ADHD or the curse of being sucked into too many brain hugs. Letters to my son

It’s the birthday of one of my favorite students. I have already congratulated him via whatsapp. Sent him a funny gif. Not as personal as a physical birthday card, but who has time for those these days? It would even be considered as going through too trouble. That’s another thing you will have to learn. When people feel like you are being too nice to them it freaks them out more than when you’re being rude to them.

One of the hardest things am struggling with is something trendy we call ADHD. Attention Deficit Disorder. First of all, I find this to be a silly label and second of all… I have it.

I wouldn’t say it’s so much a deficit as an overabundance of attention. EVERYTHING IS FUCKING INTERESTING TO ME.

I can start reading about what substances lower one’s testosterone and less than five minutes later I notice am watching a video on when the allies managed to bomb Nazi-Germany for the first time. Am not going to google it now or this little addition to my collection of letters for you will mysteriously disappear in the black holes of my laptop.

I still don’t know how I managed to get a university degree. Wait, I know. There were no smartphones and internet was some little known dimension I had not yet grasped the possibilities of. I went through college without ever having internet access in my room. Not that I didn’t have the same giddy bounce bounce bounce goes the rabbit mind back then, but the time I see consumed by indulging in the absorption of all sorts of entirely redundant facts I used to spend day dreaming.

Few people day dream anymore. There’s just too much entertaining content around. Am not saying day dreaming is some sort of exalted activity we all should be cultivating religiously, cause as soon as you say something is good for you these days people download apps to force themselves to do it for 20 minutes a day in between their yoga and cold shower sessions. Am just reporting on what I see going on around me. Streaming platforms killed the day dream.

If Steve Jobs had grown up with a smartphone there wouldn’t have been an Apple company. Or maybe that’s just something unfocused people like to think.

You don’t know Steve Jobs, but you know, go to Wikipedia.

He’s one of those dudes that replaced the parish priest or the idea of the knight or whatever else people used to admire or turn to for ‘surcease of sorrow’, to borrow from Edgar A. Poe. An other dude you don’t know at your age, but that’s really ok. I don’t know who gets to decide which people kids today should know and which ones not.

I suppose some YouTuber will be more influential in your life than any of the names I will mention in these letters.

Or by the time you will read this you’ll go: what is YouTube? Cause information will just appear in your head via an implanted chip by then.

You will probably not even read these letters. Some programme will read them to you or they will simply be uploaded to your brain in a matter of seconds.

You will shrug and say or Tweet or info-beam or whatever else will be fashionable: ‘Dad really tried to pass something on to me, but ehm, apart from appreciating the effort I can’t really say it adds anything to my life.’

Well, sorry for that. I am a hermite. I am a recluse. I am not adventurous. I do not set up companies. I am not an angel investor. I am not an actor. I am too shy to run my own YouTube show. I don’t care about food, fashion, fitness. I don’t even care about travelling.

Everyone tells me how they loooove to travel. They go to some exotic destination and sell this activity as if it’s the pinnacle of human existence and when I asked them what they did there they say ‘nothing special’.

I can do ‘nothing special’ in the steamy cubicle where I teach, sleep and eat.

If I  have to label my own writing other than ADHD writing I’d label it punk writing. Unfortunately punk is a music style, not a writing style, and it’s been dead – along with people’s spontaneity – for several decades now. No, these letters to you are not going to pay any bills.

In case reincarnation does exist I wanna be me again, but a few inches taller and heavily borrowing from Johnny Rotten’s stage persona.

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