Can I have your attention?
For a while, attention deficit disorder, sometimes also called ADD or ADHD has been a fashionable sort of diagnosis, with ever more drugs for unruly children. This worries me, along with quite a lot of other things. I’m sure some of it is driven by a pharmaceutical industry that wants to sell cures. I also think we have a culture more than keen to pathologize difference. Those of us, adult and child, who do not fit neatly into someone’s boxes (whose boxes are they, I’d love to know…) will get labels. Now, where labelling leads to useful support – like giving dyslexic kids more time in exams – fair enough, but I am wary of putting anyone on long term drugs for any reason. I’m wary of labels that seem to be more about marginalising difference than helping people. We might pause here and think about the kinds of labels folks currently identified as having ‘learning difficulties’ have been given through history.
My soap box for today is about attention though. I’ve never been tested for ADD, but this may have a lot to do with my knack for self preservation around the issue. I can’t tune stuff out. Noise, movement, information – it all comes in. I choose my environments carefully, and as the issue seems to have got more pronounced over time, I’ve learned to stay out of spaces that mess with my head. More than a couple of days in a big city makes me feel like my head is going to explode. This is a spectrum ailment, and I’m functional enough to have sneaked beneath officialdom’s radar. Being a quiet sort of girl and not prone to acting out at school, no one would have considered me a candidate for an issue generally associated with disruptive behaviour.
But is there anything actually wrong with me? I think not. Millions of years of evolution designed us to survive in a reality where a rustle could be all the warning you get of a predator. Being alert to the environment used to be a survival skill. We used also to live in much smaller groupings, with far less stimulating surroundings. What we’ve manufactured, especially in our cities is an overcrowded, noise laden, information dense space that our millions of years of evolution have very precisely equipped us not to be able to handle.
The only way to survive is to turn off as much of your awareness as possible. You have to squash the inner mammal that sniffs at new smells and tilts its ears towards sounds. You have to tune out the human self that can handle about 150 people and cannot cope with thousands. To survive in the environments we have created, you have to be not animal, not human, not present or feeling too much or caring too much.
Therefore your normal, functional, twenty first century, western, urban human must cultivate apathy and obliviousness as primary survival skills. You learn not to look, and not to hear, an all the while the adverts get louder, brighter, bigger to draw you back in. It’s a psychotic arms race that we cannot win because we are doing it to ourselves.
In woodland or in fields I don’t experience overload. I don’t feel shocked and jarred by noise and excessive input because there isn’t any. I am increasingly convinced that the ADD folk are probably more like historical humans in their humanity than those who are willingly entering zombie states in order to survive. Most of us are somewhere in between. I can’t help but feel it’s the environments that need to change, not the people.
