Jax Garren

1. You know it takes 20 minutes to drive somewhere, so you walk away from the computer 20 minutes before you need to be there.  Because that worked the last 500 times you did it… right?
2. When you were a kid, you were very attentive to teachers because you knew it was rude to not be and you wanted good grades and to be considered a good student and- ooh! Cool bird!
3. Meditation goes something like this: I empty my brain, like pouring tea from a cup. My cup is decorated with green bamboo, ’cause meditation is Asian. No wait, it’s probably not decorated, because we’re supposed to be emptying our minds. Okay, so my emptying-brain-cup is plain. Ooh.  And it has green tea in it, because that’s Asian. No, wait, I’m not Asian. I want Earl Grey Tea in my brain-cup. With lavender. That new tea shop makes the best Earl Grey with lavender… wait, empty brain. I’m emptying my brain. From a plain cup. With plain tea. Where do I empty it to? Because if I poured it into my lap, that would make a mess.
4. You failed the gifted and talented test at your elementary school because, despite the fact that you were the only taker that year to get every question you answered right, somewhere around 2/3 of the way through the test, you quit taking it and started doing something else. (Hopefully you had a good teacher who noticed and gave you a second chance!)
5. When you need to calm down and focus, you get cup a cup of coffee.
6. Listened to instructions = broken project
7. Buddhism is not your religion of choice because Nirvana, where you become one with the universe, sounds like a punishment. (Seriously? Be one with the universe? It sounds so boring… Otherwise, I really like Buddhism.)
8. Starting a project is soooo hard. Finishing a project is unheard of. But that place in the middle, after it’s started but before you got bored with it, you are all over that – potentially for hours with a zen-like focus.
9. April 10: in two days it’s my friend’s birthday, and this year I will NOT forget to post on Facebook!  April 11: Tomorrow is my friend’s birthday, and this year I will NOT forget to post on Facebook! April 12: Look how clean my kitchen is! Yay me!!! I’m awesome!!!!! April 13: I have a friend’s birthday coming up… oh… no…
10. “Interesting but unhappy” or “boring but nothing’s wrong” is a hard choice
11. You agree that the above ten items represent a disorder because the way your brain processes information is deficient and needs to be fixed.

I don’t have ADD. Numbers 1-10 are taken from my life, but 11 is not. (*At this point in writing I randomly decided to get up and make tea.*) I get into the most interesting conversations with people about ADD (I’m just going to call it that instead of ADHD Inattentive type, which is currently the “correct” phrase, but that takes too long), especially because when I was a kid, ADD was an unheard of diagnosis – if your mind wandered, you needed to get it back on task and quit screwing around – and a lot of people my age are suddenly realizing that the set of descriptors around ADD describes us very well. In my latest discussion, a friend who’d done quite a bit of research on it was explaining that there’s a theory that ADD is actually a primal mindset – ancient man needed to be able to shift gears quickly (especially in times of danger when, “Ooh! Bird!” might be either “ooh! Dinner!” or “Ooh! Danger!”), task sets weren’t so convoluted that you needed to remember nine jillion steps, and life was more about the here and now instead of pension plans and “when you graduate” (plus, lions=threat, cancer=not a threat… and not just because they didn’t know it existed, but because it might not have really existed; back in the hunter-gather days, there’s evidence that the people who didn’t die of trauma (ancient medicine did not cope well with animal maulings or breach births) lived long, disease free lives).

But to me, this is one more piece of proof that us 1-10ers do not have a disorder. Is it a different way of processing information? Sure. But that doesn’t make it a bad way of processing information. Sometimes it doesn’t mesh with the modern world, but it’s not un-copeable. And there’s perks! Until somebody explained to me what hyperfocus was, I thought everybody could get wrapped up, trancelike, into a project until everything fell away and all was right with the world. I love that feeling (and it frequently goes hand in hand with a caffeine high – even better!), and I have a regular quest to try to induce it (though I haven’t quite figured out how yet; sometimes it just happens and then everything’s awesome).

Engagement can be a major issue for us 1-10s, but sometimes people make life far more boring than it needs to be, and that’s not our fault. My second grade teacher who demoted me to the regular math group because I didn’t do stacks of work sheets with perfect attention to detail was a bad teacher. I will never forget arguing with one of my ex-students; I told her she needed to sign up for AP English next year (she was in my regular class). She shook her head and told me that I was crazy because she was making C’s in my class, so how was she going to handle AP? I told her she was making C’s because she was bored and as much as I wanted to offer her an engagement level that would work for her, I couldn’t do that and not lose the rest of the class. After much harassment on my part, she did sign up for it, and lo-and-behold comes to my class a month into her AP program to thank me. She was making A’s and loving English. Us 1-10s need to make sure we stay engaged… and quit blaming ourselves that we think boring professors are, well, boring.

The calendar ap on my iPhone (*must fix the size of this writing box; it’s waaaay too small.*) (*Fixed!*) is also one of the modern conveniences that is a huge lifesaver. I can’t tell you how many datebooks I’ve failed to keep over the years (I’d get all excited about starting one… and would be lucky if I used it for two weeks). But iPhones are designed for us 1-10ers. I don’t forget it because it’s not just a calendar, it’s a boredom saver! Have to wait somewhere? I can play Sudoku! So I never leave my calendar behind anywhere. Plus I can immediately put events into it when I learn about them – no more writing it on my hand and then forgetting to transfer it to the datebook I can’t find.

Procrastination is still a problem, but I’m learning to work around it. I’ve found that using a timer to get “as much work done as I can in x amount of time” is much better for getting tasks done than a list of tasks. I have tried so many different methods for housecleaning, and this is the only one so far that’s worked. But I think it’s because I get to make decisions on the fly (no following a schedule… that is always a major fail) and there’s something about knowing it’ll all be over in x time that makes me feel better about starting… it’s not like a project that I’m going to go crazy with and then either lose track of time (and waste my whole day) or randomly get bored with before I’m done and walk away from. I have a time limit. I can cope.

Basically, we 1-10ers have nothing wrong with us. Do we need coping strategies to deal with the modern world? Of course we do. WHO DOESN’T?? NOBODY takes this mind and body that evolved in a hunter-gatherer society and seamlessly blends it into the modern world. In many ways we are aliens to the world we have created, because we change it faster than our species naturally copes with change. So we have coping strategies to facilitate the difference. There is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with you. We do not need to be fixed. We all need to figure out what our natural tendencies are and figure out how to use them to our best advantage. And there’s nothing  at all disordered or deficient about that.