"You're Not ADD (Part 1): You're a Blonde"

My friends had no trouble identifying what was different about me, but getting an official diagnosis was harder than I thought.

When my son was diagnosed with ADD, the inattentive kind, it put me on my own path to understanding my own attention pitfalls. As hard as it was to get him sorted out at fifteen, my own out-sorting has been even more challenging. This post begins a new, intermittent (naturally) series about trying to get to my own diagnosis.

There are those of us out there who wear our difference so naturally that it becomes part of our personality.

I hear stories all the time about how quickly doctors prescribe Adderall and Ritalin to anyone who seems a little distracted. But there are those of us out there who wear our difference so naturally that it becomes part of our personality.

Here is a list of character traits that have been assigned to me (mostly fondly, to my good fortune), and to so many others who may be secret ADHD sufferers.

1. Quirky
2. Weird
3. Chatty
4. A Social Butterfly
5. Naturally Stoned
6. Lazy
7. Unmotivated
8. Half-a*ed
9. Spontaneous
10. Flexible
11. Energetic
12. Distracted
13. Spacey
14. Space Cadet
15. A Dreamer
16. A Visionary
17. In My Own World
18. On My Own Planet
19. In La La Land
20. Moody
21. A Temperamental Female
22. A Bit Nuts
23. Bubbly
24. Ditzy
25. Dizzy
26. Scattered, and my personal favorite....
27. Blonde 

OKAY! I can own that! My blonde hair twists and curls chaotically, in every direction — not unlike the mind underneath it.

Blondes have more fun, right? And, because they help me laugh at my own moments of idiocy, I am often amused by jokes about people being dumb. Songs, too. ("Cuz I’m a blonde — B-L-A-N-D! / cuz I’m a blonde — don’t you wish you were me?" — Downtown Julie Brown)

My favorite blonde joke, for those of you who still remember Wite-Out™ and Liquid Paper®, goes like this:

Q: How can you tell a Blonde has been using your computer?
A: The little white marks on the screen.

A funny image to be sure, but the message behind this joke is actually deeply relevant to the ADD journey: until you get the right diagnosis, all the corrections you TRY to make can’t really solve the problem.