Submerged
This entry is about my on-going work exploring my neurodivergence. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.
One of the clearest memories I have of speaking to a counsellor, aged 18, is describing to her how I experience my thoughts.
It’s as if there is a projector playing a film of my thoughts that I am watching in my mind. Yet there’s the projection of another film on top, and another, and another, all at once. All the layers of the films become mixed up. The sounds of the films are being played over the top of each other too. I can’t seem to decipher what belongs to where. I try to imagine the subtitles of the films but the words are just layered on top of each other. It becomes chaos.
That was over 20 years ago.
After 4 years of my current therapist suggesting I should look into an ADHD diagnosis, I finally took the plunge over a year ago, and received the diagnosis this January, not long before my 40th birthday.
In many ways it hasn’t changed anything: it hasn’t changed me, for example. But it has given me a greater understanding of how my brain works and works differently to others. It’s explained so much of my past, provided validation (explanation?), and also helped me understand the grieving, trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with me. More interestingly, it’s unlocked this opportunity to take medication (when I want, on my own terms) to help live with some of the symptoms.
The first day that I took my stimulant medication I felt like an alien in myself. My 262,478 thoughts, all swirling around at once & clattering with cymbals for attention, were gone. My mind was… silent. It was disconcerting. I watched an episode of Dexter without moving, flinching or pausing to do 52 other tasks.
To return to my initial analogy, it was like I was watching one singular film - the visuals, audio, and subtitles all in sync - without the signal interference of 22 audio, visual & textual inputs all happening at once.
This image is a polaroid self-portrait, submerged into a solution of my stimulant medication and scanned after 7 days. It’s already shifted since then, partially vanished and in which I’ve pretty much disappeared entirely.