On day two of being medicated for ADHD, I started noticing subtle differences in what my normal self would have done under certain circumstances as against what my medicated self was doing over the last two days. I wondered if this is how people went about their lives; thoughts specifically wandered towards my wife, Vikki, who is what I would ideally want to be like, thinking – is this how Vikki thinks and acts? Is that why she is always calm and sensible? Then followed a feeling of pity because she has had to live with an erratic me who is always on the edge, come packaged with extremely swingy moods, take unnecessary financial risks and read a bit too much into what people say.
Not many though would have seen this side of me for I have my guard up in social settings. A handful of people who know that I have ADHD have shown genuine surprise when they learnt about it. The psychiatrist offered an ego boosting explanation – “you’re an intelligent man and I assume you would have been an intelligent boy to be able to mask it and live almost a normal life for so long”. I lived a masked life in public alright but Vikki and my immediate family being parents and siblings bore a heavy brunt of this condition. Then there is the extended family I grew up around and close friends who put up with me simply because they love me. A thought or two goes out to ex-girlfriends of course. Let's say none to ex-wife because she was a bitch.
That leaves out colleagues and people I work with, friends of friends, friends of family, in-laws and sundry who I don’t meet quite often, however form part of my social circle because you know ‘it takes a village’ and all that. Those who like me possibly think I am a bit unusual at times and those who dislike me must think I am an idiot. And they will not have been entirely wrong.
In hindsight, it is easy for me to say that they are not entirely wrong but take me back to pre-diagnosis stage and I’d think everyone else was an idiot; which is what I believe got me through all those years. This idea was planted in my head by one of my best friends Anand, around ten years ago, when he realised that I was struggling to understand something someone did. He had said ‘ya toh hum chutiye hain ya baaki sab chutiye’. Chutiya is a crass word to describe an idiot. ‘Hum’ is used as a plural to include oneself, so it appears Anand included himself in saying - ‘either we are idiots or everyone else is’. With the benefit of hindsight now I know Anand didn’t include himself – he knew I was unusual, and he didn’t want me to feel bad for being so. There are many opinions Anand had that became set in stone for me, but none stronger than this. The irony is that I read it wrong – I was convinced baaki sab chutiye hain; that everyone else is stupid.
