1.
This one will be inconclusive because my mind is racing ahead along ten different narrative/polemical paths at the same time and I am struggling to make sense of it all.
Among the things that wounded and frustrated me most about being my mother’s daughter was her willful inattention. That’s how I thought of it, anyway. She would ask pointed questions about my life. What I was doing for work, and how much did it pay. How much I weighed now. Whether I was planning to get married ever. Whether she should find me some nice Christian Indian boy at her church for me. Later: whether my husband was “helpful” to me. Whether I was taking our son to church.
I would try to answer. It wasn’t always easy to fight back the defensive attitude and the barely suppressed rage in my voice, but I would at least try to supply her with a factual answer.
Before I’d said a sentence or two, I’d see her eyes rolling toward the far corner of the room. She wasn’t listening to me. She wasn’t interested in my answer. She never had been. The question was merely her way of introducing a topic upon which she would now tell me everything I was doing wrong or all the ways in which I was falling short as a daughter. All the ways I’d fail in life because I hadn’t done what she told me to do.
I hated her so much in those brief moments. I labeled her behavior narcissism or at the very least a form of pathological self-absorption. It was one of many things about her that low-key traumatized me over time: her fake questions and obvious uncaring.
What I never really considered was the possibility that she might suffer an actual neurological problem making her act this way.
2.
I’m not normally inattentive the way my mother was; if anything, I’ve become a bit hyper-vigilant and pattern-seeing in a way that’s good if you’re a writer but maybe not so good in other contexts. Marriage, for example. Nobody wants to be watched that closely, especially not your spouse. Living together for a long period of time depends on two people being at least a little willfully ignorant about each other’s less appealing characteristics, right?
But in other unpleasant ways, I see her in me. Her impulsive, highly reactive nature. I have some of that. I sometimes leap before I look. Adaptive when you’re an improvisational musician in a band! Or a joke-telling story-regaling life of the party! Not always so great when it comes to making eventful decisions in your personal or professional life.
Her emotional perseveration, her obsession over old hurts, her nursing of grievances. I’ve learned to be much better with all of that, but I’m still working on it.
Her anxiety and the way it can make her lash out in anger. I saw—I was the recipient of—so much of this last year when she seemed on the verge of dying in a rehab facility after a cardiac emergency. She was a holy terror, and although I understood it was coming from a place of fear, I could not let her obnoxious, abusive language just roll off my back. It fucked me in the head as if I were still 16 years old.
I know that terrible emotional pattern from the inside out, as well. I have sometimes misused my anger precisely in the way that she does: letting it loose when someone else seems not to be listening to me or falling in line with what I want. Yikes. The annoying thing about self-awareness is that it doesn’t necessarily stop you from behaving like a shithead. You still do unhealthy and unhelpful things, watching them unfold like a slo-mo car crash. This can happen no matter how much meditation and therapy you’ve thrown at the problem over time.
Last year while my mother seemed about to die, I took all that fear and negative energy and unintentionally sent it back into a new real-life romantic relationship I was having with someone who’d been an important online friend for many years previously. The timing was uncanny and horrible. There was sudden compatibility, chemistry, and fun, but also moments of hedging on each of our parts. He has certain very strong similarities to my father—namely, a tendency toward emotional avoidance and a lack of forthright communication. But I wasn’t great, either. There were plenty of questions I could have asked if I’d been more courageous and less anxious; instead, I did everything you’re not supposed to do, project, assume, barrel ahead with my own agenda, and then get aggrieved when he suddenly veered off course and disappointed expectations we’d never fully agreed upon. I got aggrieved, and he pulled away a little bit; I panicked, got accusatory, and issued weird ultimatums alternating with desperate apologies; but it was too late and he pulled away entirely. In short order, a beautiful-seeming thing fell apart.
I knew neither one of us had done a great job at communicating, but I was the one who behaved in an outward manner while he withdrew into himself. So I was reminded of this hard truth regarding anger. It doesn’t matter if the other person involved has been inattentive, hurtful, passive-aggressive, or just plain wrong. If you lash out in response, you never get what you wanted anyway: apologies, accountability, peace, consensus, reconciliation. You just push the other person away.
This is exactly what my 85-year-old mother had done to the people closest to her for her entire life.
3.
I am more or less successful at being human, despite my upbringing among emotional wolves. But last year’s colossally failed romance was one incident among several that made me realize I’m not nearly as healthy as I’d like to be, at least not right now, and definitely not in certain types of stressful situations.
Then a friend—someone I think of as quite accomplished—started describing her own struggles with not just focus but also depression and anxiety, and how her first day on Adderall lifted years of that heavy, hard stuff in an instant, made her feel like herself.
From time to time I had taken one of those online quizzes screening for attention deficit issues, but I never seemed to fit the description. Yes, I can be unfocused from time to time. I think I’m a pretty good listener. I’ve had healthy relationships. I’ve accomplished many things.
But I proliferate ambitions well beyond my capacity to fulfill them. I struggle to stay on task some of the time; other times I fall into an abyss of single-minded productivity and lose track of time. I distract myself from one project by starting another. I am 56 years old and have done about a dozen different things as jobs. I’ve grown deeply obsessed with one thing or another—jazz of the Blue Note era, old-school powerlifting, contemporary literary novels—only to drop those obsessions after a number of years. I’ve always thought of this as an interesting character trait. I don’t get stuck! I am productively restless and ever curious! There’s an allegedly uplifting term now for people like me: multi-potentialite. Ugly word, for sure. Dilettante is prettier but carries unpleasant connotations in this Protestant work-ethic culture.
The thing is, I have been self-employed for twenty-five years and I can be great at structuring myself around a project or particular job. But it’s a deeply unsettled way to live and think. And I do suffer at times from depression, anxiety, and poor emotional regulation.
Two weeks ago I decided to get a medical psych eval, the first of my life. A strange thing happened as I spoke for ninety voluble minutes with my evaluator, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, over Zoom. I’m such a veteran of talk therapy culture and such a professional over-sharer that she barely needed to question or prompt me. I just did what I do: started talking.
This is something I actually love about myself—the ability to speak cogently, responsively, openly, in full sentences and paragraphs, making connections back and forth in time, revealing emotional truths, political ideas, jokes, and anecdotes all in one surprisingly semi-organized jumble. In the right circumstance, with the right audience, I can use this skill to be quite charming. But in the context of being check-marked for symptoms including “poor impulse control” and “hyperactivity,” I walked right into a hall of mirrors.
Oh, shit. Here I am, absolutely fitting the description without even trying.
The nurse practitioner apparently agreed. When we went through the dozen or so questions to determine whether I might be a candidate for a stimulant to reduce baseline anxiety, I hit the highest positive level on eight of them.
4.
The last two years have contained a lot of hard transitions for me. Divorce, my mother’s health emergencies, and various other emotional crises like my crash-and-burn romance with an old friend. Ten or so days ago I woke up with a distinct feeling of delayed grief, a hollow, gnawing hunger at the base of my belly. I took 10mg of Adderall and that feeling disappeared, replaced by balance and hope. Later that day, I found myself smiling about some of the truly beautiful aspects of last year’s brief romance, letting go some of the confusion and ugliness of its protracted ending.
This wasn’t a speed-type response. I wasn’t agitated or jittery. I was calm. I was better able to focus on tasks.
Is it scary to see such a sudden change in one’s mood in response to a pharmaceutical? Hell yes, it is. But I’m dead curious to see what happens next. Today I’m trying 20mg.
This is all so strange, truly.
First: I know I am not my mother. I know I’ve had some very good relationships, especially with people who don’t behave in emotionally avoidant ways and who can be forthright and honest from the start.
Second: I know these evals can be like horoscopes. Who doesn’t have focus problems these days? Who isn’t in a highly emotional state in this stressed-out nation?
But then again, what if many of the problems I’ve had in my life, many of the unhelpful thoughts and behaviors I’ve tried to change through therapy and other
means, many of the things I think of as permanent features of my personality (either adaptive or super maladaptive depending on context) might all actually be symptoms of (drumroll, please) an official disorder?
What would that even mean? While ADHD does seem responsive to certain kinds of medicine for certain kinds of patients, it’s still just a description of a cluster of symptoms, not an identifiable disease. Among experts there seems to be wide disagreement about whether it’s a genetic propensity, a trauma response, a universal biology-based problem, a cultural construct, or all of the above. I plan to do more research on all this, but my sense is that I will find no final consensus.
Here’s the harder question. What if my entire life story, based as it is on my assured knowledge that my mother was narcissistic, badgering, bullying, verbally abusive, undermining, and sometimes manipulative…is also just an unsolved generational medical mystery at its heart?
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This is an accurate summation of so many of my experiences with family members. Thank you for your insight and sensitivity. loxol