch up, missing more and more of what was being taught and I was busy trying to remember what was previously said.

Reading was a problem (and still is). Basically, text looks like this to me:

All those blurry parts: imagine them as moving around all the time in a very frenetic way.

Sure, it’s a form of dyslexia. It’s all part of the same issue to me, though. I’m trying to read something and every word on the page is jumping around trying to draw my attention from the word I’m trying to focus on. I even hear those words make noises.

So I couldn’t read. And I still don’t read. Ever. In fact, when I tell people I’ve read about something, it severely understates the effort I went thru to absorb some nugget of information from a piece of text. It’s exhausting. *Note: please don’t ever give me a book as a gift. I won’t read it, even if the subject fascinates me, and it fills me with dread and guilt because I can’t read it.

As I’ve gotten older, there are many skills I’ve adopted to help with this (note-taking skills, pacing whilst listening, etc.). As a kid and teenager, I was on my own. Completely on my own. The only advice I got was, “pay closer attention!” which was not even slightly helpful, thank you very much.

The other part that led to anger was being angry at the world for basically chastising me for not understanding what they are telling me, which seemed to be in a barely decipherable language.

Plain and simple: there is no cure. Just coping. I’ve learned to cope with things, healthfully or not. I’m rarely, if ever, late to anything because I over compensate for the time (and shame of being late). I always finish projects, on time, because the shame of not finishing is too much to bear, but it’s with immense and absolutely draining effort. I am a workaholic because I constantly need to feel valuable to the world and people around me, all to counter those people in my past who assured me I would be of little-to-no value whatsoever; and because I want to make enough money that no one can think I’m a loser. I’ve made sure my vocabulary and grammar are near-perfect so no one thinks I’m an idiot. In other words: I try to present well.

Leading back to music: This may be why I got into music. I don’t have to read; achievements are very subjectively judged by the outside world, if they’re even understood at all by hoi polloi; I can jump around onto different things and work on them in bits and pieces; the external stimuli is just enough to get over all the noise and chaos going on in my brain; I’m free to express all that emotional stuff in my head and call it “art”.

Looking at the above list of reasons, I think the second one is the most crucial. Whatever I do in music, especially because I make so much abstract music, can’t be easily understood by the world (represented by my family and peers in this case) and therefor can’t be judged. If they don’t like it, I can just say, “You don’t understand it.”

This post seems like a downer and I don’t want it to be so. There is a lot of pain in there all the time. But that’s what causes growth and that’s why we’re here, right? So what are my solutions?

First piece of advice: care less what people think

I have to implement this every day: care a lot less about what those teachers, parents, and any other authority figure in the past said or might think about who I am, who I’ve become, what my art is, what I’m doing with my time, or whom I spend my time with. It’s very hard. And relentless. Their voices occupy a lot of space in my brain. I’d say a lot of the problem in the past, with concentration, et al, was the distraction of their constant, relentless voices. They have to be silenced. Every day I have to put this into practice.

I also have to remind myself daily that my brain functions in a different way than most of society’s and that in the past it was viewed as a one-way-ticket to being a burden on the world (a.k.a., a “loser”), but that’s not the case any more. I’ve chosen to not take ADHD meds more out of logistics than any moral reasoning, although there are many paths to helping the brain function better within the existing social structures. With a 50% success rate, I build habits as best I can; I take notes and utilize reminders and calendars on my phone; I pace about or doodle when listening to someone talk to me about something important because, counterintuitively, keeping my body occupied helps concentration; I maximize the hyper-focus nature of ADHD on certain tasks… like, I really lean into it with a “F*** the world! I’m on this now!” attitude when I’m working on a track, especially a client’s.

My weakness now is the aforementioned “sugar, caffeine, and zolpidem”. My last post talked about my Red Bull problem (1 & 2 of the above). I’ve not figured a way out of that yet. The knock-on effect is that my sleep schedule is also problematic, for which I have a zolpidem prescription. This is clearly not a long-term solution and I have to sort that as well.

Every day, I just have to get 1% better than the day before. Luckily, that’s very subjective, at least when being judged by the outside world, if they understand at all.