leslie



	Success At 45 by Leslie

My name is Leslie, I'm 45, male, a digital artist and a single-parent. I work at the Massachusetts College of Art, in the library. I manage a microcomputer lab, word processing, Internet, and e-mail instruction, as adjunct to the Computer Arts Center. My background is design, communications, and computer graphics. My creative interest is currently directed towards webpage design, and raising my13 year old son. I'm ADD.

I was recently diagnosed with ADD in August of 1997, after being referred by my primary care provider, because of problems with attention and memory on my job. I'm in a clinical research project that's aimed at determining whether medication and learning new behavior to manage ADD is effective. I'm on 40mg of Ritalin daily and its working wonders for me. I'm a vegetarian, don't smoke, and consider myself very health conscious, I wake at 5am and walk over 3 miles to exercise in the fitness center at the college where I work. Until recently I rode my bicycle everyday, even in winter, but when rusted, I threw the frame away. Being health conscious, I was very hesitant to start taking neurostimulant chemicals, concerned with possible side effects.

I've maintained a personal interest in brain growth, functioning and cognitive psychology for a long time, perhaps sensing that it concerned me in some way. In 1994 I became very interested in learning as much as I could about memory and cognition, and about the so-called: Nootropics (Greek noos meaning mind and tropin meaning toward.) I began exploring the holistic and nutritional aspects of enhancing the nervous system and how one might increase the health of one's brain naturally. I was primarily interested in increasing memory and recall, as well as preventing free- radical damage in the brain, increasing the blood supply to the brain, and enhancing brain metabolism. These are still interests of mine. I was also interested in increasing intelligence, and recall. I started taking tablets containing Ginkgo Biloba hoping to get positive results, I was essentially unable to see noticeable improvement. This was with no suspicion of my ADD.

Throughout my life I think I have always felt a little different, a bit eccentric, with creative/mystical tendencies. I repeated second grade, and although I've always been talented artistically; essentially I had significant mathematical problems in grade school. Around this time I started reading about science and meditation and I became fascinated with the idea of the 4th dimension. Full of creative inspiration, I recall asking a high school math teacher to please explain a problem logically, hoping that I was on the verge of finally learning how to think about math creatively. Her reaction however, was that of being totally flustered, and at a loss for words. I lost faith in the traditional education system around that point. In 1969 I dropped out of high school in 10th grade, and later finished my high school equivalency. I attended the University of Mass, at Boston in 1976, while there, I was fortunate to take a class with Dr. Alan Natapoff, a neurophysicist at Harvard who teaches a new learning technique for remedial math, I left UMass without graduating.

After spending almost 6 years struggling within a highly technical computer laboratory requiring high levels of organization and focus, I had to accept that something just wasn't under my control. This is because of my, at times, almost non-existent working memory. I was disorganized, easily sidetracked, excessively forgetful, I got bogged down when many things were presented to me, procrastinated, could not complete tasks in the allotted time, forgot to complete work, needed to be reminded by others to get things started or keep working on a task, and starting tasks but not completing them. I would try harder and harder, and it still didn't seem to work. And let me tell you that I tried really hard! After intensive researching the Internet for information on ADD and a series of events leading to this I identified enough familiar sounding descriptions that led me to decide that I might be ADD myself. I wasn't eager to jump on the latest phantom sickness-of-the-week bandwagon, like chronic fatigue syndrome. So I thought I should at least try to get a professional's opinion about what could be going on in my brain.

After taking the 5 hour battery of neuropsychological tests, I was diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, inattentive type, with mathematics learning disability, and a mild to moderate new learning impairment that includes retrieval problems. This diagnosis has changed my life. I never doubted my intelligence and was reassured when I discovered that my performance on selected WAIS-R and Shipley Hartford Tests indicated that my intellectual functioning was estimated to fall within the high average to superior range.

Now I can understand why my brain functions like it does, and I have a direction. In short, I'm re-making myself. Not that I don't like myself, I do, but I have decided that there are things that I could improve on, and I choose to make whatever self-improvements I can. My approach to using the medication is exploratory, and it is helping me to focus on this process, as well as engaging in neuropsychological education, and research in cognitive psychology.

Since I found out about my own ADD I have met other people at the college where I work that are ADD, and with help, I'll be starting an ADD support group on the campus. I spoke to the college ADD specialist, who is also ADD herself and we will be beginning meetings as soon as we can secure a meeting space and schedule a meeting time.

I feel like I'm ahead, simply because now I know something about what's been going on in my brain. As I said, there's still lots of work ahead. I feels good though. I'm very interested in learning about other adults with ADD's lifestyles and experiences. Especially, if they're creative. I'm just beginning to meet other ADD adults and it's very reassuring for me to know that other people are out there who are "wired differently" like me. The "average" world generally doesn't have a clue about how difficult it is trying to function in the "mundane" linear dimension, when hypersensitivity makes you feel things happening, and think about things happening, on many levels simultaneously.

I feel like I'm pretty much "out of the closet" at my job. I'm not ashamed of my ADD, although I think it's still a stigma in our culture to be "wired differently". It's seen as a genetic mutation, or moral failure. As people become more educated, and more famous people with ADD come out, it may become more publicly understood and accepted in time. More people are ADD than realize it, I think. I read that between 3 and 22% of Americans are probably ADD.

My revelation of my ADD to my supervisors was in a way, a tremendous relief for me, because now they understand why in spite of their belief that I'm an intelligent enough person, I have been biochemically hindered, though trying as hard as possible to remember things, and get more organized on my job. Now they, and I, know why it's been so difficult for me. The medication has made it possible to start to reconstruct myself. I'm very excited about the upcoming support meetings that we will be holding at the college. The ADD specialist is ADD herself and the brief communications that I've had with her already have hinted at the explosion of possibilities for creative learning which can come out of sharing experiences and focused ideas.

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