once asked a forty-three-year-old writer with ADD to describe herself as a child. “Pepper pot, flibbertigibbet and high strung,” she shot back. I loved that account, with its spirited, hyperenergetic, all-over-the-place scatter-mindedness. For the record, though, I did ask her what exactly she meant. Unpredictably explosive, intense, unfocused and always trying to engage other children in chatter, she explained. “You see, you were focused,” I countered. “You were focused on what was important to you: your relationships in the world. But nobody understood.”
