Your inattentive professor!

by Hanieh Molana

While writing this paragraph I stopped four or five times: first, to look at my dogs sleeping in peace; then, to think “I should call and make an appointment with a groomer soon.” Soon, I find I’m taking a short video of their cuteness to send to my partner, who’s out of town. Within seconds, I ask myself “Should I go sit outside and write this in the backyard on that new chair that I bought a few days ago?”

I look back to check my notebook calendar, making sure that I’m not missing any meetings or appointments while working on a panel talk for the conference…oops—sorry! For no reason I opened my Facebook page! I’m closing it immediately to get back to my writing…

Right now, I’m just staring at the screen with my left hand holding my chin sort of half-way up and thinking “where to start?”

Hmm [looking out the window]…should I go sit outside?

OK, ok, ok. Let me share this first with you all before things get serious here. So we had this plant that died a few months ago (next to my desk, right now). I almost got rid of it! Guess what?! It’s coming back and it makes me so HAPPY.

[sigh] One of my students just emailed me and I’m going to read their email real quick, but will reply later, because I really want to get started here…

I look up to the ceiling to think, grasping for inspiration out of thin air, trying to figure out where to start, how to frame my thoughts…[deep breath] Can I be honest? I just took another photo of my dog. I love when he forces his eyes shut! It’s so adorable!

OK, you know what? It seems like I need a distraction from all these distractions around me. I need a break! I’ll be right back…

I’m here now! I just got back from watering my plants. Now I’m sitting again behind my desk, in front of the screen, ready to gather fresh thoughts and work on this paper…

Let me just jump right into it: this is a behind-the-scenes view into many moments of academic work, a “welcome to a brain with a neurodevelopmental condition.” Some call it a neurological disorder, but let’s just call it ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). And yes, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s! Yay!

Fun fact: Did you know a person with ADHD has a smaller brain size? Although this doesn’t make us any “less intelligent”, the size of the frontal lobe of an individual with ADHD is smaller than a person with a “typical” brain structure. In simple terms, the frontal lobe is the part of the brain that helps you do work and complete tasks. And as you might already know, it is in charge of our attention span, self-control (or impulses), memory formation, sense of time, motivation, speech and language production, just to name a few.

This concludes our lecture on neurobiology.

While watering the plants a few minutes ago, I was confronted with a memory that frequently recurs. Sometimes I find myself reading a page or a paragraph, but not understanding, struggling to comprehend or process it. So, I read it again. With gargantuan effort, my eyes scan the paper. I up the ante, speaking the words out loud or whispering to myself. I take off my glasses and I put them on again, but I can’t make sense of it. I read fast and then I read slow.

After a few tries, the words still don’t mean anything. They all look like detailed artwork on the page, a constellation of little figures, curly and straight, short and long. My eyes? Don’t get me started on that. They are just like black holes, vacuuming in all the information and verbiage, inward and down, down, into nothingness…

My whole life, I was constantly blamed for not paying attention in school, for missing questions on exams, for forgetting to turn in a homework assignment or falling asleep in class, and on, and on. It might be embarrassing to continue the list! But you know what? I love who I am! My super-fast mind? It excites me! Thanks to my brain, I don’t just lack focus — I am resilient and creative.

Since I joined grad school, and more recently as an assistant professor, I find myself in some sort of paradoxical space, living between two extremes on a continuum. I find my brain sprinting, producing many thoughts and expounding on creative ideas. But when it comes to writing, I’m “too slow” and “too distracted” to concentrate. My thoughts are so loud! They constantly steal my attention. Words fly away before I get a chance to write them down. Yet I must write as an academic! I have to publish! But I do not want to “just” publish! I want to thrive!

My psychiatrist told me that taking medication would help me to “slow down.” In other words, my brain needs to be modified in order to meet academic standards. Pills to put me still, keep me “in place” and reorient my professional manner. To help me keep up with scholarly “expectations” and participate in the ever-important labor of knowledge production.

I do not know what to blame sometimes: my ADHD brain, or my medicated brain. I still do not know what to treasure the most.

Do you want to know what I call my medications? I call them “the academic’s speed regulator.” Like speed bumps, they regulate my brain’s movement. They allow me to go fast enough, but not too fast, to revel in and record ideas and inspiration. I’m slow enough to be able to write down my thoughts, yet quick enough to catch up with the fast-paced (key word: “accelerated”) academic culture.

Medication has opened up a new place on the continuum. Instead of two, I now find myself living between three extremes: a complex, paradoxical space through which only a superhuman can navigate. It can get overwhelming.

You know what? After it all, my dogs are still cute, and that new chair that I was talking about earlier isn’t especially comfortable. But I love daydreaming while sitting on it.

Et in Therapia ego

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