That’s Me in the Spotlight, Losing My Concentration
As a late Gen-Xer I was part of the last cohort of American children to stumble through adolescence with learning accommodations no more nuanced than “Shut up and do your homework.” You may romanticize our suck-it-up 1980s childhood as some kind of marker that we’re tougher than Gen Z, but as a parent now I can only think how well-supported my autistic son is by the changes in education and medicine. I also think how I would not have minded at all getting proper treatment for my own ADHD at a younger age.
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Instead, I learned to self-medicate through writing. Since childhood, my writing was the place where the noise of the world could be tuned out and ideas put down, sentence-by-sentence, with layers of meaning falling into easy place. In my writing, I was organized. In my life, less so.
In high school, I’d set my alarm for 5 a.m. and get up to do my homework, because the house was quiet at that time. I remember rigging a light and wedging a small desk in my closet so I could study for my SAT test without the things that distracted me so easily.
Just how long writing has been my coping mechanism was proved to me this summer when my mother passed away and I was cleaning out her garage. I was soon surrounded by decaying box after box full of Jem and the Holograms or Garfield-branded notebooks and journals filled with my young, neon-inked writing.
As you can see, I really had no other option in life other than becoming a novelist, but it was in adulthood that this obsessive work style stopped actually working. Having contracts and deadlines gives a sense of accomplishment but are exactly the things to trigger one’s ADHD. Career and life stresses would immobilize me to the point of being unable to open emails for days at a time. Then, even the writing itself stopped. Anti-depressants didn’t work, because I wasn’t depressed. I was stressed and anxious and a doctor recommended ADHD medication.
My writing came back, but different this time. I was keeping hours like a shopkeeper and at the end of the day I could turn the “open” sign around to “closed,” then enjoy life. I wrote two novels in a span of three years. During this period my focus was balanced, and instead of being daunting the work was joyful. The laptop keys pattered as simply as rain. It was who I am, and what I do, and everything felt in sync. In a word, I felt… normal. But it’s now been eight months since I’ve had a prescription, one of thousands of Americans on the wrong end of a shortage.
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I’ve given up on filling my prescription, but I know of people here in New York who spend days every month playing Whac-a-mole at pharmacies to find their ADHD prescriptions and I understand why. Experiencing mental well-being, which I hadn’t felt for years, changed my life and saved my career. But in this country we romanticize being broken too much and see any admission of illness as a character flaw. A nagging part of me—the Gen-X part—says that I can play on a broken foot. After all, I did it for years and there are still more books to write.
I’ve tried to maintain the habits I re-learned while on meds: keeping set hours, working only on one thing at a time, and not panicking because the to-do list will never end. Luckily, there’s a New York phenomenon that’s also come back after the pandemic: apartment sitting.
Others may run in terror from friends asking for cats to be fed and plants watered but I’ll happily sign up, laptop in my bag and the writing already starting in my head. When I sit down in spaces full of books I never bought, bills not in my name, and no dinosaur toys underfoot, I’m back in the place where my thoughts are organized and I’m free from anxiety.
This works for me now, but I hope medical treatment is once again more easily available. If it isn’t, and anyone knows of a Brooklyn or Queens pharmacy with generic in stock, maybe they could remember to help a novelist out and let her know.
Check out Emily Schultz’s Brooklyn Kills Me here:
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