Sometime in the week I got to reading Driven to Distraction by Ratey and Hallowell, I think, a book about ADD. This had shot up my agenda with my disillusionment with my exclusion diet and with some shock which I can’t now place but which reminded me that I have a seriously destabilising disorder which will have to be diagnosed and medicated. This triggered a series of reveries.
The book outlines exactly what an individual with ADD can expect to experience. One of these things is a period of depression after an accomplishment.
I was walking in to Mardy Hell, the local shopping mall that was built on the site of an old steel works around eighteen to twenty years ago (I remember Mum pointing out the site when it was little but a brown field stretching out as far as the eye can see; we had gone for what had become a regular walk along the canals from the Nine Locks pub, sometimes with the nets that we used to bring with us to a place we called the ‘Quarry,’ in actuality a levelling lake for the lake in the park). I hate the place and it’s always an ordeal for me but we needed to do some food shopping, something we have to do more than ever at the moment due to my dietary needs.
I had had a bad day, no doubt. It may have been the day that I made some piffling faux pas with one of the women at work I have never really been able to talk to – there’s always some – and certainly, I was feeling paranoid, depressed and a little vulnerable early on in the week.
Reveries first had centered around overturning my car and coming out with some pretty nasty injuries. This as a way of showing how I had been feeling, admitting it was my own fault for driving like a loon.
But on walking into Mardy Hell, straight past the pet shop where I often drag M_____ to look at the rabbits and guinea pigs and to soothe my mind a little, I became aware of the rushes of the development of another reverie which instead featured slashed wrists, the result of just such an achievement as described by Ratey and Hallowell: the securing of a publishing deal. As is often the case, I was talking about it in a meeting at work, essentially coming out as aspergic (and mood disordered) as is often the case in such things.
– completed 1/10/07 –
I can’t remember the details of these reveries, though I can tell that they are typical of a type I have been having for years. As usual in such ‘coming out’ reveries, I tell the rest of the staff that they may use the fact against me if they please (often I say this having been told I was brave for coming out), but that they may also see it as evidence of how strong I must have been to get through it.
[Wow, I think I have just had a memory of a reverie of being celebrated as a writer going back a decade or so, so this has some pedigree] The tone of the reverie was distinctive. A kind of calm, almost reassuring tone of melancholy I associate with winter around Christmas, perhaps between Xmas and New Year when I’m not assailed by too many extraneous obligations.