This is a short excerpt of my forthcoming book 10 Things I Hate About ADHD – Laughing at Distraction.
How many times have you started reading and somewhere along the way you realized your mind drifted off and you can’t remember the last sentence you read?
How many times have you started reading and somewhere along the way you realized your mind drifted off and you can’t remember the last sentence you read?
Losing track
It’s so easy to lose track of what you’re reading when you have ADHD. What did the last page say again?
Don’t you hate that?
It is even worse if you have to start the book over from the very beginning again, and again, and again!
Love and hate and well, lost
Reading is one of the things I enjoy and love the most, but it is also one of the things I hate the most about ADHD.
I get lost when reading. No, I mean really lost.
Needle in a haystack lost! Amazon jungle lost! Where the Hockey-Puck am I? – lost!
I will start reading a page or a paragraph, or just a word, and then an hour or two, or even a day, week or decade later, I will slowly come back to reality and realize that I cannot remember a single thing I have read because my mind drifted off to fight evil aliens in a distant land somewhere.
Damn those aliens!
Book burning is not a solution
From time to time I will catch myself when I start drifting off, at which point I will return to where I last ‘remember’ and continue once again. This is a calm and planned action, but around the hundredth ‘restart’ I begin playing with my lighter and wonder calmly what pretty book flames would look like (doesn’t everyone?).
Alas, my neighbor is a firefighter and a friend, so it is not that he would frown upon my pyromaniac, witch-like book burning so much as that he would be too quick to come over and put it out!
How would I explain that the book would not let me read it or that I purchased it for entertainment and that I was going to get what I paid for no matter what?
No, of course I would never burn a book. Really.
There is way better punishment for a book that I can’t focus on long enough to read all the way through, and that is to quietly place it in a pile, never to be found again, ever. All of my books are in piles, all of them, I tell you!
I also love to hate self-help books
For people with ADHD self-help books are an addiction. We support an entire industry.
I dread going to the bookstore because I know I cannot leave without getting my fix. I tell myself, “Just one, only one. That’s all you need.” But the next thing I know I am carrying a bagful twice my weight and I have no place to put them. So I walk them home and pile them up wherever I can find space among my current piles.
I have decided that it is not about reading the books; it is more about having them. Even if I can never find them again, at least I know they’re there.
What? The same book?
You are a certified person with ADHD when you find several copies of the same book in your home, but you do not necessarily qualify if the book has an updated cover. After all, anyone could make that mistake!
-I hope you enjoyed this short excerpt. If you’re wondering why the book is not published yet, well, my wife calls it crastinating. Not sure what she means. Do you?
~Bryan
Checked out my new blog Positive Writer. Latest post: Stop Worrying About What People Think and Create Anyway ~Bryan
