MEMENTO | 2007-01-26
My sweet little notes to Pain below reminded me that, I BELIEVE, he said that he, too, had attention deficit. As I have told you, my ADHD is so bad it is actually crippling, the Feds pay me disability partly because of it.
It used to be thought that attention deficit was a strictly childhood thing. Lately they found it is not, many people keep it into adulthood. And then it was assumed AD was a bother, but could not be crippling. I my case, it is officially a disability, and I got nine years BACK disability for it. That is NOT easy to do.
The movie "Memento" is about a man who has attention deficit that makes mine look minor. Since the time he got a head injury when his wife was murdered, he forgets EVERYTHING in half an hour or so, and he is looking for the guy who murdered his wife. The plot interests me relatively little, because I can identify with his situation so well.
How do you write yourself notes if you can't remember where your notes go? He tattoos them on himself. Think about it: where else would he see them if they weren't tattooed on his skin. And THIS is what is so hard to remember about AD, as I think Pain, if he is not too pissed off at me by now, will testify.
It seems so easy: write yourself notes. But remembering to check those notes is a discipline a normal person cannot understand. And remembering to write those notes in the right place is an almost insurmountable problem.
Anyway, the movie was fascinating to me, because there was so much autobiography in it. Using your mind to deal with a problem is the advantage we humans have always used. But what if it's not your legs that are crippled, but a piece of your brain? People give advice to people with things like AD that they would be ASHAMED to give to a person who had an obvious physical handicap: "It's all a matter of will power. My legs get tired too, but you don't see me just sitting there in a wheelchair."
One thing I learned in counseling people in drug recovery. A lot of people have problems like this. I am lucky I get paid for mine, and that mine was found out before I died. I feel better about a lot of things now that I understand what I was dealing with.
One of the best things I ever heard was when the forensic psychologist, who has to testify under oath, said to me, "Bob, if I didn't have your Federal record here, I would have sworn on the stand that you couldn't have done what you did."
Being the modest guy I am, I replied, "And half of it hasn't been declassified yet." I didn't add that ninety percent of THAT has been wiped.
Besides telling you what a great man I am, the point of this piece is to make a point that is very easy to miss. Everybody I know has something in his head that doesn't work right. But when they come to you to talk to you about it, it is not like a physical problem. You have to work around what is in their brain to use that same brain to deal with it.
This sounds easy, doesn't it? In practice, this is simple, but it is not easy. When we speak to another mind, we always project our own mind into it. We assume we are talking to someone like us. If that were true, the person could just talk to himself.