An Abnormal Defect of Moral Control

I’m not sure when my warranty ran out, though, as they say, your parents don’t leave the hospital with a baby and an instruction manual. No exchanges. No returns. You make it up as you go and do your best — or so I am told. If I could guess, it might have been that school day when I was eleven. A regular lunchtime spent running along the white and gold court lines painted on the asphalt chasing after my friends, though I was struggling to understand this particular game. Was I ‘it’? My fingers snatched at their red woollen jumpers, but they continued to to be always a wisp out of reach. Step by step, it felt less like a game and more of a shake off. ‘Go away,’ they shouted at me, ‘leave us alone.’ I watched from the sidelines as they made a break for the school field. 

Or maybe it happened when I was fourteen years old. In the D-Block underpass, framed by thick steel beams, four friends sat opposite me as I waited for the verdict of the lunchtime jury. I had a stone-in-belly feeling that I should have taken more notice of the subtle omissions – the ignored texts, the hushed whispers, the overlooked party invitations extended year after year to everyone but me.  I had unwittingly morphed into the insufferable tagalong, lingering in their company until my presence became unbearable. I spend the next period in biology class with a lopsided smile to mask my puffy red eyes. I don’t blame my parents and teachers who dismissed it as clique politics. It was an all girls school and only feelings were hurt. I spent the next four years of high school learning how to wind everything up tight inside, like a spring under tension. I stored it all in my shoulders until my fascia was set like concrete. I practised keeping quiet because the silence of saying nothing at all is more dependable than the whiplash of speaking out. 

No, you know what really did it? That university party. I stretched out just a little. I laughed and spoke uncongested, feeling pleasure in the slinky-like looseness. On the car ride home back to the flat we shared, my boyfriend at the time turned to me. ‘You can’t speak like that,’ he said. ‘The way you were loud and talking over everyone else was embarrassing.’ 

My head was severed and I could no longer retreat into the safety of my shell. For a long time I pulled myself around headless and voiceless. I lived my life under constant friction, grinding between car tyres and asphalt, humming like a breath constrained at the back of the throat – I’d let my mind slink into the gaps of quiet between all the noise – my phone buzzes, sending a soft thrum through the particles in the fibreboard desk. My thoughts eject with a pop. 

Wed 12:05 PM

Marija: @Anita guess who got a referral to a psychiatrist. Your turn lol. But they have             no availability til June!!!

I am neither Marija nor Anita, but I know exactly what the message means. Self-consciousness lends itself to a specific type of clairvoyance. What I sense is too close to a secret kept well under wraps. It peels away skin and exposes sinew to stinging air. My guts tie themselves into knots, a lumpy black tar of resentment at Marija and the burn of having to share. But how could they possibly know I have been chewing over an appointment booked six months in the future? It feels like I am fighting over a finite sphere, each slice becoming infinitely smaller by division. TikTok is flooded with armchair experts. Amidst the sea of strangers, videos surface with tendrils that sting at my secret suspicion – that I might not be made to the exact specifications as everyone else. It is no longer just the boys who can’t sit still in school. There is a seat for the daydreamers and procrastinators too. I try to dissect my brain’s anatomy. I learn the medical term for my mystery plague that leaves me paralysed on the sofa and unable to prioritise essential functions like feeding myself, showering, and cleaning the house. Still, it feels too close to malpractice – at risk of a false dichotomy between what is normal and what is supposedly not normal. I continue to wait and wait as this sticky black bile simmers within me. 

Close to burning out, I leave for a month-long vacation. City slicking in Singapore, traversing the length of Vietnam, reclining on a lounger in a five hundred dollar-a-night hotel in the far south of Thailand. This holiday is a respite. I exist in a timeless state. My thoughts dilute as my languid body floats in the bath-warm water of the Andaman Sea, but I don’t return any happier. My recourse is a plot to extract myself for a six-week stint in Europe. Supportive but befuddled, my partner asks me if this would make me happy. 

‘I don’t think you are ever happy,’ he says. 

I try to digest his words. They meld with the gnarls in my digestive tract and fuse with my constant indigestion. I take Omeprazole to help, like they give old people and pregnant women. It neutralises stomach acid but not the viscous, inky feeling of sadness and failure.

I notice that I live life through a constant lens of the ‘grass is greener’ attitude, with jobs, with friends, with family. This outlook where something, somewhere, is always better for someone else, but not for me. I continue to grind the appointment between my teeth. It’s stuck there between my molars. If it were a toothache, I wouldn’t prod it repeatedly just to check if it was painful enough to visit the dentist – I would just go – but it is hard to shake the feeling I am simply pathologising ordinary experiences of distress and difficulty.  

I obsess over the blue bar that marks the appointment in my calendar, ticking down the time until the last 48 hours when it is too late to call and cancel. Bloated with six months of worries, I make it to my session. I submit this narrative, penned in a notebook, handshaking, voice wavering while reciting my sadness, my indiscretions, and my shame. Each confession is a pinprick, releasing a trickle that soon spills over, flooding the room—I hadn’t realised how much I’d been holding in. I leave with a diagnosis, a prescription in hand, and an empty space I envision planting with compassion and acceptance. 

In a bar in Britomart, my friend Sophia and I perch sipping twenty-dollar cocktails and slurping noodles. She tells me her brother, a doctor, was also just diagnosed. While Sophia is sympathetic, she ponders what exactly we are struggling for? If we were to take medication she asks, ‘What more do you need? What more is there to achieve?’ 

I think about all my lost dreams like dead stars, their light snuffed out by a scant breath. As I grieve, the knot in my gut begins to dislodge. 

British paediatrician and author of medical textbooks, Sir George Frederic Still, called the emergence of ADHD an ‘an abnormal defect of moral control in children.’ I think back to the painted goal lines on the school court. The hemisphere that separated me from everyone else. Repeatedly ousted because I was rude, outspoken, and bossy. That, and other moral phantoms are ghosts of my past. Though they still haunt me, I can see that court from both sides now. I like squinting at it, letting my eyes haze and relax, and seeing the lines blur before they snap back again. 

What do I say to that eleven year old girl? There is no satisfying resolution; one cannot become neurotypical – nor should they. Instead, the story ends like this:

I am thirty years old. Marija, Anita, and I linger in my living room. I boil the kettle and put on a record. We sip tea and swap stories, interspersed with the stop-start of the turntable. Our laughter is warm, our silences snug. Together, we summarise the takings of my essay:

We are different – but not different from everyone. 

We are fallible – but not defined by our mistakes.

In the end I tell my inner child that she will always carry that tension in her shoulders – but that the court is large, and there is space for her too.