SADHD: Disorder or Ditz

I'm not in favor of the quick patholigizing of personality or pleading insanity in defense of all assy behavior, but when faced with my own recuring life problems and baffling actions, the alphabet soup of disorders and syndromes starts to look pretty tasty. Answering yes to most of the questions on a couple of ADHD lists doesn't mean I have ADHD. I file my flakiness under SADHD: Situational Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Ditzorder.

Most of the day, I find it difficult to concentrate. I get out of my chair and move around aimlessly. Anything can distract me. Yet on evenings and weekends, I can concentrate for hours on books, writing, and even concepts. When I'm trying to play frisbee, I can think of nothing else but the game. So, my attention deficit problems depend on the situation I'm in. The reason that I am bored at work is because my work is boring. Job disatisfaction, however, doesn't explain my other long standing tendencies.

During my distracted moments, I visit ADHD websites start to recognize stuff: frequently losing things, forgetting details, blurting out answers to questions before people finish them, impatience. This site is called A Day in the Life of an ADDmirable Woman, but it also sounds like an episode of I Love Lucy. Maybe this stay-at-home mom isn't disordered. Maybe she is chaffing in the shackles of patriarchy. Or maybe she's just a ditz. We need to know about her childhood to be sure.

When I was a kid, my knickname was "hyperwoman," even though I wasn't like the official "hyper" kids in elementary school. I stayed in my seat. I got good grades. I wasn't a boy. I was rambunctious and more disruptive than my bookish friends, but my obnoxious outbursts and disgust with long devision didn't count as learning disabilities. I was "hyperwoman" because I could be hypersensitive and I flew into crowd-pleasing rages at least twice a year, often in response to punishments I saw as unfair. (What do you mean we all have to put our heads down because you couldn't see who was talking out of turn? No Justice, No Peace!)

In the end, it doesn't matter if I'm officially "hyper" or not. The important thing is knowing that some of my weirdness might not be as weird as I think it is.