Is it ADHD...or...

….even Hank and Herbie can’t decide what to do next…

It’s been coming on in the past eighteen months or so, this feeling that someone missed my ADHD diagnosis. My doctor friends tell me that I would have needed an ADHD diagnosis by the time I was 12 for this to be my true issue. But in the 1960s, we really didn’t know that much about the causes of squiggly kids who couldn’t pay attention. 

My symptoms now have all the signs - an inability to focus on one thing longer than a few minutes; distractions that occur with an increasingly random frequency; a pile of books I really, really want to read that’s gathering dust; phone conversations that trail off midway through a sentence; walking into rooms with a purpose that flies away the minute I cross a threshold. 

All of these make planning for tomorrow or even later today a real chore. 

So if it’s not ADHD, what could it be?

It could be age. I’ve heard that people at “our age” tend to wander a bit. We do have decades of experience to mentally leaf through whenever we confront the latest life experience. That can be distracting.

It could be the wide array of inputs that ping and ding and flash on any screen I’m wearing, holding, or staring at in the moment. As a kid, my inputs were limited to one newspaper, one TV, a transistor radio, and that lady down the street that knew everything about everyone. 

It could be the experienced chaos of life in Minneapolis over the past year with assassinations of a legislative leader and her husband, shootings at a Catholic school sanctuary, and roaming ICE thugs pulling brown, black, and Asian neighbors from our streets. And yes, Tom, it truly was that random. The fact checking and documentation now showing up in courts is overwhelming.

It could be the widening recognition that there is little reason to have any confidence in the competence of those “in charge” of federal or national institutions that have stood fast for 250 years in this experimental democracy of ours.

It could involve what’s happening on the other side of this fragile globe as this country appears to be marching towards full out war in the Middle East. And it’s truly a struggle to track all of the reasons why we are there now. 

Or maybe, maybe it’s just the weather. We had a blizzard on Sunday, then it was 77 degrees the next Saturday, then it bounced back to 29 degrees by Monday. Spring does bring out the most chaotic changes, doesn’t it?