“PAY us NOW!”
This category is taking a new direction. I started this blog by just typing whatever was on my mind, but I now feel the best way to help people is to offer a more systematic approach. Please click the following link to learn more!
ADHD and Your Money
Thanks!
Pharmaceutical Conspiracy!
It’s fascinating to me how many people put themselves out there AGAINST add. It’s amazing!
What is it?
I accept that many of them are genuine in concern, and I believe they make many relevant points. What they leave out of all their equations though is - experience.
I’m an adult who was diaganosed with add less than a year ago. A couple months ago it really hit me, and I started researching it more. I was struck by how many other people there are like me. They go through the same weird things that I do. It was kind of a relief.
Then it got heavy. I started looking at my past and seeing it in action. Some of the dumb things I’ve done, and stupid things I said, while certainly not right, I understand better the action. You see, what the anti-add crowd is missing, is the experiece. They have a normal working brain. Well, their brains function like the majority of people, not like us. I agree with them that add isn’t a disorder. What I disagree with them on is the fact that it exists. I live it everyday! The experience!
I do the dumbest things. Not because I’m lazy. Not because I lack motivation. Yes, sometimes I forget … but I go against my OWN will and own better judgement. Yet, when you’re there, in the experience … when it’s you …
I take medication. There. I said it. How do you like that? What’s the big deal any way? I naturally get my chores done more often. The house is cleaner. I’ve always been a hard worker, but now I can accomplish so much more in a day. I’ve regretted stopping playing music for 22 years - I’m now (as we speak) teaching myself guitar! Maybe their angry because now I’m getting a good nights rest more often.
Was it BIG PHARMA?
It had to be them! They all got together in a smokey room and decided to help people free themselves of “weirdness”! The BIG MONEY was on helping this small percentage of the population improve their lives!
Yeah.
Maybe drugs are over-prescribed for add. Maybe too many doctors jump to the wrong conclusion. I’m sure that’s all true, but that doesn’t mean that add doesn’t exist. Do certain behaviors need to be worked on? Yes. Do some people use it as an excuse? Well, duh!
That doesn’t mean add doesn’t exist.
Each of us lives our own unique experience. What the world is to me, is different than the world to you. My experience is of writing this post. Your experience is of reading this post. EVERYTHING isn’t the same.
Add is a genuine problem for many people. I’m living proof of it.
I know … I know … experience doesn’t exist.
Patience
I talk about SLOWING DOWN and ZEN and things … and I’ve realized that PATIENCE is the same thing.
I have been becoming more interested in patience recently. I was at a friend’s having a couple beers and “working” on his truck. He was getting it ready for summer. All of a sudden, another light went on in my head and I realized how incredibly patient he is. He calls it ANTICIPATION. At first, I thought “yea, it’s anticipation all right, but that’s exactly what drives me CRAZY!”
He ENJOYS it.
“Hmmmm” I thought.
Right now I’m in the middle of reading a book called “The Soul’s Code,” by James Hillman. I came across the following and thought I’d share it.
p. 24-26
Failures in our loves, friendships, and families often come down to failures of imaginative perception. When we are not looking with the eye of the heart, love is indeed blind, for then we are failing to see the other person as bearer of an acorn of imaginative trust. A feeling may be there, but not the sight; and, as the vision clouds, so do sympathy and interest. We feel only annoyed, and we resort to diagnostic and typological concepts. But your husband is not “mother-bound”; he whines and expects and is often paralyzed. Your wife is not “animus-ridden”; she is peremptory, argues logically, and can’t let go. How they are is who they are, and not what they are said to be by types and classes.
Imaginative perception takes patience. As the alchemists said of their laborious frustrating experiments, “In your patience is your soul.” how else meet the other’s incomprehensible behavior, that oddness, that slowness? Dr. Edward Teller didn’t speak until he was past three and was thought to be retarded. “One day Edward did talk, and it was in sentences, not words, as if he had been saving the effort until he had something to say.” Dr. Benjamin Spock “spoke very little until he was over three, and when he did say anything he spoke with maddening slowness.” Martin Buber, too, began to talk only at three. One of James Thurber’s teachers “told his mother that he might be deaf.” Woodrow Wilson, perhaps America’s most bookish President, “had not learned his letters until he was nine years old and could not read until he was twelve.” Former biographers blamed Wilson’s relations with his mother and his father for this delay. Up-to-date biography prefers a psychiatric diagnosis, declaring “that Woodrow Wilson had developmental dyslexia,” suggesting the blame be placed in his brain.
Dyslexia, chronic lateness, distractability, hyperactivity make up “attention deficit disorder” - and what patience it demands. Yet how else contain and tease out what this “deficit” also shows? Children so categorized, and adults too, are often those with above-average intelligence, given to day-dreams, and with such widely open sensitive souls that their “ego” behavior is noncompliant and disorganized. Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax - of course, they work. But because they work against the deficit does not confirm the cause of it or disclose its meaning. Crutches work, but they can’t account for your broken leg. Why is this disorder so prevalent today? What does the soul not want to attend to, and what might the daimon be doing when it is not reading, not speaking, and not fulfilling performance expectations? To discover this takes patience, and that imaginative perception that Henry James described as “a prolonged hovering over the case exposed.”
Blogging on ADHD!
The hard part about having a blog is coming up with something to write about. You’d think that with the add I’d have so many ideas that I’d have to choose from too many. Well … that’s the (not so) funny thing about add.
I DO have TONS of stuff to write about. I’m just always ready to move on to the next thing.
It’s a double-edged sword.
It can be very difficult at times to finish things. It’s weird. You want to finish a project SOOOOOO BAD. You’re SOOOOOO anxious to have the final product … and yet you’ll just move on to the next thing … of course, then you end up with even BIGGER problems. Ugh!
Why? Because pretty soon you’re working on 24 different things, all at once, and each one has an immediate (impossible) deadline that you somehow give yourself in your head. I’m a slave driver! In my head anyways, when the subject is myself. I’m the one crackin’ the whip (at myself).
Sweet, uh?
This brings me back to my motto - SLOW DOWN. For me, I get more done when I take my time. I complete things in record time when I don’t have a deadline. Think about it. DEAD-line. Who wants to accomplish that?
Of course, there’s the whole midlife crises thing I’m going through (we’ll get into that another time). It started as a midlife awakening, but I’ll admit, I’ve gotten sidetracked (can you believe it?), and I managed to lose sight of the path. But I’ll find it. I may be caught in a fog … but I’ll find it.
My life is in a strange place right now. The polar extremes really seem to be fighting over me. I’ve never felt so good about myself, and I have some amazing opportunities knocking at my door. Yet, some of the worst things in my life are happening too. I’m not quite ready to share the details of them here, but life is hitting me HARD from all angles.
It’s been a battle. It’s been a BATTLE all my life!
Friends, family, co-workers, customers, strangers … relationships are so much work. HARD WORK. They don’t need to be, but they are … or at least were … I’m working on myself, and that should help. Maybe this blog I’ve started will help.
Then there’s WORK! You know … jobs, career, etc. Talk about PRESSURE.
You see … I didn’t know how to make friends as a kid. At least that’s what I thought. I had a couple friends here and there, but for the most part - sixth through twelfth grade - I was on my own. I just didn’t interact very well socially.
I WANTED to! I had more DESIRE in my belly to be popular than Tony Robbins could ever drum up. But the social stuff was just a little off for me.
Now I’m an adult. A career? At a CORPORATION? Gimme a break! That’s even harder than school ever was. There isn’t enough money and medication in the world to get me to want to endure that. I’ve had some corporate positions, they’ve all been commission-based with very little supervision, but it’s still too much relationship management for me.
It’s all OK though.
Learning about the add really put a lot of things into perspective. It’s strange. You live this life knowing some thing’s just not right. You have difficulty expressing your thoughts and ideas to other people. As a kid I’d get dragged into THERAPY where they basically told me I’m a bad kid and need to BEHAVE properly, LISTEN and DO what my parents and other authorities tell me … Accuse me of being on drugs … (all I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi … but she wouldn’t give it to me).
Then one day, I’m sitting with my current shrink, trying to organize the piles of thoughts in my head, and she’s says “maybe you have add”, and had me take some tests. I took the tests (basic IQ stuff), and when I’m done she says I shouldn’t have these problems and recommends I see a psychiatrist about add. I go see this guy, take more tests, and then I start some medication for add … and suddenly I’m out of the bubble I’ve been living in my entire life!
It’s amazing!
The only hard part is getting used to driving the Corvette ZR1 with it’s 620 horsepower that is my brain. It’s hard to shake off the old habits of driving my ‘vette now that the engine is tuned. It’s a whole different experience.
From there, the whole world starts opening up. I’ve realized I had the solution to my problems all along - SLOW DOWN. Zen, man! I’ve been so wound up, for such a long time … I’m still getting used to this clean running car.
One step at a time. Day by day. Patience is a virtue. Insert your own cheesy mantra here.
So life isn’t a battle after all. It just appeared that way through the prism of my add brain.
My final thought for tonight is this: My fellow adders out there, take my advice and SLOW DOWN. Trust me, you’ve got WAY TOO MANY things you wanna do. Relax. Eventually you’ll get to them all. It’s OK. All is good.
For the non-adders out there. It’s real! I don’t care what others have to say. I don’t even care about their backgrounds, bonafides, and credentials. Until they can literally climb into my brain, they can go ahead and shut their pie holes. (Boy, that was kinda mean). And if they ever do (get to climb into my brain), they won’t be able to handle it, because a closed-mind would freeze-up and shutdown running at the speed of add.
It’s getting late, and in the name of slowing things down, I’m going to bed.
Milton Goes to College
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 - November 16, 2006) was an American Nobel Laureate economist, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, public intellectual, and author of many books.
The following is a transcript (condensed by me) of a conversation between Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn (LA) and Milton Friedman (MF) which took place on May 22, 2006. Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.
LA: … in ten years, 40% of young men in the world are going to be living in oppressed Muslim countries. What do you think the effect of that is going to be?
MF: What happens will depend on whether we succeed in bringing some element of greater economic freedom to those Muslim countries. Just as India in 1955 had great but unrealized potential, I think the Middle East is in a similar situation today. In part this is because of the curse of oil. Oil has been a blessing from one point of view, but a curse from another. Almost every country in the Middle East that is rich in oil is a despotism.
LA: Why do you think that is so?
MF: One reason, and one reason only - the oil is owned by the governments in question. If that oil were privately owned and thus someone’s private property, the political outcome would be freedom rather than tyranny. This is why I believe the first step following the 2003 invasion of Iraq should have been the privatization of the oil fields. If the government had given every individual over 21 years of age equal shares in a corporation that had the right and responsibility to make appropriate arrangements with foreign oil companies for the purpose of discovering and developing Iraq’s oil reserves, the oil income would have flowed in the form of dividends to the people - the shareholders - rather than into government coffers. This would have provided an income to the whole people of Iraq and thereby prevented the current disputes over oil between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, because oil income would have been distributed on an individual rather than a group basis.
LA: … Is it your view that the introduction of free markets in such places could overcome [theocratic] obstacles?
MF: Eventually, yes. I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
LA: Is there an area here in the United States in which we have not been as aggressive as we should in promoting property rights and free markets?
MF: Yes, in the field of medical care. We have a socialist-communist system of distributing medical care.
LA: Do you think the Great Depression was triggered by bad monetary policy at a crucial moment?
MF: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it is still the case that if you ask people what caused the Great Depression, nine out of ten will probably tell you it was a failure of business. But it’s absolutely clear that the Depression was a failure of government and not a failure of business.
LA: Do you think our government has learned its lesson about how to manage the money supply?
MF: I think that the lesson has been learned, but I don’t think it will last forever. Sooner or later, government will want to raise funds without imposing taxes. It will want to spend money it does not have. So I hesitate to join those who are predicting two percent inflation for the next 20 years. The temptation for government to lay its hands on that money is going to be very hard to resist. The fundamental problem is that you shouldn’t have an institution such as the Federal Reserve, which depends for its success on the abilities of its chairman. My first preference would be to abolish the Federal Reserve, but that’s not going to happen.
LA: … you have turned much of your attention to education, and to vouchers as a method of education reform. Why is that your focus?
MF: I don’t see how we can maintain a decent society if we have a world split into haves and have nots, with the haves subsidizing the have nots. In our current educational system, close to 30% of the youngsters who start high school never finish… They are condemned to a situation in which they are going to be at the bottom. That leads in turn to a divisive society; it leads to a stratified society
LA: Why do you think teachers unions oppose vouchers?
MF: The president of the National Education Association was once asked when his union was going to do something about students. He replied that when the students became members of the union, the union would take care of them. And that was the correct answer. Why? His responsibility as president of the NEA was to serve the members of the union, not to serve public purposes. I give him credit: The trade union has been very effective in serving its members. However, in the process, they’ve destroyed American education. But you see, education isn’t the union’s function. It’s our fault for allowing the union to pursue its agenda… [Education] suffer[s] from the disease that takes a system that should be bottom-up and converts it to top-down… It isn’t the public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education… In education, we subsidize the producer - the school. If you subsidize the student instead - the consumer - you will have competition. The student could choose the school he attends and that would force schools to improve and to meet the demands of their students.
LA: Do you define self-interest as what the individual wants?
MF: Yes, self-interest is what the individual wants. Mother Teresa, to take one example, operated on a completely self-interested basis. Self-interest does not mean narrow self-interest. Self-interest does not mean monetary self-interest. Self-interest means pursuing those things that are valuable to you but which you can also persuade others to value. Such things very often go beyond immediate material interest.
LA: Does that mean self-interest is a synonym for self-sacrafice?
MF: If you want to see how pervasive this sort of self-interest is that I’m describing, look at the enormous amount of money contributed after Hurricane Katrina. That was a tremendous display of self-interest: The self-interest of people in that case was to help others. Self-interest, rightly understood, works for the benefit of society as a whole.
Music for the Motion Picture Into the Wild
The Great Controversy - Two or three months ago a friend of mine was taking his wife out on a “date night” by planning the typical dinner and the movies. A chance to be adults without the kids for a few hours. As he looked through the offerings at the local Big Cinemas, he was coming up empty handed. He settled on a small art theatre and a movie called “Into the Wild”.
The following day my friend called me and wanted me to go to the movies with him and another buddy of ours. He gave both of us the same story before getting an answer out of either of us. Being that “John Rambo” was at the Big Cinema, I immediately concluded that was what we’d be going to see. I mean, The Guy’s going to the movies and everything … any who, we went, and my interest in the rock band Pearl Jam by way of front man Eddie Vedder was greatly renewed.
It seems there’s quite a bit of controversy swarming around about the movie and hence, its soundtrack. There is no secret to the plot from how it begins to how it ends. Bright young kid with a promising future graduates from college, then walks away from everyone and everything he knows, burning his money, ID, etc. and heads off to go live off the land in Alaska for awhile. The CONTROVERSY stems from individual perspectives on whether Chris McCandless was right or wrong in what he did. This stems from the insistence that it must be one or the other. Right OR wrong. What I saw was both. Each a shadow of the other.
Sean Penn had asked Vedder to write a song for the movie, but instead he tackled the entire project, playing every instrument himself. The whole CD tracks in at just over 30 minutes. The listener often feels cheated when such good songs come to an end so abruptly. One at first thinks of Vedder, the “anti-rock star” Rock Star, cutting his songs short to keep from earning a radio hit, but after a few listens, the sudden ending to so many good songs gives me the same feeling those who befriended McCandless must have felt as he arbitrarily moved on. Like his relationships, just as you begin to involve yourself in the song, it ends.
The movie was nothing less than brilliant in it’s ability to deliver to the audience the experience of freedom and adventure Chris’s travels brought, as well as the darkness of truly being alone, trapped within himself, among everything he was trying to run from. The soundtrack Eddie Vedder delivers is nothing short of the feelings, moods, and messages of the movie itself.
This acoustic and mellow soundtrack puts Eddie Vedder’s amazing talent on display. It seems to me he often tries to hide his talent, but here he sets it free. I’ve never listened to a soundtrack that walked me through my emotions in the pattern this one does. I personally enjoy it best as a whole album (do we use that word anymore?). I like to start with track #1, and listen all the way through #11 with it’s “hidden track” at the end. The silence in between is as much of the experience of listening as the songs themselves.
