I suffered with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) as a child. I didn’t know it. It was poorly understood then so I thought I was dumb. Today I’m an adult with ADD and I know it. Ironically, I’m the better for it. Teachers in my schooldays regarded the symptoms of ADD as either evidence of moral failure, a lack of discipline, stubbornness or as indications of limited intelligence.
My life has been a process of recovery. Over time and with help I learned to understand and embrace my way of thinking and even to see it as a gift. In grade school I thought it was a curse. So did my teacher, Miss Richter.
During grade school, my academic performance was marginal. My mother was called in regularly for ‘conferences.’ The conference proceeded in a formulaic manner, predictable questions and required answers, the way litanies are performed in churches. Now sixty-five years later, one of the conferences remains as vivid in my mind as if it was yesterday. That I ever made it out of sixth grade seems nothing short of miraculous.
During the conferences I would stand between my mother and Miss Richter. Miss Richter wore mostly dark tan dresses, the color of Hitler’s brown shirts, and heavy black shoes with high heels that looked to me like jackboots. With her head raised imperiously, she would enumerate to my mother (as she had six months previously) my offences.
With my head lowered hangdog and feeling penitent, I would listen as she recited: “He does not apply himself. George is lazy, daydreams all the time, does not complete homework or do the required reading. He pays no attention in class.” As she spoke, my face burned with shame, my mother looked sad and bewildered, and Miss Richter, having ended her litany rose up on her toes triumphantly and posed this question to me, “Well, what have you to say for yourself?” Since this was not the first time, I knew the drill well enough to say I was sorry, would work harder to pay attention, do the reading, stop daydreaming and would apply myself. At best, it lasted six weeks. I did not like school.
Like the biblical tale of Dives and Lazarus, I wound up feeling alone: “Between us a great gulf is fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.” In short, the wall between the smart kids and me seemed insurmountable. I thought I was a loser.
As an adult, I slowly realized the peculiarities of the way I think and discovered something very affirming about who I was and the world I inhabited as a boy. The church was offering me a way out and only forty years later did I see how that happened. I did not have a disability; I had a way of learning that did not work well in the scholastic education model such as we had at P.S. 29 in New York City.
ADD brings difficulty in sustaining attention – a book of a hundred pages can be as intimidating as a pit of snakes. How do you get through its sheer volume? The other hurdle, although not necessarily painful, is how people like me have a wild imagination. When it’s heated up it fires off like a pan filled with hot popcorn, sending ideas ricocheting off each other. That exacerbates the difficulty in focusing. So when Miss Richter said I didn’t listen in class she was partially right. I listened to her until something she said interested me, then my imagination fired up and my mind took off like hounds to the hare. I simply left Miss Richter behind.
In retrospect, I see now that it was religion that saved me, although not in the conventional sense of the word.
I liked my church. Sunday after Sunday I’d attend church to hear in prayer and liturgy some of the most beautiful English ever written. It was accompanied by rich pageantry. I read little in the King James version of the Bible still less in the Book of Common Prayer, but Sunday after Sunday I had been hearing and internalizing the spoken words, their epic stories and the images the words inspired. For a kid who couldn’t read that well, I was amassing a formidable vocabulary. I was inexorably led to a vocation of story telling. As a preacher I told stories, as a psychotherapist I listened to stories and had the vocabulary to help shape my own stories and other’s into meaning. Then finally in later life I discovered writing, which was a pure joy, like finding myself.
I think of my poor mother, an avid reader, intellectually curious and a closet artist – having to endure the indignities of the ‘conferences’ that neither of us fully understood. My mother had little encouragement that I’d be a better student, but hoped that I might talk to our neighbor Mr. Zahn. He was a foreman at Brewers Dry Dock and at least he “could get you a nice job and the money is really good.” I’ll allow as to how probably I would have made more money in the shipyard. I know my mother is glad it worked out the way it did. I am, too.
The ultimate meaning of intelligence is not in the numbers or the names diagnostic categories assign to various mental functions. It’s in understanding how one’s mind works and then putting it in the service of what it’s best fitted to do.
N.B. I’m not saying anything but Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Einstein were school dropouts.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
leslie moorhouse says
Wow….my life exactly!! Thank you George!!!!!!!!!!