Thought For Food

Princess Bella has “ADHD” or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. 

Let me take a pause here to decide just where to start this blog, because I have so many things to say and I’m not sure just what order I want to put them in.  Hey there’s a bird out there picking on the dogs!  Cool!  Anyways, as I was saying, I think they totally misnamed this stuff. 

People with ADD and ADHD do not have a deficiency of attention.  What they have is an overabundance of attention.  Their attention is captured by EVERYTHING at all times!  They don’t miss anything at all.  There is not one thing that goes on in this universe that they miss.  It might not make the top 10 on the list of important things they give notice to, but they didn’t miss it, I guarantee you! 

What happens is, they don’t focus on the things that other people  want them to focus on.  This is not a deficiency.  This is a failure to come to an agreement on what constitutes the most important thing.  That is a whole other ballgame.

It is my own personal opinion that ADD and ADHD are old ……..  for lack of a better word…..conditions.  And I use the word condition here NOT in the sense that it is something that needs to be “fixed”, but that it is possibly outside the norm.  I believe that we can lay our very existence at the feet of someone back in the misty long ago who was blessed with ADD or ADHD.

I say this because…..imagine this:  Our little cave-group is sitting around the fire in our pitiful cave, noshing on a few ptarmigan, all happy and stuff.  All of a sudden…..GROWLLLLL…..SNARLLLL!!!!….and whatever other mean nasty things happen when a sabre tooth tiger comes skulking out of the dark.  EEEKKKK!

Now!  Who do you want in your midst most: The cave-dude with ADD/ADHD who’s gonna whack that sabre tooth over the head with a big ol club, or the logical thinker who is going to weigh all the consequences of his actions before he does anything?  MY vote goes for the ADD/ADHD guy!  I believe with all my being that it was those people who acted first without thinking it all out, whose attention was on everything, who were watching it ALL and not missing anything,  that not only kept us alive but advanced us to the point that we can now consider their gift a problem and chastise them for it.

Because it is only now, at the advanced point our civilization has reached, that the gifts of ADD/ADHD become a “problem.”  Only now do we have to sit un-naturally still for hours on end as small children day in and day out for months at a time.  Only now do we have jobs that require us to be indoors all day long every day all year long.  Only now does the watchfulness and quick action inherent in ADD/ADHD become unnecessary.

Instead of calling ADD/ADHD a problem or making people with it feel broken, we need to name streets after them, have a national ADD/ADHD holiday, and celebrate the fact that it exists at all.  Because without it, we very well might not be here at all!