Again, I wake up at some ungodly hour, 3 AM this time, to my ADHD and OCD arguing over something that happened 30+ years ago. It’s not like the focused upon situation is something that effects my life or is in any way a topic of importance. Here I’ll lay it out for you.
The story so far…
Way back in 1988 I was finishing failing out of high school due to, I now understand was, undiagnosed neurodivergence. Add this to the fact that I was living in a very rural, out in the middle of nowhere, podunk, backwater and you can see I was in for a whole lot of trouble. My highly religious community (church, school, townsfolk) all decided that it was a Spiritual and Self-Discipline problem. So I was told quite often that I was weak and needed to spend more time with the Lord.
I did. Nothing changed.
I was ostracized by my family and friends and received nothing but angry and scared looks in public.
Feeling so out of place I did the obvious thing and turned toward the Punk movement. I liberally mixed, punk, new wave, and new romantic style into my wardrobe. Now the townspeople thought I was gay. I wasn’t, and if I had been I would have been loud about that too. That didn’t stop my neighbor from putting a bullet in me as I rode my motorcycle past his house.
By this time, I felt useless, a pariah. I had two friends from high school who were the only two people who mattered to me. I had told people that I was closer to these two than I was with my own family.
Things had gotten quite bad and I needed to get out of that town. I worked all summer long and saved up my money. I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and wandered around for a few months until I ran out of money and had to come home. I really needed that break, and to see that the way people here in the US and deep rural, isn’t the only way to live.
I came home a bit refreshed, but that didn’t last very long. Nothing at home had changed. I was still a spiritual and social pariah. I really needed to hang out with my friends. I called them up, said, “Hey, I’m back. Let’s get together. Let me know when your free and we’ll hang out!”
“Sounds great!” They replied. “We’ll call you.”
and I never heard from them again. After that no one returned my phone calls or responded to me in anyway.
A few years later, things were still the same, but by now I was to the point of being suicidal. I didn’t tell anyone, I wasn’t looking for attention. I felt useless and barely tolerated. I was remind often of how much I disappoint God and should pull my shit together.
Neurological issues don’t work that way. I was unable to pull my shit together.
Now it was the early 90s and I had heard that one of my old friends was living close to my parents house. I had heard that he had become a pastor. I thought, great, perhaps now we can have an honest conversation and I can find out what heinous thing I did to cause them to just never speak to me again. By this point I was at the end of my rope, panicked and thinking about suicide. This conversation could make it go either way. I felt that I was useless to those around me and to God.
I went there and we got a moment on his patio to talk. I asked him what happened to cause him and the other guy to just never speak to me again. I was really hoping for a bit of closure. He was completely unaware that my decision to end it all or keep going was going to be greatly influenced by this conversation. That is probably why his response was, “Dude, you got weird.”
That hurt. I had been “weird” my whole life. This was nothing new. It was a non answer. He then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes telling me all the wonderful things he and his wife were doing for the Lord. They made it perfectly clear that God does not care for people like me, by their inability to be real, authentic, or to see past themselves. Just like all of my spiritual teachers at church. It all boiled down to the same crap.
You need to discipline yourself and get right with God.
Thankfully my friends lack of compassion and inability to see a friend in pain convinced me that if I was this useless to God and he doesn’t care for “people like me” then I was not worthless. I was free. No more carrying the weight of other peoples expectations of me.
The story now…
Now in my gang of Neurodivergent traits is one named OCD. OCD loves to grab onto a subject and never let go. Like a little bulldog that guy. Then he gets ADHD to join into the conversation and I wake up in the middle of the night to their conversation. Usually they rotate subjects and it would only happen a couple of times a month. Then, due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to move back to that rural town that I had grown up in. Now it was 35 years later. Now it happens once or twice a week due to the fact that when I look out the window, or go grocery shopping, I’m driving past all of the little places that these things happened.
Now I wake up at ungodly hours of the night with my mind trying desperately to figure out what the hell I did. Then I can’t sleep. Then I walk in circles in the dark in my house. Sometimes I’m angry and cursing. Sometimes I’m hurting, in pain, and weeping.
Thankfully I have inkwell.social to puke these things into words so I don’t go, get on Facebook, and write them to the two fools who ditched me.
I really need some sleep.
Image by Thomas Wilken from Pixabay
Marginalia