Comments from a College Student

People always warned me how hard college would be, but now I know having ADD in high school was much worse. It chipped away at my spirit and shredded my confidence bit by bit. Imagine, waking up every day knowing you must spend the entire day underwater, struggling to make it to the surface. Other people who seem to be just like you can keep their chins above the water, but you are underneath, praying you will eventually be able to breathe. This is exactly how I felt for four years of high school. Since I've taken a Post-Graduate year at the Putney School and been through two years of college, I am continuing to restore and add to the confidence that my high school experience had decimated.

In my first year of college, I began to question why I hadn't done more. I didn't feel well-rounded and wondered what I had done with all my time in high school. Now I realize I was trying to survive. Those four years were a constant attempt to conform to a system which never quite illustrated my strengths. In high school, I sat in my room and listened to depressing music because I craved empathy, and since I was too turned off on academia, I was almost afraid to open a novel, even for pleasure.

I would have read Camas and Sartre if I had known their words were uncannily similar to the music lyrics I was so obsessed with. But at the time, reading and creative writing, now my true loves, haunted me as too scholastic. I was convinced that participating tn anything involving school would only remind me of my limitations. I still think back on my old point of view with loss. I always excelled in writing about literature, but since high school focused so much on my weaknesses, I neglected to fully embrace my strengths.

I felt like Raskolnikov who walks around in a fog feeling disconnected from the streets of St. Petersburg in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Although I was smart, I often felt out of touch with what I was being taught. Although I was social, I was too emotional (often from academic stress) to sustain a group of solid friends, making me feel more disconnected than ever. I skimmed the surface of life's misty bubble wondering if it would ever break and I would finally "be like everybody else." My thirst for empathy which I later found in literature was channeled into a whole series of bands whose lyrics depicted alienation. I collected small blank books to scribble lyrics into. Sometimes I played songs over and over again in an attempt to decipher the often amorphous lyrics. This gave me a sense of accomplishment. I didn't know why, I just had to do it. I wasn't chronically depressed, but I felt that when someone sang about sadness, it meant that they understood how I felt. I was less alone.

My inconsistencies in the high-school classroom produced a great deal of performance anxiety. Sometimes in class I hyper focused and gave articulate answers. Other times 1 would scribble down pages of notes and have no idea what I was writing. If someone asked me what the class was about, I would sometimes blank out, despite the lengthy notes I had inscribed just minutes before. I was tutored for math, earth science, and sometimes French at least once a week. I remember how tired I would feel after just an hour of tutoring--I focused so intensely on understanding the concepts--on staying keyed in arid not letting my mind wander, that it was physically exhausting.

I had various outlets. In seventh grade, I was too afraid to study because I was afraid as soon as I opened a book and saw the material, I would feel horribly overwhelmed and hopeless. So I cleaned, to my mother's great joy. I organized pens and folders. I made my bed and organized the figurines in my cat collection by height.

I wanted to study and do well. I really did. But I had no idea how to focus. I literally could not sit at a desk and do a task from start to finish. By cleaning, I felt a sense of accomplishment and productivity that doing schoolwork wouldn't give me.

I remember studying in ninth grade for regents exams. I surrounded myself with piles of tearstained notes, review books, and various lists from my tutors. My older sister came into the room, and I would say, "Laura, what am I going to do?" I had flashed the papers before my eyes. I had highlighted the review book...but I felt just as the old cliche says: I couldn't see the forest through the trees. I felt so stupid. I felt stupid in class when I'd ask a question and teachers would say, "I just said that. Wake up, Susannah." I felt dumb when I would get a ninety percent on a test and get a fifty on the next one. I didn't understand that my inconsistencies were due to lack of attention, not a Jack of intelligence. I wasn't running around the room making noise or raising hell, so my ADD was quite difficult to detect. I even made frequent eye contact with my teachers. I stared up at them, watching the lips move without processing the words they uttered. Sitting in class was often comparable to watching television after the mute button is pushed.

One of the hardest things about ADD is that it feeds into itself, especially in a classroom environment. The more you fail, the stupider you feel, so the less you want to study. Each time you open a math book, not only does it produce a renewed hopelessness in you, but also a feeling of degradation. You are close to being persuaded that you really are inferior. As if by not understanding logarithms, you're somehow less capable as a person.

Many of these negative feelings derived from pride and ego. After all, which is worse: studying relentlessly only to get a big red D at the top of your test, or knowing you didn't study and getting the D? If you don't study, at least you have comfort of rationalizing, you have the freedom to tell yourself: "I'm smart, I just was being lazy." THERE IS A REASON WHY I FAILED. If you study with tutors and pound the material into your brain and still fail, you feel like you're defective or that you were ill-fated at birth. Sadly, my mom tells me now--years later--that most teachers said I was in the top tenth percentile of my class. But I felt like a fraud. I was in MAP (The Major Achievement Program); I felt that it was a mistake. Somehow, they screwed up. If I wrote a good essay or spoke articulately, it had to be a fluke. Strengths or talents in the undetected ADD student can be antagonists. People think if you fail a test you "Just aren't applying yourself"

In retrospect, I wonder if I used the idea of having a boyfriend as an escape from my feelings of academic inferiority. What I lacked in intelligence, (now I realize it was confidence), I could make up with charm, arid with someone thinking I was really special— even in the misery of breaking up--somehow I could avoid the fogginess of my inconsistency in school. I could focus my attention on someone else and channel a source of frustration into another person. I convinced myself the other person made me miserable instead of the mystery of my brain.

Sure there were some A's; it wasn't all bad. There were times when I mastered the material so well I could recite it months later: the self-fulfilling prophecy concept of psychology, for example. Or the poem, A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Or Hamlet's inability to convert his thought into action. Yet, even in my successes, I still felt as though I were always on some kind of thin veneer of ice which could shatter at any time.

Home wasn't great either. I am lucky to have caring parents who paid for tutors and tried all kinds of encouraging things, but I definitely took my toll on them, especially my mom. I would get up at 6:OOam and go through a whole day swimming upstream and come home. I didn't want to do homework because, once again, it brought back the frustration I felt in class that I wanted to avoid. I yelled. I told her I didn't care because I wished I didn't. It hurt so much to care about something I felt I had so little control over. I told her to leave me alone.

Everything that frustrated me in school compounded and transferred onto my relationship with my mother. I knew that she cared so much, more than maybe anyone else in the world, so I could spew a bunch of ugly stuff that I didn't mean, and she would forgive me. I cared about what she thought. I was ashamed of failing a math test, so I acted mean instead of vulnerable. If I allowed myself to feel vulnerable, I would only cry and pour salt into my own wound. When I came home, often it was with such a lump in my throat and a feeling of despair to the point of wondering if I would even make it to college. So anything my mom said was like touching a bomb.

My parents were very good about not comparing me to my sister, but her success hung in the air like the smell of food you stick in a drawer and try to forget about. She attended Vassar and had no academic difficulties in high school. When she was in high school, she casually studied on her bed and was tremendously successful. When I studied in high school, my neck hurt from sifting at my pink and cream desk cutting index cards in half to make flash cards in the desperate hope that my brain would digest the information. When I did receive a good grade I was on such a high, and I was desperate not to see my success revert to failure.

To this day, I am convinced the resonance from my high school experience continues to transfer onto my personal relationships. In high school my life seemed to fluctuate drastically: a 95 on a test followed by a 66; my mom was either mad at me (primarily because of my hostile words), or we were getting along great; my friends loved me one day and turned on me the next. Hallowell says that people with ADD have a hard time accepting success: I can see why. Once things go well, I await the time when the ax will fall. The euphoria of success is somehow false, Somehow deep down, there is still the fear that the person who failed the Course III exam will suddenly re-emerge. When I'm really happy with someone, I have to dismiss my old belief that a huge disappointment will soon follow.

Now that I attend Mount Holyoke, I am grateful to hear professors say such things as "I don't ever want to hear anyone say they could've done better if they had more time. People who say, ‘Pencils up, pencils down, that comes from old military school style of teaching.'" How welcome it is after four years of panicked test taking that I can walk into a class and hear a professor neither give special treatment because of an LD or rush me because "Not everyone has tat much time, why should you get extra time?" Here, everyone has unlimited test time.

What saddens me is that not everyone with ADD has parents as supportive as mine or who consider something as untraditional as taking a post-graduate year of high school, not to make up for sports in high school but to make up for the high school structure having squelched most of the creativity and confidence that I'm still discovering got lost in the abyss of academic chaos. It is tragic if one must wait until the college level to be exposed to the savvy of the profs I have here at MHC and had at Putney. Some people might have so much discouragement and so little understanding from other people that they might not make it to college at all. It's tempting just to give up.

Despite controversy regarding medicines such as Ritalin and Dexedrine, I must say that without the aid of Dexedrine, it would be even more challenging to sit at a desk and work on a task. I started taking Dexedrine, which was prescribed by a psychiatrist, in boarding school when a friend, who was familiar with ADD because her father is a doctor, saw my continual battle with myself to sit down to write a paper and encouraged me to call my psychiatrist. Sure, everyone procrastinates, but this is truly a different kind of procrastination. It paralyzes me, even when I set aside the time to do the work and have every intention of doing it. I felt so entirely overwhelmed before beginning to take the Dexedrine that I would lie in bed curled into a fetal ball as my assignment awaited me at my desk.

Dexedrine is not a wonder drug. I still have to work much harder than many people. I often compare the effect to wearing glasses to bring objects into focus--or adjusting the lens in a camera to take a picture with a keener eye. The medicine helps me to focus long enough so that I can pull out a relevant string from the web of my thoughts and do something with it: whether it's writing a paper or following a topic of conversation. The medicine does not make me a different person; it allows me to be more myself. Since I can express myself and absorb what others express more clearly, I no longer feel that I spend my school days underwater vainly trying to make it to the surface. The Dexedrine helps me feel more engaged with people around me, both inside and outside a classroom. The fog of confusion and misunderstanding which plagued me in high school has finally dissolved.

Ed Note: GRADDA thanks Susannah Buzard, a college student, for sharing this, her personal insight, with us.